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

"In Shopping and Fucking, Mark Ravenhill made theatre relevant to the Thatcher generation. Now he's put videos and Net-surfing in Faust. And it's no less stunning" (Guardian)

Twenty-eight years before The Importance of Being Earnest, a young woman gives birth to a baby boy. Is it an accident when Nanny places him in a handbag and her unpublished novel into the pram? In 1998 a new baby is stolen and an academic discovers an unpublished novel of more than usual revolting sentimentality. From Victorian wet nurses to 90s sperm banks, Mark Ravenhill's play examines the role of parenting...

Two plays by a young British playwright who is fast making a name for himself. Williams is winner of the 1998-99 John Whiting Award for Best New Play and 1998 Alfred Fagon Award (both for Starstruck) and 1996 TAPS Writer of the Year Award

Starstruck: When Hollywood heartthrob Stewart Granger lands in Kingston to shoot his latest movie, the whole town goes crazy. Will Dennis become a star or does girlfriend Pammy have other ambitions? And will Gravel's new money-making scheme leave his wife seeking comfort elsewhere?

The No Boys Cricket Club: Coping alone with her...

"Complicite not only open our eyes to Bruno Schulz but turn his densely impressionistic stories into a piece of vividly imaginative theatre" (Michael Billington, Guardian)

The Street of Crocodiles is inspired by the life and stories of Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). Originally co-produced by Theatre de Complicite and the Royal National Theatre it opened at the Cottesloe in 1992 and toured all over the world until 1994. The original production was remounted in 1998 and played in New York, Toronto, Minneapolis and Tokyo before opening at the Queen's Theatre London in January...

From the celebrated and controversial writer of Shopping and Fucking

Some Explicit Polaroids premiered at the New Ambassadors Theatre, London in October 1999 in a production directed by Max Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, prior to a national tour.
"There are few stage authors writing more interestingly than Mark Ravenhill . . . He is - it is now yet more evident - a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual sensationalism" (Financial Times)

The first collection of plays by one of Britain's most original dramatists

This first volume of Snoo Wilson's plays contains a mixture of his best early work from the 1970s and more recent efforts. Long considered to be a legend of Fringe theatre, Snoo Wilson's early plays had such absurd titles as Girl Mad as Pigs and Ella Daybellfesse's Machine. All of Wilson's plays search out strange psychological states in his characters and situations. Blowjob is a dark study in alienation and violence; in Pigsnight a Lincolnshire farm is taken by a sinister gang and turned into a machine for...

When Sarah Kane's first play Blasted was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995 it was hailed both as a "masterpiece" and as a "disgusting piece of filth" (Daily Mail). That play, and the others that followed, have been produced all over the world. This anthology includes Kane's never-before-published Channel 4 screenplay, Skin.
Plays include: Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, and Skin.

Two plays about cultural identity from Scotland and Catalonia, which received their English-language premieres in August 1999 at the Royal Lyceum Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in Traverse Theatre Company productions

The Speculator is set in Paris in 1720. The French playwright Pierre Marivaux is playing games with love and chance. Europe is in chaos. And John Law, a Scot from Edinburgh, is the richest and most powerful man in the world. He upsets order and alters the value of money. How long can his influence last? David Greig's new play is a rambunctious...

This volume includes four plays: Spokesong 'A dazzling play that combines warmth of sentiment with great emotional strength and intellectual playfulness ... a gorgeously rich play' (New York Post); Catchpenny Twist: 'The most appealing thing about Parker's work is the ease with which he blends lunatic humour with a gritty sense of reality. He's done it before in Spokesong and he does it again in this hard, ribald and hilarious little play' (Sunday Times); Nightshade: 'A rare delight ... A mixture of experiment, inventiveness, wit, sheer theatricality, obscure motifs and elements that are...

This volume includes three of Stewart Parker's most striking plays - Northern Star: 'Only an Irishman could have written something like this: a freewheeling, lunatic sense of invention is harnessed to a cultivated, literary imagination and stoked up by moral outrage. It is a captivating play' (Sunday Times); Heavenly Bodies: 'The colourful, rather Balzacian story of Boucicault ...An undoubted talent for pungent dialogue' (The Times); Pentecost: 'One of the most stimulating, most satisfying, most touching, most illuminating in years of Irish theatre. A total theatrical experience' (Irish...

In his new play, Remember This, Stephen Poliakoff looks at the insidious role that technology plays in all our lives. The video camera becomes an interruption in the daily existence of Rick and Victoria and their friends and relations as the couple prepare for their wedding, to such an extent that the video diary they are recording begins to take over their lives. If events have not been recorded they have not been lived. Their memory of events is only what exists on tape for an audience to see or hear. When the stress of modern living reaches a critical peak, Rick's forsakes real life for...

Wilson Plays: 2

A second collection of plays from one of Britain's most original dramatists

This second volume of plays includes Vampire: 'The height of comedy, a manic, hellzapoppin of invention, sliding from verbal frolics to pure slapstick' (The Times); The Glad Hand: 'A full-blooded theatrical experience which is also - praise be - good fun to watch. Its energetic, imaginative nonsense spills out ideas, situations, crises, comedy and political harangue in a fire-work display of non-sequitur, whiz-bang high spirits' (Sunday Telegraph); The Grass Widow: 'Hilariously confirms...

A captivating study of the plays, literature and writings about private and public theatrical spectacle during the Victorian Age

By the 1890s the British theatre had transformed itself into a world where spectacles and public shows were aimed at the widest audience possible. The theatre had become big business. This anthology brings together a variety of plays and prose which sets this phenomenon in perspective and traces the development of Victorian theatricals from private home events in the late-Georgian period to full-scale Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the 1890s. The section...

A play and production from one of the world's most innovative theatre companies

Mnemonic is about memory, people's personal histories, shared memories and discordant recollections - exhuming the past in order to examine it in the present. A variety of stories - from the discovery of bog people like Tollund Man to peoples compulsion to retrace the origins of their ancestors - collide and form a piece of theatre which questions our concept of time, our capacity to distort history and our attempts to retell the past.
"An ice-preserved body - from 5,200 years ago - forms the...

Peggy For You is a new comic drama, starring Maureen Lipman, about the life of the famous play agent, Peggy Ramsay, who helped transform post-war British drama

Alan Plater's play for the Hampstead Theatre in London is a witty and poignant portrait of Margaret 'Peggy' Ramsay, the larger-than-life play agent who nurtured several generations of British playwrights (John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn, Robert Bolt, Edward Bond, David Hare, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, and others) from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Peggy was one of the most influential...

A new play by Jim Cartwright premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in March 2000

From the author of Road and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice comes a new play about life in the North. Sump and Choke are the Little and Large of the local pub. They are friends who have bonded together though a shared passion for the martial arts. What happens to them during their bonding exercises surprises them both. Jim Cartwright's comic drama looks at two northern hard men and explores the idea of masculinity in an age when every certainty is in doubt.
He's large as life at the star and garter...

4.48 Psychosis sees the ultimate narrowing of Sarah Kane's focus in her work. The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of phychosis: the mind itself. This play was written in 1999 shortly before the playwright took her own life at age 28. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient.

An award-winning play which took the nation by storm when first heard on BBC Radio 4, now in a new stage version

Lee Hall's extraordinary, award-winning play about faith, love and the meaning of life was first broadcast on Radio Four in 1997 to unprecedented acclaim. A monologue by an exceptional autistic seven-year-old girl called Spoonface Steinberg, who is dying of cancer, touched the hearts of all who heard it. It is a moving, funny and exhilarating piece of drama. The radio version was immediately repeated due to popular demand and a cassette of the play was rushed into shops...

A new play for the Royal Shakespeare Company

"World's moving. People moving. We've only to cross the sea. Same sea we're looking at. The world's waiting for us. We've only to take our place it." In 1936, 1974 and 1996, a woman shapes dramatic events in a rural community on the Scottish coast, reflecting the shifting political and social fabric of Britain in the 20th century. Victoria will received its World premiere in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2000.
"David Greig is the most consistently interesting, prolific and artistically ambitious writer of his generation"...

This is the first play adaptation of the classic novel and cult film. It premiered in April 2000 at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, starring Kathleen Turner as Mrs Robinson

California in the 60s. Benjamin's got excellent grades, very proud parents and, since he helped Mrs Robinson with her zipper, a fine future behind him... A cult novel, a classic film, a quintessential hit of the 60s, now Benjamin's disastrous sexual odyssey is brought vividly to life in this world stage premiere production.
"Terry Johnson is that rare creature: a moralist with wit. He writes...

Rita, Sue and Bob Too by Andrea Dunbar; A State Affair by Robin Soans

When it first came out, Rita Sue and Bob Too caused a sensation for it's frank portrayal of child sexuality in a Northern Town; the fact that the play was based on the writer's own experience only added to the furore. Max Stafford-Clark originally commissioned Rita, Sue and Bob Too for the Royal Court in 1982. Eighteen years later, he returned with a group of Out of Joint actors to the Bradford estates that Andrea knew. A State Affair is a record of what they found.
"A genius straight from the slums" - Shelagh...