for the plays of Samuel Beckett. It is extraordinary that he achieves this within a story whose basic plot -- that of a woman, a husband and a lover and the tragedy that results -- is itself so conventional. A key element in the play is the setting, whether visible in the stage scenery or described in the dialogue. The action takes place in an ancient, decaying castle, surrounded by deep forest, which only occasionally lets sunlight in, and with caverns underneath it that breathe infected air and are in danger of collapse. As numerous critics have pointed out, all this symbolizes the dominating power throughout the action of a destiny (the power of death, if you like) fatal to mankind. Note also the role of water, which appears in several forms throughout the work: Golaud finds her by a stream, Mélisande arrived in the kingdom by sea, she loses her wedding ring in a fountain, Golaud and Pelléas discover foul-smelling waters under Arkël's castle, Mélisande is often seen crying and mentions her tears several times. Moreover, most of the characters' names contain liquid consonants: Pelléas, Mélisande, Arkël, Golaud, Yniold. She appears to be related to the mythical figure Melusine in French folklore. Premiere Pelléas and Mélisande premiered on 17 May 1893 at the Bouffes-Parisiens under the direction of Aurélien Lugné-Poe. Lugné-Poe, possibly taking inspiration from The Nabis, an avant-garde group of Symbolist painters, used very little lighting on the stage. He also removed the footlights. He placed a gauze veil across the stage, giving the performance a dreamy and otherworldly effect. This was the antithesis to the realism popular in French theatre at the time. Maeterlinck was so nervous on the night of the premiere that he did not attend. Critics derided the performance, but Maeterlinck's peers received it more positively. Octave Mirbeau, to whom Maeterlinck dedicated his play, was impressed with the work, which stimulated a new direction in stage design and theatre performance. In music The play has been the basis of several pieces of music. Perhaps the best known is the opera of the same name (1902) by Claude Debussy. In 1898, Gabriel Fauré had written incidental music for performances of the play in London and asked Charles Koechlin to orchestrate it, from which he later extracted a suite. In the same year Mel Bonis wrote a piano piece named 'Mélisande'. The story inspired Arnold Schoenberg's