The plays are Maeterlinck's The Blind, Alfred Jarry's Ubu the King and Apollinaire's The Mammaries of Teresias. Very little of Maeterlinck's work appears to have held the stage, and even Pelleas and Me lisande has become, quite ineluctably, a period piece, rarely seen and tedious to read. Unlike Pelleas and its vague, twilight colouring, The Blind is strained and almost hysterical, closer to Expressionist theatre than to the mood of the Nineties. Jarry's anarchic black farce is a specialised taste, while Apollinaire's perverse, brittle fantasy looks forward to the Twenties but contains little that Cocteau and others did not do better.
Brian Fallon