Includes the plays Transformation, Masses Man, Hoppla, We're Alive! Preface by Charles Wood. Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was a formative figure in the development of theatrical modernism, yet his plays have not been available in English since the 1920s and '30s. He was also a revolutionary activist who experienced fully the unbearable cataclysms of his times: war, revolution, imprisonment, the chaos of Weimar life, Nazi persecution, exile and the Holocaust. His revolutionary intensity infuses these three innovative plays, all of which inspired landmark productions and substantially extended the language of theatricality. These stage-worthy new translations capture that spirit of artistic and political combustion and should help to restore Toller's rightful place in the modern repertoire. Twenty-seven rarely seen production and design photographs are brought together here for the first time and, with the extensive supplementary material, they create a vivid sense of modern theatre in the making. Essential reading for the contemporary theatre student, scholar, spectator and practitioner.

Ernst Toller was the most prominent of the German Expressionist playwrights. Transformation is a poetic distillation in stations of the author's conversion from patriot to pacifist in the First World War. In Masses Man, utopian socialist realism clashes with Leninist revolutionary violence. With Hoopla We're Alive , Toller espoused "new sobriety" and presented a contemporary political cross-section of Berlin.