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

Containing Coward's best work from the last two decades of his life, this volume includes Relative Values, which ran for over a year in1951-2, Look After Lulu (1959), his perennially popular Feydeauadaptation, Waiting in the Wings (1960), a bravura piece set in a homefor retired actresses, and Suite in Three Keys (1965), a trilogy ofplays which gave Coward his last roles on stage. The volume isintroduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer, and includesan extensive chronology of Coward's work.

Galsworthy Five Plays

John Galsworthy (1867-1933), novelist and dramatist, is most widely known as the author of The Forsyte Saga, but recent productions testify to the power that his plays still exert over modern audiences and the strength and relevance of the issues he raise

In Strife, Galsworthy deals with industrial relations; in Justice, with prison life - it was one of the few plays to effect real reforms. The Eldest Son is also about injustice - one law for the rich, another for the poor; The Skin Game, Galsworthy's first commercial success, presents class conflict;...

A play by one of Britain's best-selling writers

"Set in the year 2001 where the class system is numbered from one to five and only the upperclasses are allowed to breed, Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes is about the births of a perfect but illegal 'class five' baby, and an imperfect 'government' baby bought by a 'class three' mother and exterminated at birth because of her nine toes...compulsive viewing...insanity is served up as commen sense - to sinister effect." Kate Kellaway, Observer

The Ruling Class "is a scorching and savage tragedy, yet its jokes are innumerable...they throw wide open the windows of your mind, they enlarge your field of vision and they blow away the accumulated dust of ages" (Sunday Times); Leonardo's Last Supper and Noonday Demons are "two ironic plays of delusion...Peter Barnes' dialogue is rich in surprising verbal twists, intellectual allusions and splendid jokes." The Bewitched is "a feast for intellectuals as well as a rollicking example of folk theatre" (Plays and Players) while Laughter is a vicious satire on comedy itself and Barnes' People...

Nicholas Nickleby: "With uncommon audacity Nicholas Nickleby not only takes on Dickens' sprawling novel, it fractures all the petty limitations we have imposed upon the stage as well...A landmark" (New Statesman); In Entertaining Strangers, a community constructs a nativity play: "English left-wing social drama at its sturdiest and finest: human, argumentative, utterly unafraid of human realities, and seething with indignation and compassion" (Sunday Times) and Ecclesiastes, a radio play that looks at the rise and fall of a "fundamentalist" Christian clergyman in the US.

Set in medieval Italy during a crisis in the Church, Sunsets and Glories is "a work of the highest and most thrilling theatrical energy" (Independent on Sunday)

Sunsets and Glories is set in the late thirteenth-century Italy where power struggles between Church and State inspire such characters as the spineless Charles 11, paid killer Montefelto and 'madwoman' Maifreda. Into this maelstrom steps Peter de Morrone, the saintly Pope Celestine V, provoking a bitter crisis of faith in the abiding values of violence and corruption. Once again, Peter Barnes' mordant wit takes history and...

A play about Benjamin Britten and his friendship with WH Auden and Peter Pears

Drawn from the life of Benjamin Britten and informed by many personal interviews with the composer's friends including his sister Beth, this play explores the conflict between his association with WH Auden and his partnership with Peter Pears, culminating in the triumphant premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945.

Once in a While The Odd Things Happened premiered at the Cottesloe in 1990.
Paul Godfrey's work includes Inventing a New Colour (Royal Court, 1988); Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens (Royal...

Tissue: "The tissue of the title is a left breast and lymph node removed during Sally Bacon's mastectomy...Louise Page catalogues Sally's changing attitudes to what her mother calls her chest, her brother calls her tits and what she calls her bosoms." (Guardian); Salonika "There is in this strange and beautiful new play...a moment when the author crosses the boundaries of naturalism and the seaside sands of Salonika are literally parted and the dead past rises to life" (Guardian); Real Estate "Miss Page, by accurate, detailed, loving writing has created four real people, sensitive to the...

Ripen Our Darkness was the play that established Sarah Daniels as a writer.
The Devil's Gateway carries the flavour of life in Bethnal Green in the 1980s.
Masterpieces, Daniels' most controversial play is a radical take on the porn industry and caused outrage among critics - "The play has bite, anger and tenacity and many of its arguments are true...the supreme merit of Ms Daniels' combative work is that it makes me want to argue back."--Michael Billington, Guardian
Neaptide looks at lesbianism and prejudice - "A lacerating wit"--City...

A journalist disappears while covering a protest at Sellafield. When his wife sets out to find him two weeks later, she stays at the same guesthouse and encounters the same bizarre collection of characters including the wife of a mass murderer, an ex-astronaut beach bum and a wheel-chair bound activist.

"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times)

Benefactors conjures the world of the suburbs observed through the lens of post-imperialism; "dazzling.. This prismatic work circumscribes the disillusionment of an era" (New York Times); Balmoral dares to imagine what Britain would be like if it had gone through the Russian revolution in 1917; "a sophisticated drollery, an educated amusement" (New Statesman); Wild Honey is a reworking of Checkov's first play (also known as Platonov) and is shot through with farce, feminism and eroticism.

The first collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel

Famine portrays the Great Hunger of the Irish in 1840s, with fresh pathos and insight.

Patriot Games is a documentary drama charting the 1916 Easter rising.

The Blue Macushla is a live gangster movie on stage set in the Republic of the 1970s with the politics of the Troubles emerging in Northern Ireland spilling over into the South.

Anthony Minghella's writing "sets a standard of emotional truth and clarity so sublimely high that everything around it looks stale, flat, tawdry and obvious"--The Times

Whale Music is: "genuinely tender, poignant and spikily anti-amle all at once" (Daily Mail); A Little Like Drowning "makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you think" (Guardian); Two Planks and A Passion "is one of the best new plays I have seen in the past decade" (Financial Times)

Winner of the 1992 Evening Standard Best Comedy Award and the 1993 Olivier Award for Best Comedy,"The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is a cracker, original, hilarious and hauntingly sad" (Daily Telegraph)

"Like everything Cartwright writes, Little Voice is playful, magical and terrifying, a view of the world from an unexpected angle, perpetrated by an imagination that notices the dust in the grooves of old records and finds poetry in garish, swanky clothes or the glitterball of a rowdy northern club" (Sunday Times)

"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian)

The Contractor: "A subtle and poetic parable about the nature and joy of skilled work, the meaning of community and the effect of its loss" (Observer); Home: "about the solitude and dislocation of madness and...the decline of Britain itself...part of the play's appeal is that Storey leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions...a play that contains within itself the still, sad music of humanity." (Guardian); Stages: ..".an elegy for lost times and places, an obituary that has been free-associated by...

The second collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel

In Conversations on a Homecoming, Michael returns from America to Ireland for a long-awaited reunion with his drinking companions: "A bilious bar-room comedy on the irreducible elements in the Irish character and the death of the Kennedy dream" (Observer), Bailegangaire "is as complex and haunting as one of Yeats' later poems...A senile bedridden old woman rehearses over and over again an epic tale of a village laughing...