Peepolykus bring their exhilarating combination of verbal slapstick, visual surprise and anarchic comedy to Gustave Flaubert's seminal nineteenth-century masterpiece Madame Bovary. Laugh and cry in equal measure as Emma Bovary chooses the wrong husband. Lose yourself in mesmeric love scenes featuring a procession of devastatingly attractive men. Rail at the fate of women in a patriarchal society, if you will. Prepare yourself for vermin, moustaches, wild animals, lots of French people and a nun. Written for a bijou cast of four playing multiple roles, The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary was a co-production between Peepolykus, Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse, the Nuffield in Southampton, Bristol Old Vic and the Royal & Derngate in Northampton. It premiered at the Everyman in Liverpool in 2016 before touring to all those other places too. Like their tremendously popular Hound of the Baskervilles, Peepolykus's Bovary offers abundant opportunities for comedy and slapstick - plus some massive tragedy - to any theatre company or drama group looking for a loving derailment of a classic novel.

In the second volume of his "Mask: A Release of Acting Resources" David Griffiths provides a detailed and sensitive view of the Japanese Noh theatre: historically, philosophically (with an evaluation of Zeami's treatises) and in respect of the rigorous practicalities of Noh training. The latter is given particular authority and insight because of the access Griffiths had to Noh actors in training and performance. Greatly enhanced by the author's illustrations, this volume gives one of the most accessible introductions to Noh that is available in English. Appended to the descriptive and analytic material is a short play, "The Dove," written by Griffiths (and subsequently professionally performed) described as 'unashamedly' acknowledging its Noh influence. This one woman piece is a sensitive and evocative drama with subtle references to its cultural source. Its potential as an exercise in mask work is excellent.

Series sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available.

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 A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde.

The best known of all Irish plays.

Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy is a classic play from Japan's golden age of puppet theater. Written in the eighteenth century, it tells the tale of Sugawara no Michizane, a wronged scholar-official who, in death, joins the Shinto pantheon as a nurturer of scholarship and calligraphy. The story recounts Sugawara's entanglement with the powerful Fujiwara family, who accuse Sugawara of plotting against the emperor, resulting in his exile and death in 903. After a series of misfortunes befall those who conspired against him, Sugawara's enemies appease his spirit through deification. Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy centers on three archetypical brothers and their wives. Their fates unfold against the intrigues surrounding Sugawara and his foes, which reflect the cultural values of the Edo period woven into a stylized past. This annotated translation by Stanleigh H. Jones Jr. replicates the play's poetic and idiomatic language and its original mix of register while also clarifying the drama's complex story and dialogue for students of Japanese literature and drama. An introduction situates the play within its eighteenth-century context and ninth-century setting and describes the relationship between bunraku puppet theater and kabuki. A unique illustrated appendix delves into the construction of puppets and the art of puppetry.

Uncle Vanya Anton Chekhov One of the four magnificent plays that Chekhov wrote in the last years of his life. First performed in 1897. Regularly revived.

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides' "Medea", "The Children of Heracles", "Andromache", and "Iphigenia among the Taurians", fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles' satyr-drama "The Trackers". New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays. In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

October 31st 1978. Thomond Park, Limerick. The mighty New Zealand All Blacks, oin an Irish tour, take on the none-too-mighty Munster team - and, to everyone's surprise, they lose 12-0. From this piece of Irish sporting history John Breen has fashioned a funny, lively play in which both teams, plus fans, children, relatives and even a dog, are portrayed by a cast of six, with no props and only a half-time change of shirt.

Equality is here - now what? In a supposedly `post-gay' America on the brink of passing marriage equality, a first date at a New York bar starts two men on a fearless, funny and fragmented journey leading up to a historic moment of change. Jordan Seavey's raw and provocative portrait of a love story explodes attitudes, emotions and prejudices that sit at the heart of relationships across the world. This dazzling kaleidoscope of a play asks us all the question - are personal and political choices really all that different?

Darrel is a middle-aged mentally challenged man who lives with his mother. When she dies in her sleep, Darrel does not realize she is gone, and, for ten days, he lives alone. Tandem to Darrel's day to day routine are the adventures of his favorite children's book characters, Honeydog and Little Burp. The newest play from puppeteer Ronnie Burkett who garnered critical acclaim for Provenance.

Another drama from Dora-winning playwright of "The Neighbour's Wife"

Winner 1996 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright; Winner 1996 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright For one week each autumn, Mick Dowd is hired to disinter the bones in certain sections of his local cemetery, to make way for new arrivals. As the time approaches for him to dig up those of his own late wife, strange rumours regarding his involvement in her sudden death seven years ago gradually begin to resurface.

"We need to use our imagination. We need to imagine that change might be possible. That change is possible, however hard or impossible it might seem." In a blend of English, Farsi and fully integrated BSL, three performers tell a story from three perspectives. It is the story of an international meeting. A meeting at which something happened, and in that moment everything changed. Exploring equality and inviting action, Summit delves into ideas of language, rhetoric and how we communicate with each other, over three acts and in three different ways.

Cruel and Tender 'A mordantly knowing modernisation of Sophocles's Trachiniae... The approach here manages to be at once lethally level and capable of surges of anguished feeling... Highly recommended.' Independent Fewer Emergencies 'A triptych of vicious modern fairy tales that brings the nightmare right back and stabs you through the soul.' Guardian The City 'Although this is the most disquieting play in London, there is a curious exhilaration about both the performance and Crimp's confrontation with our perpetual unease.' Guardian Definitely the Bahamas 'A summation of a life lived vicariously, at the margins of other lives, between suffocating suburban walls; and the play is as unflinching as it is unnerving.' The Times Play House 'Play House concerns the volatility and vulnerability of love, as a young couple, Simon and Katrina set up home... Unusually for Crimp, the play both begins and ends with moving declarations of love. Suddenly this usually chilly dramatist seems unexpectedly blessed with a warm heart.' Daily Telegraph In the Republic of Happiness 'Crimp goes so far as to call it "an entertainment in three parts," and it rocks along like a dystopian vaudeville... The actors are imprisoned and liberated at once, their strange between-worlds condition a source of joy, intemperateness and above all a care for our diversion... My favourite play of the year.' What's on Stage

This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection--often tested, but never wholly severed--across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo, and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

I suppose I'm a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad but irresistibly funny' Joe Orton. This volume contains everything that Orton wrote for the theatre, radio and television from his first play in 1964, The Ruffian on the Stair, up to his violent death in 1967 at the age of 34. It includes his major successes: Entertaining Mr Sloane, which 'made more blood boil that any other British play in the last ten years' (The Times); Loot, 'a Freudian nightmare', which sports with superstitions about death - as well as life; his farce masterpiece, What the Butler Saw; The Erpingham Camp, his version of The Bacchae, set in a Butlin's holiday resort; together with his television plays, Funeral Games and The Good and Faithful Servant. The volume includes a revealing introduction by John Lahr, Orton's official biographer."He is the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility" (Observer)

Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremems of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room.

"By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." --Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

"So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." --Time

Brian Merriman wrote The Midnight Court in or around 1780. This play, in English and Irish, imagines his life before he laid pen to paper.

The Penguin Classics debut that inspired a classic film and a current Broadway revival
Reginald Rose's landmark American drama was a critically acclaimed teleplay, and went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, "Twelve Angry Men" holds at its core a deeply patriotic belief in the U.S. legal system. The story's focal point, known only as Juror Eight, is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal biases. Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture of America, at its best and worst, to form.

The plays in this collection reveal in combination the 'frivolous' and 'serious' aspects of Tom Stoppard's talent: his sense of fun, his sense of theatre, his sense of the absurd, and his gifts for parody and satire. The author rounds off his brief introduction, giving the genesis of each piece, with the comment: 'The role of the theatre is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory'. Leading off is The Real Inspector Hound, the ultimate country-house whodunnit; Dirty Linen moves a Whitehall farce to Parliament Square; Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth subverts Shakespeare; and After Magritte explains the inexplicable.