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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Drama texts, plays
4.48 Psychosis was written throughout the autumn and winter of
1998-99 as Kane battled with one of her recurrent bouts of
depression. On February 20, 1999, aged 28, the playwright committed
suicide. 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.
Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals
of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two
copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who
may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal... Winner of
the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988, and many other
major awards, Our Country's Good premiered at the Royal Court
Theatre, London, in 1988 and opened on Broadway in 1991. 'Rarely
has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued
with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent It is
published here in a new Student Edition, alongside commentary and
notes by Sophie Bush. The commentary includes a chronology of the
play and the playwright's life and work as well as discussion of
the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the
play was originally conceived and created.
Staged in 1893, when Wilde had already achieved fame, wealth and
notoriety, A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse
comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young
man on the make, with an American heiress and the post of secretary
to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach.
When he asks his mother to celebrate with them, it turns out that
Illingworth is Gerald's father, who seduced and abandoned his
mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition,
and Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition,
which also analyses Wilde's various drafts and revisions of the
play, argues that the playwright here continued to explore the
rivalry between an older man and woman for the affection of a
beautiful young man.
'My dad said he jumped buses. Horseboxes. Jumped an aqueduct once.
He was gonna jump Stonehenge but the council put a stop to it.' On
St George's Day, the morning of the local county fair, Johnny
Byron, local waster and modern day Pied Piper, is a wanted man. The
council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his
children want their dad to take them to the fair, Troy Whitworth
wants to give him a serious kicking and a motley crew of mates want
his ample supply of drugs and alcohol. Jez Butterworth's new play
is a comic, contemporary vision of life in our green and pleasant
land. His previous plays for the Royal Court include "The
Winterling", "The Night Heron" and "Mojo". "The key British theatre
work of the last decade." Time Out 2012. An Instant Modern Classic.
A comic, contemporary vision of life in our green and pleasant
land. BEST PLAY Evening Standard Awards BEST PLAY Critics Circle
Awards.
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