Range of Plays

The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father (Where, asked George Bernard Shaw, shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman.

Michael Meyer’s translations are crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana (Kenneth Tynan)