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

This is the play that established Barry as one of Ireland's most powerful contemporary playwrights.

Thomas Dunne, ex-chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan police looks back on his career built during the latter years of Queen Victoria's empire, from his home in Baltinglass in Dublin in 1932. Like King Lear, Dunne tries valiantly to break free of history and himself. The Steward of Christendom took London by storm when it premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in March 1995 with Donal McCann in the title role. It transferred to Broadway and has toured around the...

"This is a profound and tragic vision of humanity at its bare, forked basics"--Patrick Marmion, Evening Standard

The Censor is "a gripping brief encounter between a pornographic film actress and the man with the licensing scissors. A moving parable of the critic and artist as a healing and finally tragic, love story."--Michael Coveney, Daily Mail

A startling collection of plays by playwrights working in the north and south of Ireland, all of which have been groundbreaking events in contemporary Irish theatre

At The Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods depicts a group of mummers in the borderland between North and South, blending their rituals of death with the all-too-modern assassins going about their awful task; in Hard To Believe by Conall Morrison an army intelligence agent for the British invokes his Protestant preacher grandfather and his turncoat father who married a Catholic and thereafter denied his background; in Disco...

Terry Johnson's most recent plays collected in a second volume and introduced by the author

This second volume of Johnson's collected plays includes Hysteria, in which one of Freud's earliest "cases" returns to haunt the psychoanalyst but finds Salvador Dali hiding in the cupboard; Dead Funny, a comedy about Benny Hill, impotence, sex therapy and the English sense of humour - Eleanor wants what Richard won't give her, Richard wants to be left in peace, Benny would rather rest in peace, but for tonight, at least, his fans won't let him; Imagine Drowning in which a journalist...

Jonathan Harvey's most popular plays collected in one volume for the first time

Contains the smash hit plays Beautiful Thing - a bittersweet tale of the joys and trials of living cheek-by-jowl in a Thamesmead housing estate, Babies is based on the playwright's experiences as a teacher which was 'mercilessly robbed from a particular night when I arrived at a pupil's birthday party to be entertained by a drag queen dressed as the Queen' and The Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club, set among the low-life of Soho centres on the character of Marti, a gay man of a certain age, who can't...

A play from the author of Trainspotting

Within the sound-proofed walls of a disused recording studio, a score is being settled. Two inner city low-lifes take the law into their own hands to satisfy their craving for fun, fear and a freakish sense of justice. "You'll Have Had Your Hole" premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and toured internationally - although it was banned in Belgium.

Stephen Poliakoff 'has been one of our sharpest and least predictable writers for the past twenty years' (Daily Telegraph)

Broadcasting House, London, in the late 1930s. With war in Europe looming on the horizon, in light entertainment radio there is the bizarre spectacle of costumed singers and dancers performing live in a medium where they can only be heard and not seen. Robbie, the mercurial Master of Ceremonies of the popular 'Friday Night at Eight', has a playful and devious imagination. Together with radio producer Clive the two hatch a dangerous and subversive new form of...

From the author of the hugely successful stage play/film Beautiful Thing

Hushabye Mountain reveals a world that has learned to live with AIDS. It is full of love, pain, laughs and friendship, where drugs in their various combinations are exhilarating, destructive, costly and even life restoring. Hushabye Mountain premiered at the Lyceum Theatre, Crewe, in February 1999, in a production with English Touring Theatre.
"You would have to have a heart hewn from granite not to respond warmly to Jonathan Harvey's latest play" (Guardian)

For the first time, a collection of Britain's top comedy performer's plays and TV scripts in one volume

This volume includes the Evening Standard award-winning play Talent 'Very funny - at times, too near the knicker-wetting degree' (Guardian) and her other stage play Good Fun ('. . . blisteringly funny one-liners' The Times), which both premiered at the Sheffield Crucible. Also includes her acclaimed television script Pat and Margaret which Time Out hailed as 'The most impressive thing that Wood has written.'
Introduced by Victoria Wood herself

Some Voices: 'The most thrilling playwriting debut in years. . . The writing is razor-sharp, sensitive, quietly eloquent, full of the touchingly drab poetry of lost lives' (Sunday Times); Pale Horse: 'His second Court play is as compelling and extraordinary as his first . . . as taut, tight and atmospheric as Macbeth' (Observer); Love and Understanding: 'This is one of the best plays I've seen, ever, at this powerhouse of new writing . . . tough, eloquent, bruising' (Sunday Times); The Bullet: 'A Death of a Salesman for Britain in the nineties, and it is typical of Penhall's grace as a...

Shelagh Stephenson's daring and thoughtful new play

1799 - On the eve of a new century, the house buzzes with scientific experiments, furtive romance and farcical amateur dramatics. 1999 - In a world of scientific chaos, cloning and genetic engineering, the cellar of the same house reveals a dark secret buried for 200 years.
An Experiment with an Air Pump was joint recipient of the 1997 Margaret Ramsay Award and premiered at The Royal Exchange Theatre Company, Manchester in February 1997. Due for a major London production in autumn 1998. Her previous play The Memory of Water won...

The Seventh volume in the Coward Collection. On Quadrille "Miss Fontanne plays the madcap Marchioness with thecrackle and sheen of a five-pound note. Her eyes mock marvelously, hervoice cuts like a knife into a wedding cake, and the scene in ActThree, on the eve of her elopement with Mr. Lung, is as delicious ascrushed ice." Evening Standard, 1952.

"The idea of Peace in Our Time,"Coward wrote "was conceived in Paris shortly after the Liberation. . .I began to suspect that the physical effect of four years intermittentbombing is far less damaging to the intrinsic...

Philip Hoare, in his biography of Coward described Semi-Monde as his "most daring play to date. In a chic Parisian hotel, a series of sexualpairings take place through rendezvous, arguments, infidelities andreconciliations: sexual deviance is undisguised...set in the bisexual1920s, the play could easily be populated by characters of Coward'ssociety."

Point Valaine is "thedrama of a lurid episode of lust in the semi-tropics.. unmistakably thework of a master of the stage" (New York Times); South Sea Bubble whichconcerns "the Governor's lady in the Isle of Samolo...

Kill the Old Torture their Young is an urban tragi-comedy from the acclaimed writer of Knives in Hens, one of Scotland's most talented new playwrights

A documentary maker returns to the city of his birth. His task, to film his impressions. An old man remembers a time when eagles flew over the city. A TV executive reaches breaking point in the city he loves. A struggle actor seeks fame in a city that doesn't seem to want him. A young woman ends her artistic dreams in a city that eludes her. A receptionist tries to break the mould of her life in the city where she's always lived. A...

Dreaming by Peter Barnes is a haunting and brutally funny story of heroism and human values.

In the bloody aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, Captain John Mallory leads a band of renegades across a war-torn landscape on a breathtaking quest in search of a dream - a dream of home. Dreaming premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre in March 1999 before moving to the West End.

Ben Elton's plays in one volume for the first time

Gasping: ." . . an often hilarious satire on yuppiedom, advertising and corporate greed" (Daily Telegraph); ." . . the sharpest futuristic comedy since Henceforward, and the best Green comedy since The Good Life was young."(Financial Times). Silly Cow: "It has an ingenious plot. . . another perfect occasion for a Ben Elton satire on the modern world. . ." (Financial Times). Popcorn: "An enjoyable, intelligent, thought-provoking play" (Independent); "It thrills on stage precisely because it adopts the sick humour, sickening violence...

If there is anyone who should be the children's playwright laureate it is David Wood' (Evening Standard)

Wood Plays: 2

The Owl and the Pussycat Went to See - '... the funniest, prettiest and most melodious children's show I have ever seen' (Guardian); The BFG - 'Any child not delighted by the BFG must have a head filled with squashed flies, and deserves to be fed for a year on disgustatious snozzcumbers' (Guardian); The Plotters of Cabbage Patch Corner - 'A milestone in children's entertainment' (Theatre Review); Save the Human - 'A first-rate show, it's colourful, entertaining...

"As playwright, composer and director, Mr Wood has given children a self-respecting art form" (The Times)

Wood Plays: 1

The Gingerbread Man - 'The perfect children's play, with lots of superbly silly jokes and foot-tapping songs ... a magnificent epic of comic disarray' (Time Out); The See-Saw Tree - 'We are made to feel at once that the theatre is something immediate and involving' (Times); The Ideal Gnome Expedition - 'David Wood has surely scored again ... yet another gently entertaining excursion into a fantasy world where eminently sensible values prevail' (Daily...

Darke Plays: 1
The Dead Monkey - "Darke has something both hilarious and horrific to say about the decay of a marriage and he compels the attention while doing so." (Sunday Telegraph)
The King of Prussia - "A meaty play...seethes with life, wit and ideas. Darke give shape to a Cornish identity that feels vital and real and has nothing to do with clay pipes and clotted cream. Like Cornwall's coves, it has many unexpected depths...It also raises questions about the points where justice, conscience and the law part company" (Financial Times)
The Body - "The best moments in Nick...