Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> General

The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplin use an old story of the old man married to the young wife to expose the social attitudes of a traditional Spain bound by rigid concepts of decency, reputation and honour. The Puppet Play deploys the puppets' uninhibited and passionate emotions as a direct attack on the 'tedious triviality' of commercial theatre. The Butterfly's Evil Spell explores the themes of love and frustration, while When Five Years Pass is a surrealist play with references to the film Un Chien Andalou The Andalusian Dog] by Lorca's friend and...

Clever Soldiers: "is a thoughtful play about violence" (Times) which attacks the mythology of Oxbridge against the background of war; Hitting Town, a powerful play about incest is "a riveting piece of theatre...a stupendous achievement" (Sunday Telegraph); City Sugar: "A savage dissection of that pristine slagheap of Our Times - mass culture" (Time Out); Shout Across the River: "traces the progress of a passionate and extraordinary relationship between a young mother and her teenage daughter played against the background of a vast suburb of south London." (Guardian); American Days: "Into...

Reissued to tie in with a new production of Flight adapted by Ron Hutchinson and performed at the Olivier, Royal National Theatre

Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the Soviet Union's finest playwrights, whose work was often at odds with the Soviet State. This volume brings together his major dramatic achievements, including The White Guard, Madame Zoyka, Flight, Moliere, Adam and Eve and The Last Days.
Bulgakov is a much-studied author by schools, colleges and universities.

"David Edgar, like Balzac, seems to be the secretary for our times" (Guardian)

Edgar Plays: 3

Our Own People: "A courageous and intelligent discussion of race and industrial relations" (City Limits); Teendreams (written with Susan Todd of Monstrous Regiment theatre company) is about the failed revolutionary dreams of a set of teenagers. Maydays compares the phenomenon of post-war social rebellion from Western and Eastern perspectives; That Summer is an "elegantly tangential treatment of the 1984 miners' strike" (Plays and Players) "Edgar never lets his drama simplify into...

A rich selection from the best of Nichols' work up to and including his award-winning Privates on Parade

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is based on the author's experience of having a mentally handicapped child and won the John Whiting Award; The National Health was commissioned by Kenneth Tynan for the National theatre and follows the story of a Labour MP who goes into a state hospital suffering from a nervous collapse. It won the Evening Standard Best Play Award; Forget-me-not Lane is a trip down memory lane from the author's own childhood growing up in the West Country; Hearts and...

The first volume of stage and TV plays by one of the best British TV writers

Flint premiered just before the 1970 General Election which was to replace the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. It is driven by the figure of Ossian Flint, a seventy-year old swinging vicar who believes in "crossing lines not drawing them" and espouses the romanticised Communism of Lenin and Guevara; In the BBC play The Bankrupt, Ellis Cripper, a woman aged fifty has become bankrupt through operating at "the dishonourable end of the system...capitalism"; An Afternoon at the Festival centres around a...

Mariana Pineda achieved immediate critical success on its first performance in Barcelona in 1927. The Public is a powerful and uncompromising demand for sexual, and specifically homosexual, freedom - as predicted it was never performed in Lorca's time - it was first performed in this country by Theatre Royal Stratford East in the 80s. Play Without a Title, an unfinished Lorca rarity, realises his wish 'to do something different, including modern plays on the age we live in'.

A collection by a leading playwright of the '70s and '80s

As Time Goes By, Matura's first play is a satirical comedy of manners set among first-generation immigrants and won the George Devine and John Whiting awards. Nice (1973) is a deeply ironic monologue by a recent immigrant commenting on his experience of the hypocrisy of British officialdom; Play Mas (1974) recreates the impact of the heady political momentum generated by the People's National Movement in Trinidad in the early fifties and won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award. Independence (1979) is set in...

Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946) was the author of the most thoughtful English plays of the first half of the twentieth century, ranging from intimate to epic. Brilliantly written (Shaw called them 'masterpieces') they were judged to be far ahead of their time on first performance.

The Marrying of Ann Leete, is a thinly veiled costume drama, using an 18th-century tale to reflect on 19th-century reality. It follows the story of Ann, a 'new woman' who is surrounded by a society of manoeuvres and lies;

The Madras House follows the fortunes of the Madras family...

This first volume of Arden's dramatic work contains plays from the late fifties including The Waters of Babylon about political chancer Charles Butterthwaite at large in London; the one act industrial episode When is a Door not a Door; The Happy Haven, a comedy inspired by the painter Cranach about old age and rejuvenation; Live Like Pigs; "an amazing and lyrical play, beautifully poised between farce and tragedy" Michael Coveney and Serjeant Musgrave's Dance; "a spell-binding, mind-challenging drama that touches greatness" Michael Billington.
"Arden is a giant of modern playwriting. He...

This second volume of John Arden's plays includes works from the 1960s. Armstrong's Last Goodnight, although set in 16th century Scotland, sheds new light on the experience of conscript soldiers at the tail end of colonialism in the 1960s; The Workhouse Donkey presents "not just a kaleidoscopic portrait of a living community; it also has the moral uncertainty of life itself" (Michael Billington The Guardian). Left-handed Liberty anatomises the disintegration of the feudal system under King John; while The True History of Squire Jonathan and his Unfortunate Treasure and the radio play The...

Summer, Quebec City. Following the brutal murder of a young woman, police suspicion rests on one of her close friends, Francois, a student of political science. Meanwhile, a coroner conducts the gruelling autopsy. Based on an uncanny series of interwoven true stories, Polygraph - by Robert Lepage and Marie Brassard - is a play noir: part metaphysical thriller, part murder mystery and part love story, played out in a riveting series of overlapping and shifting perspectives.

"Philip Ridley is a singular writer, a prolific polymath, probably a genius, and the creator of some of the most peculiar, grotesque and compelling British plays (and films) of the last several years" (Time Out)

Ridley's film debut The Reflecting Skin caused a sensation at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win eleven international awards. Set in the Idaho farmlands of the 1950s, the film follows eight-year-old Seth through a mythical summer where reality is heightened to the level of an hallucinogenic, quasi-fantasy. The Passion of Darkly Noon is a modern...

Winner of the 1996 BAFTA for Best Single Drama

Jane Austen's classic novel is the story of Anne Elliot. Engaged eight years previously to a young navel officer, Frederick Wentworth, she allowed herself to be persuaded by a trusted family friend that the young man she loved wasn't an adequate match, and that she had better prospects. The scene opens some seven years after Anne has refused the love of her life when Frederick Wentworth returns from the sea, in search of a wife.

Nick Dear's critically acclaimed screen play was first screened on BBC2 in April 1995 and was...

When Mina, alienated from her own culture, visits her old nanny, Sophie, at her home in Soweto, the reunion is not as joyful as she had hoped; what we choose to remember, after all, is never how things really were.

Backpay by Tamantha Hammerschlag premiered at the Royal Court in October 1996 as part of the Young Writers Festival.