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’ […]

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 […]