Sacred Monsters. Terrible Parents

This collection includes works from different years, allowing the reader to form an idea of the various facets of the talent of the great French writer. The play "Sacred Monsters" is a story about the world of theater, full of love, hatred, ambition, and jealousy. On the theatrical stage, even a banal love triangle becomes a drama about creativity and choice. The play "Terrible Parents" is considered by many critics to be Jean Cocteau's best theatrical work. It is an elegy about family and interpersonal relationships, where pain and love, attachment and hatred intertwine, leading to painful consequences. The short novel "The Impostor Tom" tells the story of a sixteen-year-old boy skillfully mastering the art of subtle deception. But he lies not out of vanity or greed, but from a quest for heroism and a desire to escape from the mundane, sometimes not understanding where fiction ends and the harsh reality of World War I begins. One of the most famous medieval legends is reinterpreted by Cocteau in the play "The Knights of the Round Table." Here, pretense and disguise, humor, and the absurdity of tragedy triumph over reality.