A collection of six Bernhard plays, all in English for the first time.

Save Yourself if You Can is a collection of six plays that span the entirety of Thomas Bernhard’s career as a dramatist. The plays collected in this long-awaited addition to Bernhard’s oeuvre in English—The Ignoramus and the Madman, The Celebrities, Immanuel Kant, The Goal Attained, Simply Complicated, and Elizabeth II—traverse somber lyricism and misanthropy to biting satire and glorious slapstick. They explore themes that will be familiar to longtime readers of Bernhardt, but here they are presented in a subtly different register, attuned to the needs of the stage.
 

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) grew up in Salzburg and Vienna, where he studied music. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. He went on to win many of the most prestigious literary prizes in Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier. Douglas Robertson is a translator based in Baltimore, Maryland. He has translated many works from German into English, and he has studied Thomas Bernhard’s work for over ten years.

1.The Ignoramus and the Madman
2.The Celebrities
3.Immanuel Kant
4.The Goal Attained
5.Simply Complicated
6.Elizabeth II