Three plays translated from the German by Roger Downey.

Franz Xaver Kroetz is a controversial figure whose works have helped reshape world drama over the last two decades. His unsparing portraits of life in Germany's lower middle-class redefine the notion of realism on the stage.

This volume includes: Through the Leaves, about a female butcher and her labourer lover; The Nest, about a worker who inadvertently poisons a lake and, consequently, injures his infant son; and Mensch Meier, about a jittery, imaginative, Munich assembly-line worker, his vague housebound wife and their silently observant teenage son.