Courtroom Dramas on the Stage Vol 2

<p>Volume 2 concentrates on trial plays mounted in the twentieth century. The first decade featured notable dramas by Leo Tolstoy (The Living Corpse Russia 1900) Alexander Bisson (Madame X France 1908) and John Galsworthy (Justice England 1910). The trend continued with authors of the main stream penning plays populated with judges prosecutors defense attorneys jurors witnesses and the accused often charged with murder in the first degree -- Elmer Rice Ayn Rand Ernst Toller W. Somerset Maugham Richard Wright Maxwell Anderson and Arthur Miller. Herman Wouk Jean Genet Aldous Huxley William Faulkner William Saroyan James Baldwin Terence Rattigan Jeffrey Archer Ariel Dorfman David Henry Hwang Aaron Sorkin others.</p><p><br></p><p>Veteran mystery writers joined the fray concocting courtroom melodramas. Among them were Gaston Leroux (The Mystery of the Yellow Room 1912) A.E.W Mason (No Other Tiger 1928) Agatha Christie Witness for the Prosecution 1953) and Henry Cecil (Settled Out of Court 1960).</p><p><br></p><p>Quite a few plays were inspired by real-life events. Caponsacchi (1926) is based on a poem by Robert Browning depicting a double murder among the clergy in Rome of 1698. Sophie Treadwell's expressionist drama Machinal (1928) focuses on a sensational 1927 murder case in Queens New York in which an ordinary stenographer kills her much older husband when she feels stifled at home. A Pin to See the Peepshow (1951) by F. Tennyson Jesse and H.M. Harwood introduces a twenty-eight-year-old London millinery who with the aid of her younger lover plans to eliminate a bossy husband. On the evening of October 3 1922 he is found stabbed to death on a side road.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>The entries presented chronologically include a plot synopsis production data opinions by critics and biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors.</p>