"An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him." - Henry

George Bernard Shaw famously refused to permit any play of his "to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its own." Allowing his beloved Pygmalion to be supplanted by a comic opera was therefore unthinkable; yet Lerner and Loewe transformed it into My Fair Lady (1956), a musical that was to delight audiences and critics alike. By famously reversing Shaw s original ending, the show even dared...

"We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us." - Krapp

Samuel Beckett s most accessible play is also one of the twentieth century s most moving dramas about aging, memory, and disappointment. Daniel Sack offers the first comprehensive survey of Krapp s Last Tape (1958) with a general reader in mind.

Structured around a series of questions, five approachable sections contextualize the play in the larger career of its Nobel-Prize-winning writer, explore its major thematic concerns, and offer comparative analyses...

All you have do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality. Terry

Harold Pinter s Party Time (1991) is an extraordinary distillation of the playwright s key concerns. Pulsing with political anger, it marks a stepping stone on Pinter s path from iconic dramatist of existential unease to Nobel Prize-winning poet of human rights.

G. D. White situates this underrated play within a recognisably Pinteresque landscape of ambiguous, brittle social drama while also recognising its particularity: Party Time is haunted by Augusto Pinochet s...

"Ladies and gentlemen, I m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina

Thornton Wilder s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.

Kyle Gillette explores Wilder s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of...

"I m good Hamlet gi me a cause for grief"

At first glance, readers of The Hamletmachine (1979) could be forgiven for wondering whether it is actually a play at all: it opens with a montage of texts that are not ascribed to a character, there is no vestige of a plot, and the whole piece lasts a total of ten pages.

Yet, Heiner Muller s play regularly features in theatres repertoires and is frequently staged by university theatre departments. In four short chapters, David Barnett unpicks the complexities of The Hamletmachine s writing and...

I m thinking this night wasn t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in years gone by. Christy Mahon

On the first night of J. M. Synge s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) the audience began protesting in the theatre; by the third night the protests had spilled onto the streets of Dublin. How did one play provoke this? Christopher Collins addresses The Playboy s satirical treatment of illusion and realism in light of Ireland s struggle for independence, as well as Synge s struggle for artistic expression. By exploring Synge s unpublished...