The Son is a five-act Expressionist play by the German playwright Walter Hasenclever

Walter Hasenclever

Walter Hasenclever was a German Expressionist poet and playwright.-Biography:...

. It was the first self-proclaimed, full-length Expressionist play to be produced, though its dramatic structure

Dramatic structure

Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film. Many scholars have analyzed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristotle in his Poetics...

 is more or less realistic. It takes as its subject the conflict between the generations and a rejection of the world in general by the young. It is a semi-autobiographical

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 work.

It was written in 1912, first published in 1914, and first performed in 1916 at the Albert-Theater in Dresden

Dresden

Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....

, although Hasenclever had read the play at the literary cabaret

Cabaret

Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...

 Das Gnu in early 1914. Ernst Deutsch

Ernst Deutsch

Ernst Deutsch aka Ernest Dorian was an Austrian actor. In 1916 he played the protagonist in the world première of Walter Hasenclever's Expressionist play The Son in Dresden to great acclaim...

 played the Son to great acclaim.

The play ends with the Son's parricide

Parricide

Parricide is defined as:*the act of murdering one's father , mother or other close relative, but usually not children ....

of his father, after which he "strides triumphantly over his father's corpse into a future full of glorious potential."

Sources

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378.
• Hasenclever, Walter. 1994. Der Sohn. Ein Drama in fünf Akten. Nachw. v. Michael Schulz. Stuttgart: Reclam. ISBN 3-15-008978-6.
• Kuhns, David F. 1997. German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. New ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. ISBN 978-0521035224.
• Marx, Henry, trans. 1997. The Son. By Walter Hasenclever. In Schürer (1997a, 82-145).
• Rorrison, Hugh. 1998. "Hasenclever, Walter." In Banham (1998, 475).
• Schürer, Ernst, ed. 1997a. German Expressionist Plays. The German Library ser. vol. 66. New York: Continuum. ISBN 978-0826409508.
• ---. 1997b. Introduction. In Schürer (1997a, vii-xxi).
• Wellwarth, George E. 2002. "Expressionism." In The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama. Ed. John Gassner and Edward Quinn. Mineola, NY: Dover. 256-261. ISBN 978-0486420646.