Widely held to have led the realist revolution in Russian drama, Gogol liberated comedy from a tradition of didacticism and sentimentality. The Government Inspector, Gogol's masterpiece, was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest play in the Russian language.
This is the poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell's version of Gogol's classic satire on human vanity with its story of a penniless nobody from Moscow who is mistaken for a government inspector by the corrupt and self-seeking officials of a small town in Tsarist Russia.

Methuen Student Editions are expertly annotated...

This was all right Stephenson's first play and opened in London in 1996, winning the Olivier Award for Best Comedy that year.

Three sisters meet on the eve of their mother's funeral; as the conflicts of the past converge, everyday lies and tensions reveal the particular patterns and strains of family relationships. Teresa is seemingly content with her second marriage and health food business though she is an obsessive organizer to the point of extremes. Mary is a vaguely discontented successful doctor with an equally successful lover Mike, who is, alas, married....

Yerma (meaning 'Barren') is one of three tragic plays about peasants and rural life that make up Lorca's 'rural trilogy'.It is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculeanstruggle against the curse of infertility. The woman's barrennessbecomes a metaphor for her marriage in a traditional society thatdenies women sexual or social equality. Her desperate desire for achild drives her to commit a terrible crime at the end of the play.

This Student Edition comes complete with a full introduction; plot synopsis;commentary on characters, context and themes; bibliography;...

The play focuses on the complex relationships, politics and morality of four people trading partners in search of love and lust. It uniquely blends elements of tragedy, comedy, and melodrama and challenges audience perceptions at every turn. Marber turns upside down romantic notions of love and sex uniting two people as one and pointedly challenges the idealistic notion that total honesty is the best way to preserve a relationship. As the four characters move in and out of relationships and expose their individual bleak takes on those relationships, the audience sees their self-delusions...

Ayckbourn's series of five interlocked plays typify his black comedies of human behavior in recognizable and absurd domestic situations. First produced in 1976, the plays are alternately naturalistic, stylized and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness and characters who suffer the result of being ignored.

The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk with adults; in The Drinking Companion an aging absentee husband clumsily attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, an embarrassed waiter witnesses domestic...

Bernarda Alba is a widow, and her five daughters are incarcerated in mourning along with her. One by one they make a bid for freedom, with tragic consequences. Lorca's tale depicts the repression of women within Catholic Spain in the years before the war.
The House of Bernarda Alba is Lorca's last and possibly finest play, completed shortly before he was murdered by Nationalist sympathisers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Inspired by real characters and described by the author as 'a true record of village life', it is a tragic tale of frustration and explosive passions...

Described by Edward Bond as 'almost irresponsibly optimistic', Saved is a play set in London in the sixties and reflects a time of social change. Its subject is the cultural poverty and frustration of a generation of young people on the dole and living on council estates. The play was first staged privately in November 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre for members of the English Stage Society at a time when plays were still censored. With its scenes of violence, including the stoning of a baby in its stroller, Saved became a notorious play and a cause celebre. It has since had...

A farcical look at political violence as it's played out during The Troubles in Northern Ireland against the drab backdrop of a bare, rustic Irish cottage and unending boredom in an inhospitable environment in which a mutilated cat sets off a murderous cycle of revenge.

The second play in Martin McDonagh's dramatic trilogy, it is a wildly funny and gruesome portrayal of an Irish terrorist who is numb to the feelings of his victims, but yet completely attached to and sentimental about his pet cat. The cat is reported dead when Padriac is away bombing civilian targets in...

The Lonesome West was first presented as a Druid Theatre Company and Royal Court coproduction in the summer of 1997, and is the final part of McDonagh's trilogy set in an fictionalized and impoverished western Ireland village called Leenane. Its substantial themes and textured controversy make it a popular choice to study--the Catholic Church is exposed as irrelevant and powerless and the characters have a dangerously skewed sense of morality. The text is full of McDonagh's characteristic combination of farce, aggression, and wit. The plot follows two brothers, Valene and Coleman,...