A captivating study of the plays, literature and writings about private and public theatrical spectacle during the Victorian Age

By the 1890s the British theatre had transformed itself into a world where spectacles and public shows were aimed at the widest audience possible. The theatre had become big business. This anthology brings together a variety of plays and prose which sets this phenomenon in perspective and traces the development of Victorian theatricals from private home events in the late-Georgian period to full-scale Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the 1890s. The section...

A play and production from one of the world's most innovative theatre companies

Mnemonic is about memory, people's personal histories, shared memories and discordant recollections - exhuming the past in order to examine it in the present. A variety of stories - from the discovery of bog people like Tollund Man to peoples compulsion to retrace the origins of their ancestors - collide and form a piece of theatre which questions our concept of time, our capacity to distort history and our attempts to retell the past.
"An ice-preserved body - from 5,200 years ago - forms the...

Peggy For You is a new comic drama, starring Maureen Lipman, about the life of the famous play agent, Peggy Ramsay, who helped transform post-war British drama

Alan Plater's play for the Hampstead Theatre in London is a witty and poignant portrait of Margaret 'Peggy' Ramsay, the larger-than-life play agent who nurtured several generations of British playwrights (John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn, Robert Bolt, Edward Bond, David Hare, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, and others) from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Peggy was one of the most influential...

A new play by Jim Cartwright premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in March 2000

From the author of Road and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice comes a new play about life in the North. Sump and Choke are the Little and Large of the local pub. They are friends who have bonded together though a shared passion for the martial arts. What happens to them during their bonding exercises surprises them both. Jim Cartwright's comic drama looks at two northern hard men and explores the idea of masculinity in an age when every certainty is in doubt.
He's large as life at the star and garter...

An award-winning play which took the nation by storm when first heard on BBC Radio 4, now in a new stage version

Lee Hall's extraordinary, award-winning play about faith, love and the meaning of life was first broadcast on Radio Four in 1997 to unprecedented acclaim. A monologue by an exceptional autistic seven-year-old girl called Spoonface Steinberg, who is dying of cancer, touched the hearts of all who heard it. It is a moving, funny and exhilarating piece of drama. The radio version was immediately repeated due to popular demand and a cassette of the play was rushed into shops...

A new play for the Royal Shakespeare Company

"World's moving. People moving. We've only to cross the sea. Same sea we're looking at. The world's waiting for us. We've only to take our place it." In 1936, 1974 and 1996, a woman shapes dramatic events in a rural community on the Scottish coast, reflecting the shifting political and social fabric of Britain in the 20th century. Victoria will received its World premiere in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2000.
"David Greig is the most consistently interesting, prolific and artistically ambitious writer of his generation"...

The first single edition of Noel Coward's most controversial play.

"Only in Semi-Monde does Coward find a successful metaphor for the sexual complications that lie behind his posturing. Semi-Monde is easily the most visually daring of his comedies, and the most intellectually startling ... made up of sexually mischievous tableaux vivants and gets much nearer the homosexual knuckle than Coward's public image allowed." - (John Lahr, London Review of Books)

Written in 1926 and originally entitled Ritz Bar, Semi-Monde was considered too daring for its...

It's London 1726, and Mrs Tull's got problems. The whores are giving her a hard time, a man in a dress is looking for a job, her husband has a roving eye and the apprentice boy keeps disappearing for 'a wander'. Meanwhile in 2001 a group of wealthy gay men are preparing for a raunchy party.
Mother Clap's Molly House, a black comedy with songs is a celebration of the diversity of human sexualtiy, an exploration of our need to form families and a fascinatig insight into a hidden chapter in London's history.
'Ravenhill's writing is tough, eloquent, sardonic, with some of the barbed...

A new stage adaptation of one of Pratchett's best-selling novels

Commander Vimes is sent to wild, wintry and Transylvania-like Uberwald to establish trade links with the King of the Dwarfs but he ends up trying to stop and inter-species war. On his side though, is a talking dog, a reformed vampyre and a self-made man. You can tell he's self-made because the stitches still show.

Vimes may have arrived as Ankh-Morpork's ambassador but he soon finds it's not all golden chocolate balls. Now he's an escaped prisoner - out in the icy woods, wearing only the gloomy trousers of Uncle...

A new stage adaptation of one of Pratchett's best-selling novels

There's been a murder. Allegedly. William de Worde is the Discworld's first investigative journalist. He didn't mean to be - it was just an accident. But, as William fills his pages with reports of local club meetings and pictures of humorously shaped vegetables, dark forces high up in Ankh-Morpork's society are plotting to overthrow the city's ruler, Lord Vetinari.