The Contract Killer
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Karlsen is a down-on-his-luck private investigator looking for work. When the only job on offer is a contract killing, Karlsen agrees despite his lack of experience. Things don't go to plan and it seems the contract is open to negotiation. The play follows the twists and turns of an inexperienced contract killer with a weakness for turquoise dresses and wide-eyed women. This absurdist comedy by one of Denmark's best-loved writers sees the fates of the eponymous contract killer, his target, the employer and his wife, twist, turn and hang in the balance. What is a life worth? Who will survive? And will the hair dye ever make it to Pakistan?
Paul Russell Garrett
Translated by
Keld Zeruneith (1941-), Emeritus Reader at the University of Copenhagen and member of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters. Zeruneith is a poet, literary critic, historian, and prolific author, well known in Old Norse studies for his work on the sagas and in modern literary studies for his biographies of three famous Danish poets; he is equally well known in Classical studies for ^GThe Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, from Odysseus to Socrates^g (2007; original Danish 2002), for which he won Denmark's most prestigious literary award, the Sen Gyldendal Prize, in 2004. Zeruneith brings his considerable breadth of scholarly and linguistic expertise and depth of poetic and psychological insight and knowledge to bear upon Old English studies in ^GDe sidste tider: Hedenskab heroisme kristendom: en angelsaksisk overgangshistorie^g (The Last Times: Paganism Heroism Christianity: An Anglo-Saxon Transitional History, 2017). Written in Danish, Keld Zeruneith's ^GBeowulf: The Tragedy of a Hero: A Reading^g (^GBeowulf. En helts tragedie. En lAesning^g) was first published in the English translation of Paul Russell Garrett (2023).
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