Brief Candle, Stoney Bowes, Da Ponte's Last Stand, Confessions of Zeno

The fascinating and all too brief life and achievement of the painter and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, celebrated in Carlo Ardito''s play Brief Candle, is in stark contrast to the unsavoury adventures of Stoney Bowes, the original of Thackeray''s Barry Lyndon, so demonised in his own lifetime as to become a byword for iniquity in the North of England. Another historical character is the picaresque hero of the third play in this volume: Da Ponte''s Last Stand explores the autobiographical recollections of Mozart''s famous librettist and is based on Da Ponte''s own unreliable memoirs. His attitude to life and art was quite unlike that of the eponymous anti-hero of Confessions of Zeno, whose comically tortured mind and final escape from the attentions of a Freudian analyst is in itself an affirmation of the power of survival of the human spirit.