This essay was written in 1983, when Burgess’s verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi in the leading role. The production was a great success: Michael Billington, the long-standing theatre critic of the Guardian, wrote about the ‘bold, emotionally unashamed’ […]
In 1948 Anthony Burgess began a teaching job as a lecturer in speech and drama at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College, near Preston in Lancashire. He trained teachers as part of the post-war project to turn ex-servicemen into schoolmasters, and they were given an intensive one-year course: Burgess gave courses in the history of drama […]
Anthony Burgess’s second commission from Michael Langham, the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, was an adaptation of Oedipus the King by Sophocles. He had recently completed the novel MF, whose incest theme also reflected Burgess’s interest in Freud and Oedipus. He had little knowledge of Greek and a hazy knowledge of ancient […]
Our short blog series Anthony Burgess and the Theatre opens the curtain on Burgess and his relation to the theatrical world. There will be a new post every Friday as we look forward to the publication of Salamander Street’s Chatsky & Miser! Miser!, a volume of two plays translated by Anthony Burgess. This series deliberately […]
The re-release of the Clockwork Orange film in the United Kingdom (on 5 April 2019) provides an opportunity to revisit the turbulent history of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation, which was first shown in New York in December 1971, with the British and European premieres taking place in January 1972. To many people in Britain, Kubrick’s […]
Never performed or heard in the UK, Burgess’s Oedipus the King is a robust and powerful version of Sophocles’s classic text. The drama includes an invented language that Burgess created especially for the 1972 production of the piece at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, USA. This has been preserved in the International Anthony Burgess […]
The various agents of Anthony Burgess, by Graham Foster.