The Post Office

About

Tagore's one-act play (1912) is among the most beautiful short dramas in world literature: a sick child, confined indoors, watches the world through his window and imagines freedom — particularly the letter he might receive from the king. The play was written in Bengali and translated into English by Tagore himself; Yeats was so moved by it that he arranged its first English production. It was performed in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 by Jewish children facing deportation. The play works on multiple levels — as a child's story, as an allegory of the soul, as a meditation on mortality — and its serenity in the face of death gives it a spiritual quality unlike anything in the Western dramatic tradition.