A South African pastor and a young teacher from Cape Town battle over the fate of an eccentric elderly widow. The play won the 1988 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.

This volume uniquely draws together seven contemporary plays by a selection of the finest African women writers and practitioners from across the continent, offering a rich and diverse portrait of identity, politics, culture, gender issues and society in contemporary Africa.

Niqabi Ninja by Sara Shaarawi (Egypt) is set in Cairo during the chaotic time of the Egyptian uprising.

Not That Woman by Tosin Jobi-Tume (Nigeria) addresses issues of violence against women in Nigeria and its attendant conspiracy of silence. The play advocates zero-tolerance for violence against women and urges women to bury shame and speak out rather than suffer in silence.

I Want To Fly by Thembelihle Moyo (Zimbabwe) tells the story of an African girl who wants to be a pilot. It looks at how patriarchal society shapes the thinking of men regarding lobola (bride price), how women endure abusive men and the role society at large plays in these issues.

Silent Voices by Adong Judith (Uganda) is a one-act play based on interviews with people involved in the LRA and the effects of the civil war in Uganda. It critiques this, and by implication, other truth commissions.

Unsettled by JC Niala (Kenya) deals with gender violence, land issues and relations of both black and white Kenyans living in, and returning to, the country.

Mbuzeni by Koleka Putuma (South Africa) is a story of four female orphans, aged eight to twelve, their sisterhood and their fixation with death and burials. It explores the unseen force that governs and dictates the laws that the villagers live by.

Bonganyi by Sophia Kwachuh Mempuh (Cameroon) depicts the effects of colonialism as told through the story of a slave girl: a singer and dancer, who wants to win a competition to free her family.

Each play also includes a biography of the playwright, the writer's own artistic statement, a production history of the play and a critical contextualisation of the theatrical landscape from which each woman is writing.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial future as bloody as its Republican past and a ruler from outside the house of Caesar. The anonymous historical drama Octavia is the earliest literary witness to this era of uncertainty and upheaval. In this book, Ginsberg offers a new reading of how the play intervenes in the wars over memory surrounding Nero's fall. Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife in which the ruling family waged war both on itself and on its people. In doing so, the Octavia shows how easily empire becomes a breeding ground for the passions of discord. In order to rewrite the history of Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of Rome's most celebrated authors to stage a new reading of that era and its ruling family. In doing so, the play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those historical accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg elucidates the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. Her book claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over both the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman empire.

Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level. 'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian "A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus to explore the contributions of artists from regions like Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Together, these essays offer the most comprehensive worldwide examination of modernist studies available. Topics covered include: Richard Wright and photographic modernism; poetry of the Caribbean; Chinese modernism and Lu Xun's Ah Q-The Real Story; Ben Okri and magical realism; aesthetic autonomy in Paris, Italy, Russia; Cuba's avant-gardes; geography of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in Europe; Japanese modernism in works by Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Yokomitsu Riichi; and South African cinema.

Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break, Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernist thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes habits, continuities, and daily life over spectacular events, heroic opposition, and radical rupture. Pragmatic modernists developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of pragmatist keywords, including "habit," "institution," "prediction," and "bigness," Pragmatic Modernism offers new readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among others. It shows, for instance, how Stein's characteristic literary innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of habit; and how institutions-businesses, museums, newspapers, the law, and even the state itself-help to construct the subtlest of personal observations and private gestures in James's novels. This study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing, it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as modernism's legacy.

Queer Virgins examines the creation and theatrical performance of queer puns in Renaissance London. Its argument--that a small theatre known as the Whitefriars was run by a community of playwrights who self-consciously targeted an audience sympathetic to homoerotic desire and to homoerotic puns in particular--revises the current scholarly belief that early modern Londoners did not form self-conscious communities based on erotic desire. This book is for students of the early modern theatre; those who are interested in the history of erotic relations between men, and all who delight in puns and bawdy.

This book considers some of the main adaptations of the character of Cleopatra for the Renaissance stage, travelling from Italy to England to arrive finally to Shakespeare. It shows how each reading of the story of Cleopatra is unique to and expressive of the culture which produced it, even as writers drew from the same sources from Antiquity. For the first time texts belonging to different cultures, rigorously presented, are brought into dialogue on such questions as moral standpoint, gender and the representation of the exotic. Moreover, through the fascinating figure of Cleopatra, the reader is able to explore the development of Renaissance tragedy, in its commercial and non-commercial versions. Ultimately both questions at the heart of this study - concerning Cleopatra's identity and her translation into theatre - converge to be (dis)solved by Shakespeare.

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals.
This volume collects Euipides' Alcestis (translated by William Arrowsmith), a subtle drama about Alcestis and her husband Admetos, which is the oldest surviving work by the dramatist; Medea (Michael Collier and Georgia Machemer), a moving vengeance story and an excellent example of the prominence and complexity that Euripides gave to female characters; Helen (Peter Burian), a genre breaking play based on the myth of Helen in Egypt; and Cyclops (Heather McHugh and David Konstan), a highly lyrical drama based on a celebrated episode from the Odyssey. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

This book is a study of August Strindberg's famous drama "Miss Julie, "presented in both Swedish and English. Since it was first performed in 1888, "Miss Julie "has became one of the most successful plays written by Strindberg, widely considered one of the pioneers of modern drama. The book provides a penetrating analysis of the author's text, followed by a close investigation of Ingmar Bergman's much lauded 1985 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. "Drama as Text and Performance "is intended as a paradigmatic illustration of similarities and differences between the two media--textand performance and their recipients, readers and spectators.

The year 2006 marked the centenary of the birth of Nobel-Prize winning playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. To commemorate the occasion, this collection brings together twenty-three leading international Beckett scholars from ten countries, who take on the centenary challenge of "revolving it all": that is, going "back to Beckett"-the title of an earlier study by critic Ruby Cohn, to whom the book is dedicated-in order to rethink traditional readings and theories; provide new contexts and associations; and reassess his impact on the modern imagination and legacy to future generations. These original essays, most first presented by the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the Dublin centenary celebration, are divided into three sections: (1) Thinking through Beckett, (2) Shifting Perspectives, and (3) Echoing Beckett. As repeatedly in his canon, images precede words. The book opens with stills from films of experimental filmmaker Peter Gidal and unpublished excerpts from Beckett's 1936-37 German Travel Diaries, presented by Beckett biographer James Knowlson, with permission from the Beckett estate.
Renowned director and theatre theoretician Herbert Blau follows with his personal Beckett "thinking through." Others in Part I explore Beckett and philosophy (Abbott), the influences of Bergson (Gontarski) and Leibniz (Mori), Beckett and autobiography (Locatelli), and Agamben on post-Holocaust testimony (Jones). Essays in Part II recontextualize Beckett's works in relation to iconography (Moorjani), film theoretician Rudolf Arnheim (Engelberts), Marshall McLuhan (Ben-Zvi), exilic writing (McMullan), Pierre Bourdieu's literary field (Siess), romanticism (Brater), social theorists Adorno andHorkheimer (Degani-Raz), and performance issues (Rodriguez-Gago). Part III relates Beckett's writing to that of Yeats (Okamuro), Paul Auster (Campbell), Caryl Churchill (Diamond), William Saroyan (Bryden), Minoru Betsuyaku and Harold Pinter (Tanaka) and Morton Feldman and Jasper Johns (Laws). Finally, Beckett himself becomes a character in other playwrights' works (Zeifman). Taken together these essays make a clear case for the challenges and rewards of thinking through Beckett in his second century.

This original and innovative study is the first systematic exploration of Racine's theatricality. It is based on a close examination of all Racine's plays and on evidence for performance of them from the seventeenth century to the present day. David Maskell considers, with the help of illustrations, the relationship between verbal and visual effects. He shows how the decor in plays such as Andromaque, Britannicus and Berenice is significant for the action, and indicates the rich, often symbolic implication of stage properties and physical gestures, particularly in Mithridate, Phedre, and Athalie. Racine's usually neglected single comedy, Les Plaideurs, is shown to cast light on the theatrical language of his eleven tragedies. Some familiar topics of tragedy - moral ambiguity, error, and transcendence - emerge in a fresh light, and the concept of the tragic genre is critically examined from the theatrical standpoint. This study challenges many long-established views of Racine and lays the foundation for a reassessment of his role in French drama. It also opens new perspectives on his relationship with dramatists writing in other languages.

Byron's poetic reputation has been established in his comic epic Don Juan and its cognates Beppo and The Vision of Judgment. Poems lying outside this group are still regarded with some uncertainty. This study demonstrates that some of Byron's most deeply held critical and political convictions - but also certain aspects of his experience over which he had comparatively little conscious control - found expression in his historical dramas of 1820-21: Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari. In these plays we find Byron responding with the fullest degree of imaginative intelligence to his work on the management subcommittee at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the background to which is given its most extensive treatment yet; to his involvement with the Italian nationalist movement; to his advocacy of neo-classical dramatic form and above all to his understanding of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's reputation among Romantic critics. In this pioneering study Richard Lansdown sheds fresh critical and biographical light on Byron's contribution to the theatre, which will be of great interest to many studying the Romantics.

If there's a God, which at the moment I DOUBT, I want you to curse him. If there's any justice, I want them - both of them - in a car crash. Her husband's gone and her future isn't bright. Imprisoned in her marital home, Medea can't work, can't sleep and increasingly can't cope. While her child plays, she plots her revenge. This startlingly modern version of Euripides' classic tragedy explores the private fury bubbling under public behaviour and how in today's world a mother, fuelled by anger at her husband's infidelity, might be driven to commit the worst possible crime. The production is written and directed by one of the UK's most exciting and in-demand writers, Mike Bartlett, who has received critical acclaim for his plays including Earthquakes in London; Cock (Olivier Award), a new stage version of Chariots of Fire, and Love Love Love. This programme text coincides with a run at the Headlong Theatre in London from the 27th of September to the 1st of December 2012.

The Methuen Drama Student Edition of Twelve Angry Men is the first critical edition of Reginald Rose's play, providing the play text alongside commentary and notes geared towards student readers. In New York, 1954, a man is dead and the life of another is at stake. A 'guilty' verdict seems a foregone conclusion, but one member of the jury has the will to probe more deeply into the evidence and the courage to confront the ignorance and prejudice of some of his fellow jurors. The conflict that follows is fierce and passionate, cutting straight to the heart of the issues of civil liberties and social justice. Ideal for the student reader, the accompanying pedagogical notes include elements such as an author chronology; plot summary; suggested further reading; explanatory endnotes; and questions for further study. The introduction discusses in detail the play's origins as a 1954 American television play, Rose's re-working of the piece for the stage, and Lumet's 1957 film version, identifying textual variations between these versions and discussing later significant productions. The commentary also situates the play in relation to the genre of courtroom drama, as a milestone in the development of televised drama, and as an engagement with questions of American individualism and democracy. Together, this provides students with an edition that situates the play in its contemporary social and dramatic contexts, while encouraging reflection on its wider thematic implications.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

Theatre of the Book explores the impact of printing on the European theatre, 1480-1880. Far from being marginal to Renaissance dramatists, the printing press played an essential role in the birth of the modern theatre. Looking at playtexts, engravings, actor portraits, notation systems, and theatrical ephemera as part of the broader history of theatrical ideas, this illustrated book offers both a history of European dramatic publication and an examination of the European theatre's continual refashioning of itself in the world of print.

Colin McAllister was born in 1942 in Sao Paulo, Brazil but has lived in St Andrews since 1955. He was educated at the Abbey School, Fort Augustus and at St Andrews University, where he graduated with MA Honours in Political Economy and Geography. For 28 years he taught Economics and related subjects at Dundee College. He was Captain of The New Golf Club at St Andrews in 1999 and President of St Andrews Burns Club from 2005 to 2007. Golf is his main hobby, but other interests include Scottish history, the Gaelic language, economics and politics, good wine and malt whisky, and foreign travel. He published But does it scan? In 2008, Can I Scan? In 2012 and ita s Quite an Uncanny in 2016, More than 100 jokes That Made Me Laugh in 2016 and To Scan or Not To Scan in 2018.