Klaus Mann

In a Germany inexorably slipping towards Nazi domination, initial public reaction to Siblings was one of moral disgust. Meanwhile Klaus and his sister Erika were feted by the world as 'the Literary Twins' and their father Thomas Mann was at the height of his career. The play (first produced in Munich in 1930), a weird and unsettling portrayal of incest inspired by Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles and set in pre-war Paris, reflects Klaus Mann's own life with Erika - an intimate world of private games cultivated against their overpowering father. In Siblings, however, the participants are no mere adolescents but adults whose rituals and games are sinister and desperate attempts to exclude the encroaching totalitarian conformity of the 'outside' world. The play was given both its English language and British premiere in this version in 1989 at the Lyric Hammersmith under the direction of Peter Eyre. As a companion piece the evocative novella The Children's Story, written in 1926 when Klaus Mann was nineteen, presents a complementary view of childhood. Here the more carefree games and fantasies of the children are played out beneath the shadows cast by adult passions and conflicts.

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