''On the Frontier: A Melodrama in Three Acts'', by W. H. Auden and

Christopher Isherwood Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical ...

, was the third and last play in the Auden–Isherwood collaboration, first published in 1938. The play tells the story of the outbreak of war between the fictional European countries of Ostnia and Westland. Some of the action takes place in the "Ostnia–Westland Room", an imaginary setting in which two rooms, one in an Ostnian household, one in a Westland household, each occupy half the stage, and the family in one house are unaware of the family in the other—although the son and daughter of the two families sense each other's existence. Other scenes take place in the office of the Westland dictator. The play ends in a visionary scene between the two lovers who have never met in real life. The play was produced in October 1938 at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, in a production by the

Group Theatre (London) The Group Theatre (London) was an experimental theatre company founded in 1932 by Rupert Doone and Robert Medley. It evolved from a play-reading group in Cambridge that Doone had been involved with during his years studying with the Cambridge Fe ...

. The

incidental music Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, or some other presentation form that is not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as t ...

for the play was composed by Benjamin Britten.

References

* Auden, W. H., and Christopher Isherwood. ''Plays and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1928-1939'', ed. by Edward Mendelson (1988). * John Fuller, ''W. H. Auden: A Commentary'' (1999). * Edward Mendelson, ''Early Auden'' (1981).

External links

The W. H. Auden Society
{{W. H. Auden Plays by W. H. Auden Plays by Christopher Isherwood 1938 plays Collaborative plays Faber & Faber books