When Sergei Tretyakov’s ground-breaking play, I Want a Baby, was banned by Stalin’s censor in 1927, it was a signal that the radical and innovative theatre of the early Soviet years was to be brought to an end. A glittering, unblinking exploration of the realities of post-revolutionary Soviet life, I Want a Baby marks a high point in modernist experimental drama.

Tretyakov’s plays are notable for their formal originality and their revolutionary content. The World Upside Down, which was ...

International brigades of mice and rats join forces to defend the rodents of Poland, threatened with extermination at the paws of cats favoured by the ancient ruler King Popiel, a sybaritic, cowardly ruler… The Hag of Discord incites a vicious rivalry between monastic orders, which only the good monks’ common devotion to… fortified spirits… is able to allay… The present translation of the mock epics of Poland’s greatest figure of the Enlightenment, Ignacy Krasicki, brings together...