Altona Men Without Shadows ; The Flies

Three plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, novelist, playwright and polemicist thought to have been the central figure in post-war European culture and political thinking. These plays are an extraordinary meditation on human freedom. The Flies (1942) presents Sartre's interpretation of the Greek legend of Orestes. Men Without Shadows (1946) is a brutal study of the effects of torture on captured members of the Maquis. Altona (1959) comments on the acquisitive aspects of capitalism as seen in a family of rich German industrialists.