Life x 3 A Play

by Reza, Yasmina; Hampton, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780571207381
• ISBN10: 0571207383
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-17
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Henri and Sonia have invited Hubert and Ines, for dinner. But the appointed evening finds Sonia is in her dressing-gown, their child screaming for a chocolate biscuit, Henri reacting badly to Hubert's casually barbed news and the immaculate Ines appalled to find a ladder in her stocking. Things could have gone better. And maybe they will . . . With characteristic perception and wit, Yasmina Reza (elegantly translated by Christopher Hampton) slices into her characters to reveal the inner truth about them and, perhaps, all of us.

Author Biography

Yasmina Reza, born in Paris in 1959, is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Her first play, Conversations AprFs un Enterrement (Conversations After a Burial) won her the 1987 MoliFre Award for Best Author along with a Johnson Foundation Award and a SACD New Talent Award. Her other works for the theater include Art and The Unexpected Man. She lives in Paris.

Table of Contents

Praise for the London premiere of Life X 3 by Yasmina Reza:

"[Reza] has perfected the technique of combining light comedy with the play of ideas . . . [Life X 3]is clever, it's elegant, it's entertaining."--Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph

"[Reza] is the most exported living playwright on the planet, a woman whose culturally rich background has given her real insight into the melting pot of today's society . . . Life X 3 ruminate[s] on man's place in the universe . . . Her amalgamation of laughs with smart arguments and flashes of raw emotion is a crowd-pulling recipe . . . [Her] social satire is often cryingly funny."--Kate Bassett, The Independent

"Alan Ayckbourn meets Edward Albee . . . The writing is sharp, the observation spot-on."--Georgina Brown, Mail on Sunday

"The Grand Chaos Theory . . . is applied to a Parisian dinner-party in Yasmina Reza's delightful . . . comedy of manners. Life X 3 is designed to show how chance, with its impact upon our actions and behaviour, changes everything . . . A wicked pleasure to behold. Miss Reza is a star-reporter at the sex-war front and a thorough mocker of male pretensions."--Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard

"Adroitly translated by Christopher Hampton . . . LIfe X 3 amounts to pleasure-in-triplicate."--Paul Taylor, The Independent