Teenager Alan, fought over by a religious mother and an atheist father, finds release in horses, until he is driven to blind them with a spike. Why? While treating the boy, a psychiatrist discovers his own life is paradoxically in the witness box.

Aeschylus' Oresteia opens with Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to the gods; an act which sets in motion a bloody cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. When he in turn is killed at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra, their son Orestes takes up the mantle of avenging his father, continuing the bloodshed until peace is ultimately found in the rule of law. Zinnie Harris reimagines this ancient drama, using a contemporary sensibility to rework the stories, placing the women in the centre. Orestes' leading role is replaced by his sister Electra, who as a young child witnesses her father's murder and is compelled to take justice into her own hands until she too must flee the Furies.

'His drama is a piece of expert dramatic construction. Mr. Miller has woven his characters into a tangle of plot that springs naturally out of the circumstances of life today.' NEW YORK TIMES Three years on from the disappearance of his son, successful businessman Joe Keller has made a comfortable life for his family in America's Midwest: despite being accused of supplying defective aircraft equipment in World War 2, he is altogether happy. But, when a shadowy figure from Joe's past returns, his hidden truths are revealed, and the price of the American Dream is laid bare. Miller's first successful play on Broadway, All My Sons launched his career and established him as one of America's greatest dramatists, also winning him the 1946 Tony Award for Best Author. An incisive indictment of greed, capitalism and self-interest, All My Sons is remembered as one of the playwright's greatest works. This Methuen Drama Student Edition is edited by Clare Gleitman, with commentary and notes that explore the play's production history (including excerpts from an interview with director Jeremy Herrin) as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

'Vanishing. It's a powerful word, that. A powerful word.' County Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1981. The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest. A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor. Developed by Sonia Friedman Productions, Jez Butterworth's play The Ferryman premiered to huge acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in April 2017, before transferring to the West End and then Broadway. The production was directed by Sam Mendes. It went on to win the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play, and the Critics' Circle, Olivier and WhatsOnStage Awards for Best New Play. It also won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Play.

Three years after a difficult breakup, Steph and Greg are wondering if they can start over again. The trouble is, she's married someone else and he's started a relationship with her best friend Carly. Meanwhile, Carly's ex-husband Kent wants her back, and even more so when he hears about her new romance with his best friend Greg. As emotions run high, all four find themselves entangled in a web of hidden agendas and half-truths in their pursuit of a happy life. A companion piece to the acclaimed Reasons to Be Pretty, Neil LaBute's Reasons to Be Happy received its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre, London, in March 2016.

Aeschylus' Oresteia opens with Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to the gods; an act which sets in motion a bloody cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. When he in turn is killed at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra, their son Orestes takes up the mantle of avenging his father, continuing the bloodshed until peace is ultimately found in the rule of law. Zinnie Harris reimagines this ancient drama, using a contemporary sensibility to rework the stories, placing the women in the centre. Orestes' leading role is replaced by his sister Electra, who as a young child witnesses her father's murder and is compelled to take justice into her own hands until she too must flee the Furies.

The Two Worlds of Charlie F. moves through the stages of service, from the war in Afghanistan to dream-like states of morphine-induced hallucinations to the physio rooms of Headley Court. All through the view of soldier Charlie Fowler's service, injury and recovery. The play explores themes of physical and psychological injury and its effects on soldiers as they fight for survival. Drawn from the personal experience of the wounded, injured and sick service personnel involved, The Two Worlds of Charlie F. premiered at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in January 2012 and toured nationally that summer. It was revived for an international tour in 2014. "Powerfully affecting - Gripping. The authenticity of verbatim drama and the saltiness of barracks-room humour with the finesse of something more lyrical." - Telegraph "An evening of rare, raw power." - Independent

After fifteen years of marriage, Daniel and Sylvia find themselves drifting further apart with each passing day. Until one morning, they find themselves abruptly united by every parent's worst nightmare... The shoes have been polished, the vases are full and the phone is ringing off the hook, but there's one thing they're still missing...answers. Forced into a confrontation, years of resentment and things long left unsaid rise to the surface as they question the circumstances that brought them to this point, and what happens to your relationship when the only thing holding you together, threatens to tear you apart. A timely spotlight on love and loss, Til Death Do Us Part is the debut play of Safaa Benson-Effiom, and was a finalist in the 2020 Theatre503 International Playwriting Award and Soho Theatre's 2019 Tony Craze award. Originally presented as a Theatre503 and Darcy Dobson Productions co-production.

The Busybody is the most popular comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Susanna Centlivre. The play centres on two couples trying to form a relationship against the wills of their guardians, and in a battle of wits, playing with many conventions from theatre traditions across the continent, a conclusion is eventually reached. Like her predecessor Aphra Behn, Centlivre was immensely successful in her day, drawing huge crowds to extended runs of her numerous plays, but the stabbing male pens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decried her work as being louche and dangerous, and her name slowly sunk into obscurity. This edition, published with William Hazlitt's prefatory note and extra material on Centlivre's life and writing, seeks to highlight the dexterity with which she took on the stage.

This amusing approach to Shakespeare's classic dramas features the plot of each of the Bard's 39 plays reduced to a single descriptive sentence. For this volume Shakespeare's 39 plays are divided into their five canonical groupings: comedies, tragedies, histories, problem plays, and collabourations. Each single-sentence summary will be foregrounded against a two-page spread featuring classic artwork that speaks both to the seriousness of the play illustrated as well as to the points made by the summary.

'The writing is beautiful, supple, rhythmical, charged with the slow, sure throb of despair and enchantment... Brian Friel is the most profound and poetic of contemporary Irish dramatists.' Observer Throughout the remote and forgotten corners of the British Isles, Frank Hardy offers the promise of redemption to the sick and the suffering. But his is an unreliable gift, a dangerous calling which brings him into conflict with his wife Grace and his manager Teddy. Their competing accounts of past events reveal the fragility of memory and the necessity of stories as a means of survival. Brian Friel's Faith Healer was first produced at the Longacre Theatre, New York, in April 1979 and was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in June 2016. 'The night of Faith Healer is one that still blazes in recollection for me, as religious experiences of art do. And it became a sort of touchstone for me in understanding not only Mr. Friel's work with a depth I hadn't appreciated before but also for defining the elusiveness of great art and the pain of the artist who creates it.' Ben Brantley, New York Times

A collection of the world's best monologues for women actors featuring well-known playwrights and emerging new writers.

Edited, Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugral volumes, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Othello has long been recognised as one of the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to devastate their lives. In its vivid rendering of racism, sexism, contested identities, and the savagery lurking within civilisation, Othello is arguably the most topical and accessible tragedy from Shakespeare's major phase as a dramatist. Productions on stage and screen regularly renew its power to engross, impress and trouble the imagination.