Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> European - General

The play was intended as a tragedy on the purposeless of life imposed on the women of his time, both by their upbringing and by the social conventions which limited their activities. When it was first produced it met with misunderstanding and abuse. It has nevertheless become one of the most popular of Ibsen's plays.

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world.

Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the...

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 Brecht's masterpiece, this edition published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series offer a full introduction. A powerful example of...

The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), 'the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury'; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father ('Where, ' asked George Bernard Shaw, 'shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?'); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman.
Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of...

This volume contains Ibsen's two most famous and frequently read, studied and performed plays about women: A Doll's House (1879), his first international success, which 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life', and Hedda Gabler (1890), now one of his most popular plays, but greeted at first with bewilderment and outrage ('The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas' Pictorial World). Also included is An Enemy of the People (1883), whose central character was the actor Konstantin Stanislavski's favourite role.
Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged...

In this savage and witty parable written in exile in 1941, Brecht recasts the rise of Hitler as a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. This prizewinning translation by Ralph Manheim skilfully captures the wide range of parody and pastiche in the original - from Richard III to Al Capone, from Mark Antony to Faust - without diminishing the horror of the real-life Nazi prototypes.

This Student Edition of Brecht's classic dramatisation of the conflict between free enquiry and official ideology features an extensive introduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion of the context, themes, characters, style and language as well as questions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text. It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.

Along with Mother Courage, the character of Galileo is one of Brecht's greatest creations, immensely live, human and complex. Unable to resist his appetite for scientific...

Brecht's famous parable, written in exile in 1939-41, shows that in an unjust society good can only survive by means of evil. In it, the gods come to earth in search of enough good people to justify their existence. They find Shen Teh, a good-hearted but penniless prostitute, and make her a gift that enables her to set up her own business. But her goodness brings ruin and she must disguise herself as a man in order to muster sufficient ruthlessness to survive.

Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features an introduction and extensive notes and textual...

This is the poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell's version of Gogol's classic satire on human vanity with its story of a penniless nobody from Moscow who is mistaken for a government inspector by the corrupt and self-seeking officials of a small town in Tsarist Russia.
"The greatest artist that Russia has yet produced" Vladimir Nabokov

"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner)

The two epic plays in this volume stand, together with Peer Gynt and The Pretenders, at the fulcrum of Ibsen's career. Brand (1865) stated sharply and vividly the necessity of following one's private conscience and 'being oneself'. It created an immediate sensation and was hailed by Strindberg as 'the voice of a Savonarola'. Emperor and Galilean...

Twenty monologues for women

Twenty monologues in this volume which range from the deeply serious to the extravagantly comic and accessible to a wide range of audiences
"The pieces are comic, grotesque, on purpose. First of all because we women have been crying for two thousand years. So let's laugh now, even at ourselves" - Franca Rame

"Set at the point where reality and ideology rub up against each other, these] monologues are vivid, concise and entertaining comments on the female condition...comic-but-angry, raw-but-precise" - Independent

In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into 'Joan Dark', a member of the 'Black Straw Hats' (a Salvation Army-like group) in twentieth century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant. Like her predecessor, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and (initially, at least) an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure.

The play, which was never staged in Brecht's...

Three contentious and enduring plays about the clash of the individual and society

Fire Raisers (1958) tells the tale of a respectable bourgeois whose house is one day visited by three strangers. It "is successful on every level; the story is as gripping as an adventure story; each line is fraught with several meanings: as an allegory it is unique" (Edna O'Brien); Andorra is based on the author's own experience of anti-semitism in Switzerland and is about Andri, a young man who is believed to be a Jew and who is persecuted by his community as a result; Triptych is a portrait of a...

A re-issue of three plays that ushered in the great age of absurdist theatre

There was a riot at the first performance of Ubu Roi on 10 December 1896, when Firmin Gemier, playing Ubu, strode to the footlights and roared: "Merde " at the audience, and theatre would never be the same again. Ubu became a force to be reckoned with in literature, art and politics. Jarry wrote more exploits for him and took to acting the role of Ubu himself in his own brief, strange life.

This volume contains lively modern translations by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor of Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu...

Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires

Can't Pay Won't Pay is set in Milan, but "the problems are desperately familiar...Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times); Elizabeth "It portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo's characteristically rollicking vein...A triumph for Gillian Hanna as translator" (Marin Hoyle, Financial Times); The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.

This second volume of Brecht's Collected Plays brings together some of his most glittering Berlin successes including The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins, Man Equals Man and The Elephant Calf. The Threepenny Opera is the story of the mercurial beggar turned entrepeneur Peachum and his battles with the criminal Mac 'the Knife'; Mahagonny, an operatic...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.

Volume One of Brecht's Collected Plays contains Brecht's first performed stage works. Baal is inspired by Brecht's student life in Augsburg and follows the life of a young poet on the rocky road to inspiration; Drums in the Night was written in response to Brecht's experience as a medical orderly in the aftermath of the First World War; and In the Jungle of Cities, set in Chicago, covers the downfall...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.

This sixth volume of Brecht's Collected Plays contains three plays he wrote while in exile during the early stages of the Second World War. In Brecht's famous parable The Good Person of Szechwan, the gods come to earth in search of a thoroughly good person. No one can be found until they meet Shen Te, a prostitute with a heart of gold. Rewarded by the gods, she gives up her profession and buys a...