Roche's translations of Amphitryon, Miles Gloriosus, and The Prisoners clearly illustrate how Plautus' writing has withstood the test of time. Includes an analysis of Plautus' approach to comedy and background on the social and political customs of his times.

A heartbreaking tale of orphans, angels, murder and music - dramatised from the Whitbread Award-winning novel set in 18th-century England. In 18th-century Gloucestershire, the evil Otis Gardner preys on unmarried mothers, promising to take their babies (and their money) to Thomas Coram's hospital for foundling children. Instead, he buries the babies and pockets the loot. But Otis's downfall is set in train when his half-witted son Meshak falls in love with a young girl, Melissa, and rescues the unwanted son she has had with a disgraced aristocrat. The child is brought up in Coram's hospital, and proves to have inherited the startling musical gifts of his father - gifts that ultimately bring about his father's redemption and a heartbreaking family reunion. Helen Edmundson's adaptation of Jamila Gavin's award-winning novel, Coram Boy, was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 2005. It won the Time Out Live Award for Best Play. 'A rich and almost Gothic drama' - Philip Pullman

Originally adapted for the stage, Peter Meineck's revised translations achieve a level of fidelity appropriate for classroom use while managing to preserve the wit and energy that led The New Yorker to judge his Clouds The best Greek drama we've ever seen anywhere," and The Times Literary Supplement to describe his Wasps as "Hugely enjoyable and very, very funny. A general Introduction, introductions to the plays, and detailed notes on staging, history, religious practice and myth combine to make this a remarkably useful teaching text.

Being a woman is blood and guts It's intestine Fuck florals and ballgowns It's balls It's livers and kidneys and puke and mucus Ripping and tearing and shredding Red stain on linen bedding It's shedding Jaz is in her second year at drama school. Jaz is tired of performing. Hence her conundrum. But when she stumbles across a piece of forgotten history - her life is changed forever... What does it mean to find yourself? Especially when it seems the world you live in is diametrically set against you doing just that? Set against the sprawling backdrop of urban London across centuries, curious is a frank, funny and moving excavation of the lives of two actresses who are young, Black, queer and trying to find out who they are. It is written and performed by Jasmine Lee-Jones, the winner of Evening Standard Award 2019 and Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright for her play seven methods of killing kylie jenner.

Stephen Ward charts the rise and fall from grace of the man at the centre of the Profumo Scandal. Friend to film stars, spies, models, government ministers and aristocrats, his rise and ultimate disgrace coincided with the increasingly permissive lifestyle of London's elite in the early 1960s. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, with book and lyrics by Christopher Hampton and Don Black, centres on Ward's involvement with the young and beautiful Christine Keeler, which led to one of the biggest political scandals and most famous trials of the twentieth century. Stephen Ward premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in December 2013.

Award Monologues for Women is a collection of fifty-four monologues taken from plays written since 1980 that have been nominated for the Pullitzer Prize, the Tony and the Drama Desk Awards in New York, and The Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards in London. The book provides an excellent range of up-to-date audition pieces, usefully arranged in age groups, and is supplemented with audition tips to improve your acting, and to ensure that the best possible performance.

Motherhood. No one can prepare you for it. No matter how much you tell yourself you can do it - can you? Where's the rush of love? When will sleep again? What if the thing you fear most is also the thing you crave? All you wanted was one night of unbroken sleep, what have you done? Mum is a feverish journey through every parent's worst nightmare. A raw and real exploration of early motherhood from the award-winning writer of Emilia, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Theatre Royal, Plymouth and Soho Theatre, London.

Presents and contextualizes a carefully selected collection of noteworthy equestrian drama. Contains the annotated play scripts for Timour the Tartar by Matthew Lewis, The Battle of Waterloo by J.H. Amherst, Mazeppa by Henry M. Milner, and The Whip by Henry Hamilton and Cecil Raleigh. An online supplement to this book is available to provide readers with additional content relating to this collection.

A darkly comic, smashed-up retelling of Richard III, Shakespeare's classic tale about the lust for power, Teenage Dick reimagines the most famous disabled character of all time as a high-school outsider in junior year: the deepest winter of his discontent. Picked on because of his disability (as well as his sometimes creepily Shakespearean way of speaking), Richard is determined to have his revenge and make his name by becoming president of the senior class. But like all teenagers, and all despots, he is faced with the hardest question of all: is it better to be loved, or feared? 'Retells Shakespeare with a much-needed urgency, providing an arch reminder that the voices of the disabled have often been ignored, terrorised or shouted down from the earliest possibility... Lew's writing neatly blends Shakespearean rhetoric with everyday speech... sharp and highly enjoyable... more plays of this calibre, telling the stories they do, are very much needed and welcome to explore our own ingloriousness' - Broadway World

Well yes and no. It's sexy, but pedestrian. Hieronymus Bosch in Smethwick. Hetty and I found a little alcove with our Sauvignon. Four couples gather in a suburban London home for a night of wine, cheese, and more intimate pleasures. Some are curious newcomers, some are old hands, but one guest takes them all by surprise. Thus an evening full of promise is poised to go beyond anyone's expectations. Terry Johnson's The Sex Party premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, in November 2022.

First published in 1986. This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which our society 'processes' Shakespeare and the purposes for which this seems to be done. The case is made by examining the work of four highly influential critics: A C Bradley, Walter Raleigh, T S Eliot and John Dover Wilson. Terence Hawkes asks whether, beyond the readings to which the plays may be subjected, there lies any final, authoritative or essential meaning to which we can ultimately turn, concluding that jazz music offers the most fruitful model for twentieth-century criticism.

Of course - as you've no doubt guessed - there's a big 'But Then' moment heading this way... It's a sunny, spring day in East London. On a street corner, two teenagers kiss. One of them is Toni. This is her first kiss. It makes her very happy. But someone is watching. Someone who doesn't care about her happiness at all. And they're about to change Toni's life... forever. Philip Ridley's thrilling new play is a startling exploration of identity, memory, love, and the lengths it takes someone to free themselves from the web of their past.

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance provides an in-depth, far-reaching and provocative consideration of how scholars and artists negotiate the theoretical, historical and practical politics of applied performance, both in the academy and beyond. These volumes offer insights from within and beyond the sphere of English-speaking scholarship, curated by regional experts in applied performance. The reader will gain an understanding of some of the dominant preoccupations of performance in specified regions, enhanced by contextual framing. From the dis(h)arming of the human body through dance in Colombia to clowning with dementia in Australia, via challenges to violent nationalism in the Balkans, transgender performance in Pakistan and resistance rap in Kashmir, the essays, interviews and scripts are eloquent testimony to the courage and hope of people who believe in the power of art to renew the human spirit. Students, academics, practitioners, policy-makers, cultural anthropologists and activists will benefit from the opportunities to forge new networks and develop in-depth comparative research offered by this bold, global project.

Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

"A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people."--"Time Out New York"

"Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County" is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."--"New York" magazine

One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, "August: Osage County" is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007.

Tracy Letts is the author of "Killer Joe," "Bug," and "Man from Nebraska," which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where "August: Osage County" premiered.

Trevor Griffiths was born in Manchester in 1935, of Irish and Welsh descent. He has been a writer for the theatre, television and cinema since the late 1960s. His work has been seen throughout the world and has won numerous awards. This title features nine of his plays.

A first-of-its-kind anthology, Beyond The Canon's Plays for Young Activists combines plays, toolkits, and an online guide to empower young people into activism. With award-winning plays from the UK's most revolutionary female writers of colour, as well as bespoke multimedia learning guides, this collection offers young global activists aged 16+, as well as teachers and creatives at any level, the opportunity to diversify their education and enhance their understanding of politically driven plays, world politics and social justice. Unique in how it amplifies these selected award-winning plays by incorporating learning guides that accommodate different learning styles (be they visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinaesthetic), Beyond The Canon dares readers to take a deeper dive into the world of the play, be inspired by the themes and provocations and use the anthology to evolve into the ultimate activist. The plays include: Muhammad Ali and Me by Mojisola Adebayo A Museum in Baghdad by Hannah Khalil Acceptance by Amy Ng With resources like top tips on creating a safe space, practical drama challenges and games, interviews with the writers, research guides and activism test sheets, Beyond The Canon's Plays for Young Activists will spark the imagination of any and all readers, likely inspiring the next Mojisola Adebayo, Hannah Khalil and Amy Ng.

Felix Mitterer's reputation as a European dramatist of the first rank is by now firmly established. With his gift for sketching social milieu in a few salient strokes and creating almost unbearably intense moments of dramatic suspense, he has for over thirty years been riveting the attention of viewers on the suffering of such oppressed groups as the aged (Siberia), the mentally challenged (No Room for Idiots) and the workingmen and women in thrall to corrupt corporations (One Everyman). The two plays offered here, In the Lions' Den and The Panther, fall well within the purview of Mitterer's social concerns, portraying as they do, respectively, the plight of the Jews in the Third Reich and, once again, the aged in contemporary society. Yet they also reveal a deeper and more personal thematic vein having to do with the intimate symbiosis of language and individual identity. In Lions' Den the Jewish protagonist Kirsch affects Tyrolean dialect to create an Aryan persona for survival purposes, in effect corroborating the idealist doctrine, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived, as this or that). You are what you can persuade others you are, and God help you if your powers of persuasion fail you! In The Panther the old man's self-image, his very sense of himself, erodes with the chipping-away of age at his memory of the lines that make up Rilke's immortal Dinggedicht. In both plays the bedrock ordering of experience imposed by language is strained to the breaking point, leaving the protagonists teetering on the brink of the abyss that looms just beyond personal identity. Of his own life the self-effacing Felix Mitterer has said: "Its only unusual aspect is that I became a writer, that I was saved and others weren't". His words allude obliquely to the grinding poverty and backbreaking work he had to endure labouring on the farms of the Tyrol as he grew up. They also convey his solidarity with those "others" who could not make it out of the Alpine ghetto and suggest his deep commitment to make their plight, and that of other oppressed groups, the driving force of his dramatic art. Felix Mitterer has done what all true artists do, transformed his personal demons into angels of art. And in tracing, through that art, the correspondence between his own demons and those of society, he masters them, not only in himself but in the receptive viewer (or reader) as well.

I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one ever seemed to sleep, and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories of their culture and their ancestors and their ongoing lives. Bulgakov taught me to hear something in those stories that I had not yet clearly heard. One could call it, in terms that would soon thereafter gain wide currency, "magical realism." The deadpan mix of the fantastic and the realistic was at the heart of the Vietnamese mythos. It is at the heart of the present zeitgeist. And it was not invented by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as wonderful as his One Hundred Years of Solitude is. Garcia Marquez's landmark work of magical realism was predated by nearly three decades by Bulgakov's brilliant masterpiece of a novel. That summer in Saigon a vodka-swilling, talking black cat, a coven of beautiful naked witches, Pontius Pilate, and a whole cast of benighted writers of Stalinist Moscow and Satan himself all took up permanent residence in my creative unconscious. Their presence, perhaps more than anything else from the realm of literature, has helped shape the work I am most proud of. I'm often asked for a list of favorite authors. Here is my advice. Read Bulgakov. Look around you at the new century. He will show you things you need to see.

'So I thought, since we can't do Europe this summer, why don't the kids and I just do a little Southern History road trip? We're going to drive back home through Mississippi, Louisiana - all those places - experience some of Daddy's heritage.' The Lafayette family gather at their late father's home in Arkansas to bury the hatchet and prepare the former plantation for its Estate Sale. Until, that is, they make a discovery which changes everything. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Appropriate is a gripping play about ghosts and the legacies we are left with, and a wickedly subversive appropriation of the great American family drama. Appropriate premiered Off-Broadway in 2014, and won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. It had its UK premiere at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in August 2019, directed by Ola Ince and featuring Monica Dolan. This edition also features his short play I Promise Never Again to Write Plays About Asians...

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.

So what have you got against gobby women running restaurants? El Barco is the newest tapas restaurant in fashionable Walthamstow Village, and it's Kerry Jackson's pride and joy. Wearing her working-class roots as a badge of honour, Kerry must navigate the local characters in a bid to make the business a success, without losing herself in the process. This biting comedy from April De Angelis premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2022.

How happily married are the happily married? Home, I'm Darling is a dark comedy about sex, cake and the quest to be the perfect 1950s housewife. Judy has Johnny's slippers waiting for him when he arrives home from work, the kitchen's clean, the rooms are aired...yet this is not the 1950s, but a 21st-century 'arrangement' agreed between the two of them. With clothes, furniture and a (faulty) fridge from the 1950s, Judy and Johnny try to 'live the dream', with specific roles and a perfectly ordered life.

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the reality of their future.