The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), ”the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury”; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father (”Where, ” asked George Bernard Shaw, ”shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?”); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman.
Michael Meyer”s translations are ”crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana” (Kenneth Tynan)