This volume of Conor McPherson's collected plays, covering a decade of writing, celebrates a fascination with the uncanny which has led him to be described as 'quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation' (New York Times). In Shining City, a man seeks help from a counsellor, claiming to have seen the ghost of his dead wife. The play, premiered at the Royal Court, London, is 'up there with The Weir, moving, compassionate, ingenious and absolutely gripping' (Daily Telegraph). The Seafarer, premiered at the National Theatre before going on to become a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit, tells the story of an extended Christmas Eve card game, but one played for the highest stakes possible. 'McPherson proves yet again he is both a born yarn-spinner and an acute analyst of the melancholy Irish manhood' (Guardian) Set in 'the big house' in 1820s rural Ireland, The Veil is McPherson's first period play. Seventeen-year-old Hannah is to be married off in order to settle the debts of the crumbling estate. But when Reverend Berkeley arrives, determined to orchestrate a seance, chaos is unleased. 'A cracking fireside tale of haunting and decay' (The Times) The Birds, hauntingly adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier, is 'deliciously chilling, claustrophobic, questioning, frightening; and with a twist' (Irish Independent). It is published here for the first time, as is The Dance of Death, a new version of Strindberg's classic, which premiered at the Trafalgar Studios in London. 'A spectacularly bleak yet curiously bracing drama that often makes you laugh out loud' (Daily Telegraph). Completing the volume is a Foreword by the author.

There are seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles. Three of them form the Theban Plays, which recount the story of Thebes during and after the reign of Oedipus. Here, David Slavitt translates the remaining tragedies - the "other four plays:" Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes. Punchy and entertaining, Slavitt reads Athena's opening line in Ajax as: "I've got my eye on you, Odysseus. Always." By simplifying the Greek and making obscure designations more accessible - specifying the character Athena in place of "aegis-wearing goddess," for example - his translations are highly performable. The Other Four Plays of Sophocles will help students discover underlying thematic connections across plays as well. Praise for David R. Slavitt: "Slavitt's translation is ...lively and sometimes witty." (Times Literary Supplement, reviewing Slavitt's translation of Seneca). "The best version of Ovid's Metamorphoses available in English today...It is readable, alive, at times slangy, and actually catches Ovid's tone." (Philadelphia Inquirer, reviewing Slavitt's translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid). "Slavitt's ability is clearly in evidence...These translations are rendered in lucid, contemporary English, bringing before us the atrocities, horrors, and grotesqueries of Imperial Rome. " (Classical Outlook, reviewing Slavitt's translation of Seneca). "Excellent translations that suit the ear and strengthen the feeble spirit of the time...One will do well to read these hymns, these poems, and find nourishment in them in Slavitt's translations." (Anglican Theological Review, reviewing Slavitt's translation of Hymns of Prudentius).

Kneehigh now finds itself celebrated as one of the UK's most exciting theatre companies. This collection contains the performance texts of four of their highly acclaimed shows: Tristan & Yseult, The Bacchae, The Wooden Frock and The Red Shoes. With forewords from Emma Rice, Tom Morris, Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose, it offers a unique insight into Kneehigh's approach to making theatre, revealing how ascript can emerge from a collaborative devising process.

"Barron paints a wholly plausible picture of teenage insecurity and ambition ... a play that wittily shows how dance can be a source of liberation without ever quelling the tremulous terrors of adolescence." - The Guardian Somewhere in America, a revolution is coming. An army of competitive dancers is ready to take over the world, one routine at a time. With a pre-teen battle for power and perfection raging on and off stage, Dance Nation is a ferocious exploration of youth, ambition and self-discovery. Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and The Relentless Award, Dance Nation is Clare Barron's explosive play about the challenges of being young, and competitive dancing. Published for the first time in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features a brand new introduction by Eboni Booth and Purva Bedi.

It is the Jubilee! Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, 1887. At Tilbury Docks, Rani and Abdul step ashore after the long voyage from India. One has to battle a society who deems her a second class citizen, the other forges an astonishing entanglement with the ageing Queen who finds herself enchanted by stories of an India she rules but has never seen. The Empress uncovers remarkable unknown stories of 19th century Britain, the growth of Indian nationalism and the romantic proclivities of one of our most surprising monarchs.

A Schools Edition of The Slab Boys by Scottish playwright John Byrne, a popular set text for SQA Higher English. A semi-autobiographical work, The Slab Boys is set in the slab room of A.F. Stobo & Co Carpet Manufacturers in Paisley and the action takes place on one day in 1957. It explores themes such as rebellion and conformity, social class and social mobility, youth, deception, and frustrated ambition and achievement. This edition includes: - An introduction by John Byrne, who was a 'slab boy' himself before becoming a playwright and artist - The full playscript - Notes, quotations and questions to improve students' understanding of the play and support study/revision - Tasks and activities that build the skills of analysis and evaluation that students must demonstrate in the exam - Assessment advice for the Critical Reading question paper This is the only single-volume version of The Slab Boys, taken from The Slab Boys Trilogy.

'Welcome. Welcome to Bristol in 1963. Welcome to Waterloo Bridge in 2016. Welcome to a house in May 2017. Welcome to three couples and what might be, what once was and what could have been in 2017. Welcome to a West Indian household in 2018. Welcome to London in 2018. Welcome to the past, present and - crucially - the future.' This anthology brings together six plays, all written or performed since 2017, by six brilliant Black British writers - Travis Alabanza, Firdos Ali, Natasha Gordon, Arinze Kene, Chinonyerem Odimba and debbie tucker green. The plays demonstrate a rich range of settings, forms, styles, locations, scales, contents and concerns - and explore themes including politics and protest, grief and colonisation, relationships and gender. They have been seen on stages including the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Bush and Bristol Old Vic, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in the West End, and on tour of the UK. Selected and introduced by leading theatre director Natalie Ibu, Contemporary Plays by Black British Writers celebrates a multiplicity of stories authored by Black playwrights in the UK over the last decade.

"Its brilliance lies in the way Shinn marries ideological debate to psychological complexity, shedding light, laser-bright and precise, on the way in which political discourse informs and shapes individual experience." The Times Election night in the U.S. and things are looking rosy for the Democratic Party as the likely President-elect, his wife, advisors, and twenty-year-old son John Jnr prepare for victory. When controversial photos of John Jnr begin gathering momentum on the internet, his father's advisors are forced into damage limitation leaving father and son to try and reach an agreement. Christopher Shinn's potent play examines religion, freedom of expression and personal responsibility. It premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in September 2008. This new Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Dominic Cooke.

There was a ruckus at lunch time. It was the best one so far. Nobody knew why they were fighting . . . You actually thought they were going to kill each other. You wanted them to stop. It wasn't funny anymore. Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The (second) best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on in marker pen - unaware of the danger growing around him. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and the police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly breaks the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to keep them safe, and Harri will come face to face with the very real dangers surrounding him. A powerful, unforgettable tale, importantly relevant for young adult readers of today. Stephen Kelman's 2011 Man-Booker-prize-shortlisted novel has been adapted for the stage by Fringe-First-winner Gbolahan Obisesan (Mad About the Boy). The stage adaptation received its world premiere at Bristol Old Vic in a Bristol Old Vic Young Company and the National Youth Theatre co-commission on 7 August 2013, before transferring to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre. Pygmalion (1912) was a world-wide smash hit from the time of its premiere in Vienna 1913 and it has remained popular to this day. Shaw was awarded an Academy Award in 1938 for his screenplay of the film adaptation. It was, of course, later made into the much-loved musical My Fair Lady. Heartbreak House (1917), which was finally performed in 1920 and published in 1921, bares the hallmarks of European modernism and a formal break from Shaw's previous work. A meditation on the war and the resultant decline in European aristocratic culture, it was perhaps staged too soon after the conflict; indeed, it did not have the success of his earlier works, which was likely due to his experimental aesthetics combined with a war-weary audience that sought lighter fare. However, while this contemporary reception was muted, it is now recognised as a modernist masterpiece. Saint Joan (1923) marked Shaw's resurrection and apotheosis. The first major work written of Joan of Arc after her canonization (1920), the play interrogates the origins of European nationalism in the post-war era. Like Pygmalion, it was an immediate world-wide hit and secured Shaw the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Drawing upon the transcripts of Joan's trial, Shaw blended his trademark wit to produce a hybrid genre of comedy and history play. Despite the historical setting, Saint Joan is highly accessible and continues to delight audiences.

Winner of the London Hellenic Prize 2020 The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro gathers together for the first time the three 'Greek' plays of the MacArthur Genius Award-winning Chicanx playwright and performance artist. Based respectively on Sophocles' Electra and Oedipus, and Euripides' Medea, Alfaro's Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, and Mojada transplant ancient themes and problems into the 21st century streets of Los Angeles and New York, in order to give voice to the concerns of the Chicanx and wider Latinx communities. From performances around the world including sold-out runs at New York's Public Theater, these texts are extremely important to those studying classical reception, Greek theatre and Chicanx writers. This unique anthology features definitive editions of all three plays alongside a comprehensive introduction which provides a critical overview of Luis Alfaro's work, accentuating not only the unique nature of these three 'urban' adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy but also the manner in which they address present-day Chicanx and Latinx socio-political realities across the United States. A brief introduction to each play and its overall themes precedes the text of the drama. The anthology concludes with exclusive supplementary material aimed at enhancing understanding of Alfaro's plays: a 'Performance History' timeline outlining the performance history of the plays; an alphabetical 'Glossary' explaining the most common terms in Spanish and Spanglish appearing in each play; and a 'Further Reading' list providing primary and secondary bibliography for each play. The anthology is completed by a new interview with Alfaro which addresses key topics such as Alfaro's engagement with ancient Greek drama and his work with Chicanx communities across the United States, thus providing a critical contextualisation of these critically-acclaimed plays.

'One of the best plays ever written about the First World War' GUARDIAN 'To say that it leaves you emotionally shattered feels like an insult to those bygone souls and the horrors the faced, but quietly shattering it is, all the same' DAILY TELEGRAPH A battalion of 1,000 young men raised in 1914 from volunteers in the Accrington area of East Lancashire go to war. They are destined to see their first real action on 1st July 1916 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, still regarded as the greatest British military disaster with huge loss of life. Not many return to Accrington alive or intact. Whelan's play traces these men's history through individual stories, but his special interest lies in the lives of the women left behind, battling with their own problems, deprived of their relationships with husbands and lovers, undertaking traditionally male roles, and kept in doubt by the misinformation of wartime propaganda. Their moving stories interweave in scenes that are often comic, but which reach a devastating climax as the news of the disastrous battle finally reaches them. Commentary and notes by John Davey.

See? All we need is... a map and... some kind of plan. This overcoat is neutral darling, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik. Just essence of Prole. In Kiev during the Russian Civil War, the Turbin household is sanctuary to a ragtag, close-knit crowd presided over by the beautiful Lena. As her brothers prepare to fight for the White Guard, friends charge in from the riotous streets amidst an atmosphere of heady chaos, quaffing vodka, keeling over, declaiming, taking baths, playing guitar and falling in love. But the new regime is poised and in its brutal triumph lies destruction for the Turbins and their world. And those are the real enemies we face, deep in the shadows. This modern man with no name, no past, no love. This desperate hate-filled man born of loneliness and frustration. This man with nothing to be proud of, nothing he is part of... Andrew Upton's version of Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard premiered at the National Theatre, London, in March 2010.

If you click my face in the corner Yep That's it Then the blue follow button Tap it You're done Welcome hunny Becky wants to be famous. Becky deserves to be famous. Becky has to be famous. When drag artist Becky Biro is told they need a larger following to be considered for international TV hit The Drag Factor, Becky can smell success. She will do whatever it takes to get there, then reap the rewards of her inevitable stardom. From the writer of the multi-award winning Velvet comes an outrageous, fast-paced dark comedy, laced with irreverent humour and cabaret songs. Fame Whore holds a mirror up to the desperate human desire for relevance, and the lengths one may go to get there. This edition was published to coincide with the run at King's Head Theatre in London, in October 2022.

Pollastra and the Origins of Twelfth Night addresses two closely linked and increasingly studied issues: the nature of the relation of Shakespeare's plays to Italian culture, and the technology of modern theater invented in Renaissance Italy. The discovery of forgotten works by Giovanni Lappoli, known as Pollastra, led to publication in Italy in 1993 in a limited edition of the Italian texts with supplemental scholarship by the authors, entitled Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy. One of those texts, the comedy Parthenio, has escaped the attention of theater bibliographers, because it was quickly sold out in its time and only a handful of copies are known to exist today. Yet it played an important part in the birth of Italian Renaissance drama and of modern comedy in general, in that it was the immediate predecessor and source of Gl'Ingannati, arguably the most famous comedy of the Italian Renaissance and certainly the most imitated, translated, adapted all over Europe. The best known of its progeny is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Much has been written in Italy and England about Gl'Ingannati and Shakespeare's debt to it, but nothing at all about Parthenio. This volume provides the first English translation (with the original Italian on facing pages); and presents for an international audience the theatrical scholarship from the 1993 book Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy, augmented with new findings.

Rory Stewart, a thirty year old former British diplomat and soldier of distinction and accomplishment, is posted to serve as governor in a province of the newly liberated Iraq. His job is to help build a new civil society at peace with itself and its neighbours - an ambitious mission, admittedly, but outperforming Saddam should surely not prove too difficult...

The first book-length study devoted to this topic, Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy offers an important contribution to scholarship on the theatre as well as on early modern attitudes in France, specifically on the subject of lying and deception. Unusually for a scholarly work on seventeenth-century theatre, it is particularly alert to plays as performed pieces and not simply printed texts. The study also distinguishes itself by offering original readings of Moliere alongside innovative analyses of other playwrights. The chapters offer fresh insights on well-known plays by Moliere and Pierre Corneille but also invite readers to discover lesser-known works of the time (by writers such as Benserade, Thomas Corneille, Dufresny and Rotrou). Through comparative and sustained close readings, including a linguistic and speech act approach, a historical survey of texts with an analysis of different versions and a study of irony, the reader is shown the manifest ways in which different playwrights incorporate the comedic tropes of lying and scheming, confusion and unmasking. Drawing particular attention to the levels of communicative or mis-communicative exchanges on the character-to-character axis and the character-to-audience axis, this work examines the process whereby characters in the comedies construct narratives designed to trick, misdirect, dazzle, confuse or exploit their interlocutors. In the different incarnations of seducer, parasite, cross-dresser, duplicitous narrator/messenger and deluded mythomaniac, the author underscores the way in which the figure of the liar both entertains and troubles, making it a fascinating subject worthy of detailed investigation.