"Run. Keep running. You're doing the right thing. Lay low. Head down. Don't look back. Just keep running. And whatever you do, don't tread on the cracks..." Leo's world has been turned upside down. Her parents are gone and her bird-loving uncle is getting too close for comfort. She is only sure of one thing...she must get out. In a desperate bid to find the grandparents she never knew, Leo jumps on a train to Glasgow, penniless and stealing food to survive. A nationwide hunt for her begins. Will she track down her grandparents, or will her uncle get to her first?

The Irish Dramatic Movement gathers together for the first time all of W.B. Yeats's major dramatic criticism for the years 1899-1919, including previously uncollected material. The essays in this collection address many topics, including the turbulent early years of the Abbey Theatre, the controversies over the plays of John Millington Synge, and the relationship between drama and nationalism. Also evident are Yeats's criticisms on numerous plays, playwrights and productions, both Irish and English.

No one in the middle of being in love ever sat down to write a love story. It's only after the belongings are sorted and the shirts returned that the pencils are sharpened and the notebooks opened. So, in a serious way, love stories are never love stories. Love is their inspiration, yes, but the end of love is the reason for their existence. This is a problem. It proposes anti-journeys where we saw only journeys, directs things toward a new negative we hadn't intended. The Flu Season tries to be a love story, anyway. It has a strategy. The play revels in it's ambivalence, lives in fits and starts, and derives a flailing energy from its doubts about itself. But these come at a price, which is paid by the characters in the play. A kind of clarity finally comes. In the end, is the end.

This selection of six contemporary plays explores a wide range of issues ? familial, social, mythological, political ? with women centre stage. The plays are distinct from each other in structure, theme and style, but are bound together by a common thread ? the position and role of women in family, social and political systems. Issues such as sexual abuse, in-law relationships, the trauma of ageing, the struggle for women's empowerment, love and passion, desire and revenge, and dynastic politics are discussed through the varying perspectives of a number of characters, bringing an immediacy and urgency to the subjects under consideration.

What is significant about the plays is that they highlight the manipulation of the English language resulting with the introduction of an ?Indian? syntax. Multilingualism is used to offset the so-called ?westernisation? that has been the by-product of the systematic globalisation of ?third world? countries. While the plays are meant to be staged, they are also very reader-friendly and will be entertaining as well as educative for the general reader.

Judith is on remand suspected of killing her mother. From the moment the police came to question her she has not spoken. Alex, a child psychiatrist with experience of mutism is called in as a last resort to make a psychiatric assessment. He battles against her silence until at last he breaks the dam. The woman speaks directly to another human being for perhaps the first time in her life. An extraordinary story is revealed, and a relationship forged. The Cutting was nominated for the London Fringe Awards (Best First Play) and the London Evening Standard Awards.

'The instant I saw the photograph my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race' Does Rosalind Franklin know how precious her photograph is? In the race to unlock the secret of life it could be the one to hold the key. With rival scientists looking everywhere for the answer, who will be first to see it and more importantly, understand it? Anna Ziegler's extraordinary play looks at the woman who cracked DNA and asks what is sacrificed in the pursuit of science, love and a place in history. Nicole Kidman makes her much anticipated return to the London stage in the role of Rosalind Franklin, the woman who discovered the secret to Life, in the UK premiere of Anna Ziegler's award-winning play.

Professor of Parapsychology, Philip Goodman, is an arch-sceptic with a mission to debunk the paranormal, wherever it occurs. But when he embarks on an investigation of three apparent hauntings - as recounted by a night-watchman, a teenage boy, and a businessman awaiting his first child - Goodman finds himself at the outer limits of rationality, and fast running out of explanations. Ghost Stories first started terrifying audiences at Liverpool Playhouse and the Lyric Hammersmith, London, in 2010, directed by its authors along with Sean Holmes - and has since become a worldwide cult phenomenon, with two West End transfers, productions in China, Australia, Canada and Europe, and an award-winning film adaptation. It was revived at the Lyric in 2019. This official tie-in edition features the complete script for the show, and an exclusive introduction by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, about the origins and development of the play. Jeremy Dyson is an author, musician, screenwriter and one of The League of Gentlemen. Andy Nyman is an actor, writer, director and long-term collaborator of Derren Brown. Jeremy and Andy have been friends - and fellow horror fans - for almost forty years.

A girl sits on a sofa, not knowing what to do with herself. She argues with her mother and envies her older sister. She also longs for her absent father, a seaman. A middle-aged woman paints a portrait of herself as a young girl, sitting on a sofa, but she's beginning to doubt her artistic ability. Still at odds with her sister and her mother and haunted by her dead father, she's unable to shake the continuing presence of the past in her life -

The legend of Faust grew up in the sixteenth century, a time of transition between medieval and modern culture in Germany. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) adopted the story of the wandering conjuror who accepts Mephistopheles's offer of a pact, selling his soul for the devil's greater knowledge; over a period of 60 years he produced one of the greatest dramatic and poetic masterpieces of European literature. David Luke's recent translation, specially commissioned for The World's Classics series, has all the virtues of previous classic translations of Faust, and none of their shortcomings. Cast in rhymed verse, following the original, it preserves the essence of Goethe's meaning without sacrifice to archaism or over-modern idiom. It is as near an `equivalent' rendering of the German as has been achieved. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A chance meeting between two children on the streets of Edinburgh leads to a terrible reckoning, leaving Jenny and Tommy forever bound together by blood and fate.

It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success, and its production history since it was first performed in 1960 has established the work as a landmark in twentieth-century drama. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, whose papers are in Sidcup, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick established the author's individuality with an international audience.

Andy Field, Deborah Pearson and Ira Brand began Forest Fringe as a totally independent, not-for-profit space in the midst of the Edinburgh Festival. Since then they have built a community of artists and playwrights, and are consistently rated as being a festival highlight. This collection collates the best of their work from the past decade and celebrates a remarkable body of work.

'You know...when a structure has lost its essence but retained its shape, the geologists call it: a Pseudomorph. A false shape. That's our marriage.' Mr and Mrs Elliot have imprisoned themselves within a domestic incarceration of marriage, family and society's twitching curtains. Battling through their self-made entrapment for the sake of the kids, they soon begin to destroy each other through an ugly routine of rows, affairs and suicidal blackmail. Written with a controlled irony and an underlying compassion for its tormented characters, Ted Whitehead's bold and unflinching play asks questions about the choices we make to fit in with social conventions - questions that are just as relevant now as they were in 1972.

The Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's debut play is an outrageously funny monologue for a female performer. It premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for several successful runs, followed by a UK tour. It won a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, the Most Promising New Playwright and Best Female Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards, The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer and the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. It received a Special Commendation in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and 'utterly riveting' (Guardian) BBC television series. This edition also features an introduction by the author.

Midsummer's weekend in Edinburgh. It's raining. Bob's a failing car salesman on the fringes of the city's underworld. Helena's a high-powered divorce lawyer with a taste for other people's husbands. She's totally out of his league; he's not her type at all. They absolutely should not sleep together. Which is, of course, why they do. Midsummer is the story of a great lost weekend of bridge-burning, car chases, wedding bust-ups, bondage miscalculations, midnight trysts and self-loathing hangovers. A collaboration between playwright David Greig and singer-songwriter Gordon McIntyre, Midsummer opened at the Traverse Theatre in October 2008 and was revived for an international tour in the summer of 2009.

The tragic story of how Rudyard Kipling sent his son to his death in the First World War. David Haig's acclaimed stageplay was filmed for television in 2007, with Daniel Radcliffe as Jack and the author himself as Kipling. The year is 1913 and war with Germany is imminent. Rudyard Kipling's determination to send his severely short sighted son to war triggers a bitter family conflict which leaves Britain's renowned patriot devastated by the warring of his own greatest passions: his love for children above all his own and his devotion to King and Country.

This is a collection of over 50 speeches for men, taken from plays from the last 20 years. Featured dramatists include Will Eno, Howard Barker, Richard Bean and Abi Morgan. The speeches are arranged according to age suitability - teens, twenties, thirties, etc. - and each monologue is placed in its dramatic context.

Tennessee Williams's evocation of loneliness and lost love, The Glass Menagerie is one of his most powerful and moving plays. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Robert Bray. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed. 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), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), 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 The Glass Menagerie, you might like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself' Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

Oedipus the King * Aias * Philoctetes * Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. In these four tragedies he portrays the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Oedipus the King follows Oedipus, the 'man of sorrow', who has unwittingly chosen to enact his prophesied course by murdering his father and marrying his mother. In Aias, the great warrior confronts the harrowing humiliation inflicted upon him, while Philoctetes sees a once-noble hero nursing his resentment after ten years of marooned isolation. In Oedipus at Colonus the blind Oedipus, who has wandered far and wide as a beggar, finally meets his mysterious death. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

One of Coward's best-loved classics in a single-play edition Coward's wit and precision as a modern dramatist is nowhere better exemplified than in this classic modern plays from 1930. Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne (originally played by Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward), recently divorced from one another five years previously, arrive coincidentally at the same French hotel. They are honeymooning with their respective new spouses. Encountering one another by chance, each is at once horrified and fascinated by the other. Together they leave for Paris and begin a roundelay of quarrels and love intrigues that culminate in their getting back together.

During the turmoil of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Maria Chekhov, Anton's sister, placed many of her late brother's manuscripts and papers in a safety deposit box in Moscow. In 1921 Soviet scholars opened the box, and discovered a play. The title page was missing. The play they found has too many characters, too many themes, too much action. All in all, it's generally dismissed as unstageable. Like life. A new play by Dead Centre, creators of the OBIE / Fringe First winning LIPPY.

In this collection of plays from one of our finest dramatists, Caryl Churchill demonstrates her remarkable ability to find new forms to express profound truths about the world we live in. Complete with a new introduction by the author, this volume contains: Seven Jewish Children (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2009): a short play about seven families wondering how to protect their children, written at the time of the bombing of Gaza by Israel in 2008-9. Love and Information (Royal Court, 2012): a fast-moving kaleidoscope in which more than a hundred characters try to make sense of what they know. Ding Dong the Wicked (Royal Court, 2012): two families on opposite sides of a war, locked in identical hatred. Here We Go (National Theatre, 2015): a play about dying and being dead. Escaped Alone (Royal Court, 2016): three old friends and an unexpected neighbour have tea in a sunny back yard - and face catastrophes. Pigs and Dogs (Royal Court, 2016): a look at how colonialism crushed the fluidity of sexuality in Africa and brought a new intolerance, exemplified in the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014. Also included are three previously unpublished short plays, each written in response to political events: War and Peace Gaza Piece (2014), Tickets are Now On Sale (2015) and Beautiful Eyes (2017).

Sebastian is that kid at high school. He's weird. He smells. He's obsessed with comics, and talks to himself. But after a catastrophic fallout with his only friend, Claryssa, he wakes up with a moth in a jar by his bed, and a calling to save the souls of all humanity. And so begins the Passion of Sebastian: a journey into a terrifying and starless night. By turns dark and shimmering, Moth is a firework of a play. Channelling Donnie Darko and Disco Pigs, it is a fast, funny and heartbreaking story about two young people with nowhere to go. From one of Australia's foremost emerging playwrights.