The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays
0-8095-4478-4
The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays is a collection of plays by Anglo-Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, edited and with an introduction by Darrell Schweitzer. It was first published, in hardcover and paperback, by Wildside Press in 2005.
Contents
The collection includes three of Dunsany's more obscure plays, only two of them previously acted and only one previously published. The contents in full are:
- "Introduction" (Darrell Schweitzer)
- "The Ginger Cat", a comedy, concerning a seeming fool who takes nothing but laughter seriously. This was in production in summer 1914, but was canceled at the outbreak of World War I.
- "The Murderers", a crime melodrama with a "twist" ending, had one known performance in 1919, at Yale University, during a visit by the playwright. It was never included in Dunsany's play collections, which were primarily of fantasies and comedies.
- "Mr. Faithful", another comedy, about the adventures of a man who must literally live a dog's life to marry the woman he has his heart set on. It was written in 1922, and performed on the BBC the same year; an acting edition published by Samuel French in 1935 is now a relative rarity.
"The Ginger Cat" was known to exist but lost for decades, and was rediscovered by Dunsany's literary curator, Joe Doyle, while "Mr. Faithful" was known in theatrical circles and remained in print in an acting edition for many years. Schweitzer reproduced the first two plays from Dunsany's manuscripts, and the third from a photocopy of the acting edition.[1]
Schweitzer comments that "The Ginger Cat" and "Mr. Faithful" remain funny for modern audiences, and describes them as "between Wildean and Screwball comedy."
Footnotes
- ^ Darrell Schweitzer, "Introduction", in Lord Dunsany, The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays, p ix ISBN 0-8095-4478-4.
External links
- The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays at Wildside Press
- Entry for The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays at Fantastic Fiction
- v
- t
- e
collections
- The Gods of Pegāna
- Time and the Gods
- The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
- A Dreamer's Tales
- The Book of Wonder
- Fifty-One Tales
- The Last Book of Wonder
- Tales of Three Hemispheres
- The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens
- Jorkens Remembers Africa
- Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey
- The Fourth Book of Jorkens
- The Man Who Ate the Phoenix
- The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories
- Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey
- The Last Book of Jorkens
collections
- At the Edge of the World
- Beyond the Fields We Know
- Over the Hills and Far Away
- The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer, and Other Fantasms
- Time and the Gods
- The Collected Jorkens
- In the Land of Time, and Other Fantasy Tales
- Five Plays
- The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays
- Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley
- The King of Elfland's Daughter
- The Charwoman's Shadow
- The Curse of the Wise Woman
- Sidney Sime (preferred artist)
- John Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (father)
- Reginald Drax (brother)
- Dunsany Castle
- Edward Plunkett, 20th Baron of Dunsany (grandson and literary heir)