Here are three French plays from the Enlightenment Period dealing with the subject of slavery. ISLE OF SLAVES, by Pierre de Marivaux, is the longest and most challenging of the three. It postulates an island in the ancient Greek world where the slaves have revolted and seized power, killing all of their former masters and declaring their independence. Now, any "masters" shipwrecked on their island are forced to live as slaves of their own slaves to impress upon them the wrongs they've committed. THE MERCHANT OF SMYRNA, by Nicolas Chamfort, and THE BEAUTIFUL SLAVE, by Antoine-Jean Dumaniant, both deal with the pain that Christian and Muslim lovers experience when one (or both) of them are captured and sold into slavery--and then are fortuitously freed by their new owners or through their own efforts. These dramas represent early moral judgments in the late eighteenth century on the evils of slavery, and as such, are important milestones in the history of European drama.

The beautiful Marquise has been left a widow tragically young... The handsome chevalier has been deserted by the love of his life who has decided to take holy orders... Both have sworn never to lose their hearts again... Neither had reckoned with the surprise of love. Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the 18th Century. Considered by his contemporaries as 'the doctor of the human heart', he wrote many comedies for the Comedie-Francaise and the Comedie-Italienne in Paris. This will be the first time this version of Marivaux's The Surprise of Love will have been seen by a British audience.

In The Game of Love and Chance, a pair of prospective lovers each swap places with their servants, while their relatives, fully apprised of both deceptions, look on in amusement. Neil Bartlett's adaptation, first performed at the Lyric Hammersmith, finds incentive modern equivalents for Marivaux's ludic theatricality and its roots in the Commedia dell'Arte.