Mad for Love

Drama. Translated from the French by Ben Sonnenberg. MAD FOR LOVE by the Franco-Belgian Fernand Crommelynck, a tragedy set at a resort hotel on the North Sea coast of Flanders in the early 1920s, tells of two pairs of lovers: one of them old and decrepit, the other young and fresh. The story begins in an atmosphere of anxious anticipation and ends with a double love-suicide. Yet the play has much comic vitality, much nobility too, as well as three great leading roles. Its truthfulness about the lives and loves of a people in the aftermath of devastating conflict make it surprisingly relevant to such places as, say, Lebanon or Sarajevo today.