Max Frisch
"I'm Not Stiller" started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3,000 in its first year, but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies. The next novel, "Homo Faber", was another best seller, with four million copies of the German language version produced by 1998. "The Fire Raisers" and "Andorra" are the most successful German language plays of all time, with respectively 250 and 230 productions up till 1996, according to an estimate made by the literary critic Volker Hage. The two plays, along with "Homo Faber" became curriculum favourites with schools in the German-speaking middle European countries. Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, "Homo Faber", has been translated into twenty-five languages.
A Cup of Kindness (play)
Walls and his team had already enjoyed five substantial hits at the Aldwych, with "It Pays to Advertise" (1923), which had run for 598 performances; "A Cuckoo in the Nest" (1925, 376 performances); "Rookery Nook" (1926, 409 performances); "Thark" (1927, 401 performances); and "Plunder" (1928, 344 performances). All except the first of them were written by Ben Travers. The earlier Travers farces had depicted upper or upper-middle class characters and country houses. For "A Cup of Kindness", he turned his attention to middle class suburban life and petty snobbery. Each of the regular members of the team was generally given the same sort of part in the various new plays, but in this one Coleridge played a maid – a grumbling, kindly factotum – rather than her usual bossy authority-figures.Jim Finch, an engaging but dubious businessman, is trying to sell shares to Charlie Tutt, and when he refuses them, to Charlie's prospective father-in-law, Ernest Ramsbotham. Both Charlie and Ernest have bought shares from Finch before, and are not going to do so again, the first lot having lost all their supposed value.