Description
Saunders Lewis (1893-1985), poet, novelist, lecturer, founder of Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) was also the grea- test Welsh language playwright of the cen- tury. His nineteen plays are a peculiarly Welsh response to the crisis in European theatre of the 1890s, and make a distinctive contribution to mainstream European culture. In this authoritative study, loan Williams describes Lewis’s important place in a line of dramatists stretching from Racine, Ibsen, Synge, Yeats, Claudel and Eliot, through Beckett, Brecht and Pirandello, to lonescu, Arden, Osbome and Pinter, and suggests a new direction for English theatre based on Lewis’s work. Lewis’s theatre was essentially Naturalist, his ´straitened stage´ narrow and clearly defined. Yet like Brecht and Pirandello he recognised the fragility of human experience and its inability to organise the world to achieve individual definition. As a Catholic convert, however, Lewis recognised a spiritual dimension to the human char
