Despite the legacy of his eponymous award, Alfred Fagon's stage works have often been forgotten due to them not being available. This anthology of selected plays brings together his shorter works for the first time into one volume that expands his legacy and confirms his place as one of Britain's key writing talents of the twentieth century. Originally an actor, Fagon's writing for the stage, film and television grew throughout the early 1970s, before his breakaway hit The Death of A Black Man was produced at the Hampstead Theatre in 1975. Now one of British theatre's most well-known names, Fagon's legacy is secured due in no small part to the commemorative award in his honour that was established following his death in 1986, to recognise Black British playwrights from the Caribbean, resident in the United Kingdom. Brought together with a critical introduction from Dawn Walton OBE, this collection also includes a reflection and response from a former winner of the Alfred Fagon award, Juliet Gilkes Romero. The plays include: A Day in the Bristol Air Raid Shelter Adventure Inside Thirteen Four Hundred Pounds No Soldiers in St Paul's Shakespeare Country Small World Weekend Lovers

Aristophanes is widely credited with having elevated the classical art of comedy to the level of legitimacy and recognition that only tragedy had hitherto achieved, and producing some of the most intriguing works of literature to survive from classical Greece in the process. Among them, Frogs has a unique appeal; written and performed in 405 BCE, the comedy won first prize in that year's Lenaea festival competition and was re-performed soon thereafter--a rare occurrence for comedies at the time. Frogs has been admired and quoted by readers and critics ever since, a testament to its timeless appeal; it remains among the most approachable of Aristophanes' plays, as well as perhaps the richest of all in insights it provides into ancient Greek cultural attitudes and values.
Mark Griffith's study of the Frogs is the first single book to offer a reliable and sophisticated account of this play in light of modern notions of culture, performance, democracy, religion, and aesthetics. After placing the work in its original historical, cultural, and biographical context, Griffith goes on to underscore the originality of Frogs in relation to parallel developments in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, among others. He highlights the play's unique portrayal of the figure of Dionysus, the Eleusinian mystery cult, and the question of life after death. This title provides not only a detailed analysis of the play and a concise account of its reception, but also a succinct introduction to ancient Greek comedy, exploring the extraordinary range of theatrical conventions, moral and aesthetic assumptions, and religious beliefs that underlie the action of Aristophanes' play. The book provides an invaluable companion to Aristophanes and the theater of classical Greece for students and general readers alike.

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Arthur Miller provides the essential guide to Miller's most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on five of Miller's plays: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons and Broken Glass. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers want a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Miller's artistry. A chronology of Miller's life and work helps to situate his oeuvre in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of his writing, its recurrent themes and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: the contextthemescharactersstructure and languagethe play in production (both on stage and screen adaptations)questions for studynotes on words and phrases in the text The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Miller's work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Miller's greatest plays.

This study considers parallel issues in revenge tragedies of the early seventeenth-century and violent cinema of the last thirty years. It offers a series of provocative explorations of death, revenge and justice, and gender and violence. What happens when we connect The White Devil with Basic Instinct ? The Changeling or Titus Andronicus with Straw Dogs ? Doctor Faustus with Se7en ? Taxi Driver with The Spanish Tragedy ? Appealing to those with an interest in either drama or film, written in an engaging style, the book also reconsiders the high /popular culture divide, and reflects on the enduring significance of the revenge motif in Western culture over the past four hundred years, particularly in the post 9/11 context.

This book takes Roland Barthes's famous proclamation of 'The Death of the Author' as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of 'the author' as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of 'authorial death' by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

A new study of Shakespeare s life and times, which illuminates our understanding and appreciation of his works. * Combines an accessible fully historicised treatment of both the life and the plays, suited to both undergraduate and popular audiences * Looks at 24 of the most significant plays and the sonnets through the lens of various aspects of Shakespeare s life and historical environment * Addresses four of the most significant issues that shaped Shakespeare s career: education, religion, social status, and theatre * Examines theatre as an institution and the literary environment of early modern London * Explains and dispatches conspiracy theories about authorship

Twenty years after Tony Kushner's influential Angels in America seemed to declare a revitalized potency for the popular political play, there is a "No Politics" prejudice undermining US production and writing. This book explores the largely unrecognized cultural patterns that discourage political playwriting on the contemporary American stage.

Besides essays on such individual dramatists as Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, David Williamson, Louis Nowra, Athol Fugard, George Walker, Sharon Pollock and Judith Thompson, there are surveys of the dramatic literature and developments in the theatre in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica and Trinidad. Canadian women dramatists and the new radical South African theatre are also among the topics. Bruce King's introduction discusses the comparative development of Commonwealth drama since the late 1940s.

Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group - which includes Arabs, Armenians, Iranians, Jews, and Turks - and religions that include the Baha'i faith, Christianity, Chaldean, Druze, Ishik Alevism, Judaism, Islam, Mandaeism, Samaratin, Shabakism, Yazidi, and Zoroastrianism - the rich and paradoxical nature of the term 'Middle Eastern' is interrogated through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora. Featuring a clear introduction and examination of the context and the various push and pull factors that have contributed to the mass migrations to North America - including the so-called "Great Migration" of 1890-1915, the Armenian Genocide, the European Holocaust, the two world wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and other social and political conflicts. With chapters devoted to Arab American, Israeli American, Iranian American and Turkish American theatre, Middle Eastern American Theatre traces the history and examines the work of key artists and directors including Heather Raffo, Yussef El Guindi, Jamil Khoury, Mona Mansour, Danny Bryck, Ken Kaissar, Ari Roth, Torange Yeghiazarian, Reza Abdoh, Sedef Ecer, Torange Yeghiazarian, of Golden Thread Productions, and Jamil Khoury, of Silk Road Rising. The volume provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of millions of Middle Eastern Americans, and how they have contributed to American theatre today.

This well-illustrated work is the first attempt to bridge the gap between several specialized discourses concerning Japanese theatre. Central are problems of scholarly and practical reception of Japanese theatre forms in the West.
The essays by a careful selection of internationally well-reputed scholars range widely through Japanese theatre, from the ancient to the postmodern, or, one might say, from "kagura to "angura. It deals with reception of Japanese theatre in the West, the treatment of the body in stage art and drama, Western influence, the impact of Japanese theatre practice and theory upon the actor's training, and stage directing in the West. Readers will come across a wide variety of intriguing topics, such as lion dances, "kabuki, "nth, folk theatre, "taishu engeki, and several important modern playwrights, etc.
This book truly promises to intensify future dialogue between the many disciplines concerned with Japanese theatre.

This title examines the representation of the body in Irish theatre alongside the specific circumstances within which Irish theatre is performed, incorporating issues of gender and embodiment, and the performance of Irishness and tradition. The author contextualizes the body in Irish theatre, and includes in-depth analysis of five key productions.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie's oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema. Beyzaie's work reformulates indigenous artistic and ritual forms and cultural narratives in plays and films whose emancipatory aesthetics have influenced several generations of writers, playwrights, and filmmakers. This book examines the origins and development of what the author identifies as Beyzaie's unique sense of creativity, using an interdisciplinary method of semiotic and cultural analysis to identify its manifestations in Beyzaie's films and plays of the 1960 and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaie's early works, such as Downpour and Uncle Moustache, and how they engage with neglected aspects of Iranian culture to challenge mainstream approaches to writing and directing plays and films. In this way, the author argues, Beyzaie's work questions notions of being and belonging, by subverting exclusionist discourses on art, politics, society, culture, self and other, personal and collective identity, gender relations, intellectuals, heroes and villains, and children.

"Dukore's style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic." - Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001). "This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century." - - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, Ireland A fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against censorship - of his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others - he sometimes won but usually lost. We forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called "disgusting," "immoral", and "degenerate." Yet it took over three decades and a world war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs Warren's Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.

Seneca's Oedipus is a work of exceptional historical and dramatic interest. It is the only surviving ancient Roman play on one of the most important and enduring myths of European intellectual history. It is poetically experimental, intellectually complex, and theatrically spectacular; its themes include the psychology of guilt, fear and reason, the ethics and limits of power, the order of fate and history, and the nature of tragic theatre. The impact of Seneca's Oedipus on the European dramatic tradition has been immense. This is the first full-scale critical edition with commentary to appear in English. It aims to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate it firmly in its historical and theatrical context and, since it is especially attentive to the play's reception, in the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. The verse translation is designed for both performance and serious study.

Born in the Southside of Chicago in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry and her family moved to a large house in a white neighborhood in 1938. In order to live there, her father had to fight a civil rights case in the Supreme Court against segregationists. Her experiences with racial discrimination fueled her strong commitment to social justice and inspired her works. In 1959, her first-produced play, "A Raisin in the Sun," met the enthusiastic praise of Broadway critics and audiences alike. It was the first and longest running play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. When it won the New York Drama Circle Award for the best new drama that year, Hansberry became the first black woman and the youngest recipient to earn that honor. She died just a few years later, in 1965, without ever fully realizing her potential. This reference book is a guide to her career.

The volume begins with a chronology that recounts the major events in Hansberry's brief but influential life. Entries are then listed for her plays, including "A Raisin in the Sun"(1959), "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's WindoW" (1964), "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" (1969), "Les Blancs" (1970), "The Drinking Gourd" (1972), "What Use Are Flowers" (1972), and the unfinished "Toussaint" (1986). Each entry includes a plot summary, critical commentary, and production information, when available. An annotated bibliography of works by and about Hansberry, along with a list of unpublished material and archival sources, complete the volume.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan is best known as the author of two of the English stage's most popular comedies, The Rivals and The School for Scandal. In his own lifetime, however, Sheridan was as renowned a politician as he was a playwright, and during a parliamentary career that spanned thirty-two years - the large majority of which he spent in opposition - he was an advocate of reform, a supporter of the French Revolution and of Irish independence, and a fierce critic of the government's curtailment of civil liberties. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, from previously unpublished manuscript materials to political pamphlets and satirical cartoons, Theatres of Opposition rehabilitates this too often forgotten figure, and offers the first detailed examination of the complex simultaneity and interconnectedness of Sheridan's theatrical and political practices. Moreover, by tracing the artistic and professional trajectory of Sheridan as a playwright, radical parliamentarian, celebrated orator, and playhouse manager, this book sheds important new light on the overlap between theatrical and political cultures in London during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Sheridan, Taylor contends, provides a prism through which we can revise our understanding of the ways in which the sites of power and performance habitually bled into one another at this time. Excavating a theatrical politics as precise as it is problematic, Theatres of Opposition speaks to a spectrum of interests, from theatre and political histories to the studies of oratory and visual culture.

This book examines the various ways in which national theatres have formed and evolved over time, and the different functions they have acquired depending on the nature of the political regimes and cultural circumstances in which they have been situated. It also highlights the difficulties these institutions encounter today, in an environment where nationalism and national identity are increasingly contested by global, transnational, regional, pluralist and local agendas, and where economic forces create conflicting demands in a competitive marketplace.

This exciting book uniquely combines interviews with scholars and practitioners in theatre studies to look at what most people feel is a pivotal moment of British theatre--the 1990s. Featuring interviews with key names in the field (including Max Stafford-Clark, Mark Ravenhill, Michael Billington, Dan Rebellato and Aleks Sierz), and with a particular focus on "in-yer-face theatre," this volume will be essential reading for all students and scholars of contemporary British theatre, as well as theatregoers and practitioners.

Though better known for his poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote seven important plays between 1926 and 1958, of which Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949) may be most produced. Posthumously, he won Tony Awards in 1983 for the musical adaptation of his poetry in the Broadway production of Cats. He was at the forefront of a mid-twentieth-century revival of the genre of verse drama and also wrote a considerable body of dramatic criticism. Notwithstanding the hundreds of critical sources annotated in this bibliography, the Eliot industry has neglected the plays in recent years, producing few important studies on par with those on the poetry. This new sourcebook surveys the entire dramaturgical and critical discourse surrounding Eliot's plays. A separate chapter for each play provides characters, synopsis, detailed production history, critical overview of both performance reviews and scholarly response, textual notes and influences, and publishing history. The comprehensive bibliography is divided into sections for primary works, including Eliot's plays and essays on drama plus interviews and archival materials, and secondary sources, including scholarly and review criticism in general and of single plays. Also featured are a chronology of major career events, an introductory analysis, and an appendix of additional performance adaptations. Two other appendixes offer chronological access to all secondary sources and succinct data on major productions and their credits. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, this exhaustive compendium makes information and resources immediately accessible to anyone doing research on Eliot or modern British and American drama.

In New Dramaturgies: Strategies and Exercises for 21st Century Playwriting, Mark Bly offers a new playwriting book with nine unique play-generating exercises. These exercises offer dramaturgical strategies and tools for confronting and overcoming obstacles that all playwrights face. Each of the chapters features lively commentary and participation from Bly's former students. They are now acclaimed writers and producers for media such as House of Cards, Weeds, Friday Night Lights, Warrior, and The Affair, and their plays appear onstage in major venues such as the Roundabout Theatre, Yale Rep, and the Royal National Theatre. They share thoughts about their original response to an exercise and why it continues to have a major impact on their writing and mentoring today. Each chapter concludes with their original, inventive, and provocative scene generated in response to Bly's exercise, providing a vivid real-life example of what the exercises can create. Suitable for both students of playwriting and screenwriting, as well as professionals in the field, New Dramaturgies gives readers a rare combination of practical provocation and creative discussion.

Love and marriage are the concerns of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Lucentio's marriage to Bianca is prompted by his idealized love of an apparently ideal woman. Petruchio's wooing of Katherine, however, is free of idealism. Petruchio takes money from Bianca's suitors to woo her, since Katherine must marry before her sister by her father's decree; he also arranges the dowry with her father. Petruchio is then ready to marry Katherine, even against her will. Katherine, the shrew of the play's title, certainly acts much changed. But have she and Petruchio learned to love each other? Or is the marriage based on terror and deception? The authoritative edition of The Taming of the Shrew from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes: -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Newly revised explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play's famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books -An up-to-date annotated guide to further reading Essay by Karen Newman The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.

RUMOUR. Open your ears; for which of you will stop The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth. Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace while covert emnity, Under the smile of safety, wounds the world; And who but Rumour, who but only I, Make fearful musters and prepar'd defence, Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief, Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war, And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop

This is the third and final volume of plays representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a novelist but, like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dramatic off stage.
This volume presents nine plays from the final and most controversial years of his theatre career. The first, Don Quixote in England, is a ballad opera homage to Quixotic idealism played out against rustic English opportunism. Two other plays, including the long-running favourite The VirginUnmask'd, were written as star vehicles for Fielding's brilliant colleague Catherine Clive. The Universal Gallant is another of Fielding's ventures in serious social comedy, but the heart of the volume, as of this concluding period of Fielding's dramatic career, is the group of audacious satirical plays he wrote when he was running his own makeshift company at the Little Haymarket Theatre, including Pasquin and The Historical Register. Audiences flocked to these productions to see the cultural and political life of the moment ridiculed in Aristophanic explicitness, notoriously in one case (Eurydice Hiss'd) including a mocking stage caricature of the prime minister himself. That unamused minister, Sir Robert Walpole, shortly after saw through the 1737 Licensing Act which put an end to unsanctioned playhouses and plays, and to Fielding's own career in theatre.
The plays are given in critical unmodernized texts based on careful collation of the original editions, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception. All music is included, with appendices giving complete accounts of textual variation and bibliographic history for each play.

I have to believe in the institutions we trust to be fair, and functional. Whether that be the judiciary, the police, the media ... That they should all be able to resist the temptations of a more entertaining lie, over a less extraordinary truth. April 2003. Army Major Charles Ingram, his wife and coughing accomplice are convicted for cheating on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The evidence is damning. The nation is gripped by the sheer audacity of the plot to snatch the GBP1,000,000 jackpot. But was he really guilty? It's time for you to decide. Question everything you think you know in James Graham's provocative new play. Olivier Award-nominee James Graham returns with a sharp, fictional imagination of one of the most famous quiz show controversies to date. The production premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre and this edition was published this edition was published to coincide with the West End opening at the Noeel Coward Theatre in April 2018.