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

The Renaissance was a time of unprecedented change in England. Massive intellectual and cultural developments coincided with considerable social instability and political tensions that would lead to the Civil War. While England was in a process of rethinking its structures and values, and subjecting traditional orthodoxy to fresh and incisive scrutiny, the drama of the period was intimately engaged in these processes. This book focuses on the key debates and events of the Renaissance, such as identity, sexuality, social order, religion, state power and colonialism, and provides an...

This volume contains the best of David Edgar's work from the seventies

The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs is an adaptation of the famous South African writer's diaries and deals with solitary confinement and loneliness - "a remarkable, persuasive picture." (Observer); Mary Barnes is based in a commune in the sixties and focuses on schizophrenia "promulgating the theory that schizophrenia can be effectively treated through behaviourist methods alone"; Saigon Rose tackles venereal disease and is "intriguing and entertaining...Edgar handles his themes - loss of innocence and a sense of...

This volume contains everything Wilde wrote in dramatic form

Wilde's masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest is printed here in its usual three-act form, but with an appendix containing the best material from the original four-act version. Also included are his three 'problem plays', Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, as well as his once-banned Salome and several other little-known but fascinating dramas. H. Montgomery Hyde, an acknowledged expert on Wilde and author of several books on him, provides an introduction to Wilde's life and work with...

This volume contains everything Brendan Behan wrote in dramatic form in English

Contains the three famous full-length plays: The Quare Fellow, set in an Irish prison ("In Brendan Behan's tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight ... with superb dramatic tact, the tragedy is concealed beneath layer after layer of rough comedy" Observer); The Hostage, set in a Dublin lodging-house of doubtful repute where a young English soldier is being kept prisoner, "shouts, sings, thunders and stamps with life...a masterpiece" (The Times); and...

The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixti

Lear - "Bond's greatest (and biggest) play ... It is even more topical now and will become more so as man's inhumanity gains subtle sophistication with the twenty-first century's approach" (The Times); The Sea - "It blends wild farce with tragedy and ends with a sliver of hope ... what makes the play fascinating is Bond's bleak poetry...

Saved - "The most uncompromising, original and un-English English play of the sixties" (Observer); Early Morning - "A gargantuan Swiftian metaphor of universal consumption" (Observer); The Pope's Wedding - "This bizarre and unclassifiable piece is an astonishing tour de force for a first play, and if it comes to that, would be an astonishing tour de force if it were a fifty-first ... Bond is an original" (Bernard Levin, Daily Mail)

The plays in this volume demonstrate the extraordinary skill andversatility Coward's writing achieved in the late 1920s.

The volume containshis best-loved classic, Private Lives, which was an immeditate hit whenit was first staged in 1930. Coward's sparkling dialogue and reparteehave ensured the play's popularity ever since. Of Bitter-Sweet in 1929 Noel Coward wrote that it was "a musical that gaveme more complete satisfaction than anything else I had yet written. Notespecially on acount of its dialogue or its lyrics or its music or itsproduction but as a whole." The...

Volume Four of Noel Coward's plays contains a selection of Coward'splays from the thirties and forties which includes Blithe Spirit, acomedy that centres around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. The playthat mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombswere bringing it to Britain "I shall ever be grateful, for the almostpsychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days duringone of the darkest years of the war." The play was for years thelongest-running comedy in the history of British theatre. PresentLaughter follows the life of...

A re-issue of the collected plays by one of Ireland's most celebrated writers

In The Shadow of the Glen an old man tests his wife's commitment by feigning death; Riders to the Sea is inspired by Synge's stay on the Aran Islands and shadows the death of a way of life as a mother sees her sons die before her eyes; The Tinker's Wedding is about a woman's desire for marriage to her tinker husband and is full of Synge's fascination for the tinker breed who had freed themselves from govenment and conventions while giving way to instincts of sexual promsicuity, fighting and drinking; The...