A white South African boy becomes aware of the meaning of racialism. Set in a tearoom in Port Elizabeth in the 1950s.

`This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you...' In this adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir, Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play. The first production of `The Year of Magical Thinking', starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare, was a runaway hit on Broadway in 2007. The same production is transferring to the National Theatre from April to July 2008.

This exciting new anthology captures the variety and richness of Restoration Drama. It provides annotated and judiciously modernized texts of the following plays: Tuke, The Adventures of Five Hours. (1662); Howard, The Duke of Lerma. (1668); Dryden, The Conquest of Granada. (1670); Buckingman, The Rehearsal. (1671); Wycherley, The Country Wife. (1675); Wycherley, The Plain Dealer. (1676); Etherege, The Man of Mode. (1676); Behn, The Rover. (1677); Dryden,
All for Love. (1677); Lee, Lucius Junicus Brutus. (1680); Otway, Venice Preserved. (1682); Congreve, Love for Love. (1695); Cibber, Love's Last Shift. (1696); Vanburgh, The Relapse. (1696); Congreve, The Way of the World. (1700); Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer. (1706); Farquhar, The Beaux Stratagem. (1707); Centlivre, The Busie Body. (1709)

The volume offers a representative sampling of many of the different types of play put on in the period (sex comedy, moral comedy, heroric drama, Shakespearean adaptation and political history) At the same time, the even distribution of the plays throughout the period encourages students to refelct on the development of the drama over the full fifty years covered by thte anthology. It includes plays by both men and women, as well as dramatic ripostes such as "The Rehearsal" and "The Relapse," which evoke so vividly the adversarial and dialectical world of the theatre in the second half of the seventeenth century.

This is a selection of the best plays of Chikamatsu, one of the greatest Japanese dramatists. Master of the marionette and popular dramas, he had, until the publication of this book, remained unknown to western readers owing to the difficulty of translating the work into English. The introduction provides a comprehensive survey of the history of Japanese drama which will assist the reader in better understanding the plays.

Unique among his works, Oscar Wilde's play "Salome" (1893) was written originally in French. Joseph Donohue's new translation of the horrific New Testament story has recast Wilde's shockingly radical drama in the natural idiomatic language of our own day. Presenting a colloquial and spare American English version of Wilde's consciously stylized French, Donohue's approach gives full value to the Irish author's dark ruminations on evil and perversity in a world on the brink of a new, unsettling Christian dispensation.

The play was first translated into English in 1894 by Wilde's young friend Lord Alfred Douglas, but Wilde was far from pleased with the outcome. And yet Douglas's stilted, inaccurate version has somehow retained a long-standing place on the stage and in the study. Donohue's lucid vernacular transformation of Douglas's safe, thee-and-thou faux-biblical language has the quality of a startling modern-dress remounting of an overly familiar classic play. This new "Salome" is calculated to bring both readers and playgoers into close, disturbing confrontation with one of the most erotic and bloodiest sequences of testamentary lore.

Brilliantly complementing Donohue's unprecedented approach is a set of engravings by a master illustrator of our time. Barry Moser is an artist who speaks the blunt yet fluent language of present-day communication through the penetrating gestural vocabulary of the graphic arts. The resulting combination of words and images directly engages with Wilde's characters and their story, setting a bold new standard for the melding of literary and pictorial excellence. At the same time, it leads readers and audiences alike to rediscover perennially significant themes--of love, death, power, and individuality.

A signed and numbered limited edition is available for $100.00.

Meineck and Woodruff's new annotated translations of Sophocles' Ajax , Women of Trachis , Electra , and Philoctetes combine the same standards of accuracy, concision, clarity, and powerful speech that have so often made their Theban Plays a source of epiphany in the classroom and of understanding in the theatre. Woodruff's Introduction offers a brisk and stimulating discussion of central themes in Sophoclean drama, the life of the playwright, staging issues, and each of the four featured plays.

This is the fourth and final volume of the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster. It contains four plays Webster wrote in collaboration, one - Sir Thomas Wyatt, a historical tragedy based around Lady Jane Grey - as part of a team of five led by Thomas Dekker, two - Westward Ho and Northward Ho, city comedies that prompted Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho - with Thomas Dekker alone, and one - The Fair Maid of the Inn, an Italianate tragicomedy of which Webster wrote the largest share - with John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and John Ford. With the inclusion of these four plays, this Cambridge edition becomes the first complete works of John Webster. The edition preserves the original spelling of the plays, poetry, and prose, and incorporates the most recent editorial scholarship, including information on Webster's share in the collaborative plays, and new critical methods, textual theory, and theatrical analysis.

A hundred short monologs for teenage performers capture the problems and joys of the teenage years.

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you might like Williams's The Glass Menagerie, also published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself ... he is, quite simply, indispensable' Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

In 2012, photographer David Moore returned to the site of his celebrated 1980s colour documentary series Pictures from the Real World. Moore offered the full archive of the project to Lisa and John, two subjects of the original series and asked them to make their own selections. The outcome released many previously unseen photographs and became the acclaimed script and play The Lisa and John Slideshow - a contemporary piece of documentary theatre addressing family memory, loss and the everyday.

English-speaking readers might be surprised to learn that Alain Badiou writes fiction and plays along with his philosophical works and that they are just as important to understanding his larger intellectual project. In Ahmed the Philosopher, Badiou's most entertaining and accessible play, translated into English here for the first time, readers are introduced to Badiou's philosophy through a theatrical tour de force that has met with much success in France. Ahmed the Philosopher presents its comic hero, the "treacherous servant" Ahmed, as a seductively trenchant philosopher even as it casts philosophy itself as a comic performance. The comedy unfolds as a series of lessons, with each "short play" or sketch illuminating a different Badiousian concept. Yet Ahmed does more than illustrate philosophical abstractions; he embodies and vivifies the theatrical and performative aspects of philosophy, mobilizing a comic energy that exposes the emptiness and pomp of the world. Through his example, the audience is moved to a living engagement with philosophy, discovering in it the power to break through the limits of everyday life.

Who killed Mrs Gandhi? We know the name of the assassins, but did they act alone? In this fictional filmscript, Tariq Ali suggests that larger forces were at work, exploiting genuine Sikh grievances to settle their own score with a prime minister who, whatever her faults, was fiercely independent of Washington and safeguarded Indian sovereignty with a zeal inherited from her father. Provocative and suggestive, this script planned as the second of a series was never completed. The Assassination is published here for the first time and completes Ali's trilogy, with The Leopard and The Fox and A Banker For All Seasons.

'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.' This line, from the play, was adopted by Jean Anouilh, to characterize the first production of "Waiting For Godot" at the Theatre de Babylone, in 1953. He went on to predict that the play would, in time, represent the most important premiere to be staged in Paris for forty years. Nobody acquainted with Beckett's masterly black comedy would now question this prescient recognition of a classic of twentieth-century literature.

According to a 2008 NEA report, 2,000 regional theaters in the U.S. were presenting plays and musicals to over 58 million audience members each year. A significant percentage of this work was new plays, often written by playwrights living outside of New York City. Regional Best is a collection of nine of the best of those plays, each of which premiered regionally but with national and international quality.

One of a series designed to provide a new, accessible approach to the works of great poets and playwrights. Each text includes general notes on the text; discussion of themes, issues and context; and suggestions for further reading.

During a brief but brilliant literary career, Irish-born dramatist and statesman Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote cleverly plotted plays that revealed his nimble wit and keen eye for comic situations. 'The Rivals' brims with false identities and romantic entanglements amid a cloud of parental disproval.

Ferdinand forbids his widowed sister to marry again. When he discovers that she is not only married but had a child he is driven mad with fury. The Duchess of Malfi is a study in strong characters, dark deeds and dreadful revenge. This edition includes close textual analysis, notes on different interpretations, interviews with actors and directors and a selection of critical scenes.

The old songs will have to change.
No more hymns to our faithlessness and deceit.
Apollo, god of song, lord of the lyre,
never passed on the flame of poetry to us.
But if we had that voice, what songs
we'd sing of men's failings, and their blame. History is made by women, just as much as men.
Medea has been betrayed. Her husband, Jason, has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible.
Euripides' devastating tragedy is shockingly modern in the sharp psychological exploration of the characters and the gripping interactions between them. Award-winning poet Robin Robertson has captured both the vitality of Euripides' drama and the beauty of his phrasing, reinvigorating this masterpiece for the twenty-first century.

When Dr Stockmann discovers the town's famous spa waters are poisoned, she expects to be treated as a hero for averting an environmental catastrophe. Instead, she's accused by her brother the mayor of threatening the town's livelihood. Public and media opinion divides and the community splits into factions. Tackling fake news, whistle-blowers and the corruption of power, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's contemporary take on Henrik Ibsen's classic premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse in September 2019.

From Lorca's prologue to a puppet play: 'This is not the first time that I, the drunken puppet who marries Dona Rosita, leaves the hand of Federico Garcia Lorca on the stage, where I live and never die. The first time was in the house of this poet- remember that, Federico? It was spring in Granada, and the drawing rooom of your house was full of children who were saying: ' the puppets are flesh and bone, so how come they remain children and never grow up?' The famous Manuel de Falla was at the piano and there performed for the first time in Spain Stravinsky's Histoire d'un soldat...' Collected for the first time in a single volume, Federico Garcia Lorca's Four Puppet Plays, A Play Without a Title, the Divan Poems; Other Poems, Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces represent the purest examples of the poet's genius and range.

'Oxford Student Texts' offer an accessible route into the study of texts for A level including line-by-line notes, and detailed sections covering key themes, issues, and contexts. This edition focuses on 'Edward II' by Christopher Marlowe.