Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

In Chekhov's tragi-comedy, one of his most studied plays, the Gayev family is torn by powerful forces deeply rooted in history and the society in which they live. When their estate is hopelessly in debt they are urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, a proposition which prompts a family struggle to act decisively.

This version of Brecht's great anti-war play is by David Hare and was premiered by the National Theatre, London, in November 1995. In this chronicle of the Thirty Years War, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part with her livelihood - the wagon. The Berlin production of 1949, with Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, marked the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble.

Considered by many to be one of the greatest anti-war plays ever written and...

Scenery: Interior

This boulevard comedy was a smash hit in Paris, where it played for over two years, and in London, where critical acclaim greeted the Apollo Theatre production. Bernard is planing a weekend with his chic Parisian mistress in a French farmhouse. He has arranged for a cordon bleu cook to prepare gourmet delights, is packing his wife Jacqueline off to her mother's, and has even invited his best friend to provide the alibi. It's foolproof; what could possibly go wrong? Suppose Robert turns up not knowing why he has been invited? Suppose...

Black and Silver

Characters: 1 male, 1 female

Interior Set

In this short, affecting and laughable scene parents are awakened in the middle of the night by the baby. They stumble about trying to pacify the infant. At one point the husband panics because he cannot hear the baby breathing in the cradle, which is only reasonable because the wife has put it on their bed.

Mr. Foot

Characters: 1 male, 1 female

Interior Set

A tour de force for an actor and actress-- and a foot. It seems the man's foot jiggles uncontrollably at various moments and the...

Thomas Heywood's masterpiece, A Woman Killed With Kindness, is a domestic tragedy, which combines two plots and has two women at its centre. One woman is almost prostituted by her brother in order to pay off his creditor. The other woman begins an affair with her husband's friend and house-guest, only to be discovered by her husband and sent away from their home. This supposed act of 'kindness' by her husband, who spares his wife the fate of being killed outright, ends in disaster, and this is a morality tale that Heywood wanted his audience to learn from.

In this edition...

Closer emerged as one of the most successful plays of the 1990s, and one with a continuing afterlife through the academy award nominated film adaptation in 2004. Although the work of dramatists such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill initially attracted the most critical and academic attention, Patrick Marber's Closer had long West End and Broadway runs. The play has since gone on to repeat this success in over 30 other countries.

Tom Stoppard is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary British playwrights, a writer who has earned an intriguing mix of both critical and commercial success. Arcadia is considered by many critics to be Stoppard's masterpiece, a work that weds his love for words and ideas in his early career, with his emphasis on storytelling and emotional engagement in his later career.
With its engaging alteration between past and present Arcadia offers a comedic and entertaining exploration of chaos theory, entropy, the Second Law of thermodynamics, iterated...

Focusing on major and emerging playwrights, institutions, and various theatre practices this Concise Companion examines the key issues in British and Irish theatre since 1979. Written by leading international scholars in the field, this collection offers new ways of thinking about the social, political, and cultural contexts within which specific aspects of British and Irish theatre have emerged and explores the relationship between these contexts and the works produced. It investigates why particular issues and practices have emerged as significant in the theatre of this...

This Jacobean tragic-comedy by Philip Massinger explores the cultural conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa experienced when the two began to travel and trade in the early modern period. The play is peopled with merchants and pirates and the somewhat convoluted plot involves conversions between both faiths, disguise, kidnap and clandestine marriage.

The play is one of many of the period exploring the tantalizing and sometimes threatening "other" world of other religions and cultures and as such is studied alongside more familiar plays such as Othello and...