Reid Plays: 1 - Tea in a China Cup, Did You Hear the One About the Irishman . . . ?, Joyriders, The Belle of the Belfast City, My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?, Clowns (Paperback)

Nikolaus Pevsner is best known today for his series of architectural guides - recently updated and reissued - that catalogue the best buildings, public and private, in Britain. Keener students of architecture will also know him as a sometimes controversial champion of Bauhaus modernism. But for 30 years from the mid-1940s he also held sway over a much wider area of our national cultural life through his radio broadcasts, the scripts of which are now gathered into this fascinating volume. In these talks, Pevsner ranged over art and architecture, and, necessarily without any visual aids, made paintings, buildings and sometimes whole cities come alive in the listener's mind's eye. His subjects are varied and though they rarely stray from the canonical there are a few surprises, such as a talk on town planning in New Zealand. They generally cover famous paintings and their painters, great buildings and their architects - but each work that receives his attention has benefited from his imaginative vision, which brings together history, aesthetic appreciation and a deeply humanistic appreciation of the people who created them and the people whose lives they either depicted or affected. He says in his 1955 Reith Lectures, on The Englishness of English Art, that 'most intelligent [museum] visitors ... find that they need history to understand and even to appreciate art', and he fully supports this belief in his talks on Hogarth, Reynolds, Blake and Constable and aspects of English architecture. In the best traditions of the universal educator, he delights rather than intimidates with his scholarship, simultaneously communicating new information to the novice and new ideas to the more advanced scholar of art and architecture. This is not a book to be read straight through at a sitting, but a stimulating collection to be dipped into with pleasure time and again. (Kirkus UK)

A collection of plays by one of Ireland's finest dramatists of the 80s and 90s Tea in a China Cup focuses on the differing experiences of three generations of women in a working-class Belfast Protestant family, a tapestry of tales linked by the central character Beth, torn between the influence of traditions and the rejection of gentility and respectability. Did You Here the One About the Irishman? shows how both nationalists and loyalists are dependent on one another; Joyriders, grew out of the work Reid did with residents at the notorious Davis Flats estate and is structured around the day-to-day activities of four Catholic teenagers on a youth training scheme running at a now-disused textile mill in Belfast and plays on the idea of Britain taking a joy-ride through Ireland; The Belle of Belfast city shows Dolly, a former music-hall star whose bawdy songs and unconventional antics conjure a magical Belfast far removed from that represented by her nephew Jack, a hardline loyalist politician. My Name, Shall I Tell You My name? is "Fierce, poignant...a formidable portrait of intransigent, archaic patriotism" (The Times) and Clowns (the sequel to Joyriders) is a "warmhearted, compassionate play". (The Guardian)

General

Imprint:	Methuen Drama
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Contemporary Dramatists
Release date:	May 1997
First published:	September 1997
Authors:	Christina Reid
Dimensions:	203 x 127 x 22mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Mass Market
Pages:	343
ISBN-13:	978-0-413-71220-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Drama texts, plays > General
LSN:	0-413-71220-6
Barcode:	9780413712202

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