Sappho

'A magician.' The Times 'A philosophical play of ideas, exploring loss, war, and incest in Ancient Greece, by the celebrated author of The Alexandria Quartet. Lesbos, Ancient Greece. Lawrence Durrell's intricate play follows vivid characters who represent different attitudes towards the role of the individual in the world, exploring how their lofty ideals are transformed when they become victims of unforeseeable real-life circumstances. Eloquent, tragic, poetic, Durrell's parable is a powerful study of idealism in an imperfect universe, drawing vibrant parallels between the classical world and our modern existence.

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals- later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands. Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.