What will happen in England after we have won this war? Bunting! Bunting everywhere! After the bunting has been taken down. They will never take down our bunting! July 1940. After an aerial dog fight, Pilot Officer Jack Absolute flies home to win the heart of his old flame, Lydia Languish. Back on British soil, Jack's advances soon turn to anarchy when the young heiress demands to be loved on her own, very particular, terms. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's classic comedy of manners, The Rivals, is given an uproarious Battle of Britain update by Richard Bean and Oliver Chris. In 2011, Richard Bean became the first playwright to win the Evening Standard Award for Best Play for two plays, The Heretic and One Man, Two Guvnors. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the National Theatre, London, in July 2022.

A new play from the author of Under the Whaleback

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a small time East End hood, now in Brighton to collect GBP6,000 from his fiancee's dad. But Roscoe is really his sister Rachel posing as her own dead brother, who's been killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers. Holed up at The Cricketers' Arms, the permanently ravenous Francis spots the chance of an extra meal ticket and takes a second job with one Stanley Stubbers, who is hiding from the police and waiting to be re-united with Rachel. To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his two guvnors apart. Simple. Based on Carlo Goldoni's classic Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters, in this new English version by prize winning playwright Richard Bean, sex, food and money are high on the agenda.

I want theatre to be sweaty, exciting, unpredictable.... Mike Bradwell is on a mission to revolutionise British theatre. He's sick of fancy plays by dead blokes and wants to tell stories about real people, living real lives. And it doesn't get more real than Hull. In a freezing cold house on Coltman Street, a motley crew of unemployed actors gather to improvise a play with no name, no plot, no budget and no bookings. Richard Bean's (The Hypocrite, One Man, Two Guvnors) hilarious and irreverent comedy takes us back to the 70s and Hull Truck Theatre's origin story. It is a roaring combination of comedy, cabaret, farce and drama. Join us for a celebration of where it all began... This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Hull Truck Theatre in February 2022.

Richard Bean's English version of The Servant of Two Masters is set in Brighton in the 1960s. Centred on the bumbling Francis Henshall, a minder to both Roscoe Crabbe - a local gangster - and Stanley Stubbers - an upper-class criminal. But Roscoe is dead, killed by Stanley Stubbers and being impersonated by his sister Rachel, who is also Stanley's girlfriend, and in Brighton to collect GBP6,000 from Roscoe's fiancee's dad. Chaos unfolds as Francis tries to stop the two 'guvnors' from meeting and everyone else tries to hide their real identities. Richard Bean's award-winning play is a glorious celebration of British comedy: laugh-out-loud satire, songs, slapstick and glittering one-liners. One Man, Two Guvnors opened at the National Theatre in May 2011, before transferring to the West End and embarking on a successful UK tour. It won Best Play in the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2011.

Young Marx is a comedy set in 1850's London, where Karl Marx, is hiding in Dean Street, Soho. Broke and restless, the play portrays the thirty-two-year-old revolutionary as a frothing combination of intellectual brilliance, invective, satiric wit, and child-like emotional illiteracy. Creditors, spies, rival revolutionary factions and prospective seducers of his beautiful wife all circle like vultures. His writing blocked, his marriage dying, his friend Engels in despair at his wasted genius, his only hope is a job on the railway. But there's still no one in the capital who can show you a better night on the piss than Karl Heinrich Marx. Young Marx aims to demystify Karl Marx, and is full of jokes and farce. It was chosen as the first play at the opening of London's Bridge Theatre in 2017, where it played to critical acclaim.

The sixth collection of plays from award-winning playwright Richard Bean, including the world-conquering hit One Man, Two Guvnors, as well as Young Marx, his riotous take on Karl Marx's life in London, which launched London's new Bridge Theatre and The Hypocrite, a historical-farcical romp that lit up Hull's year as City of Culture. One Man, Two Guvnors Based on Carlo Goldoni's classic Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters, sex, food and money are high on the agenda. Winner of the both 2011 Evening Standard Theatre Best New Play & Critic's Circle Best New Play awards. Young Marx Creditors, spies, rival revolutionary factions and prospective seducers of his beautiful wife all circle like vultures. His writing blocked, his marriage dying, his friend Engels in despair at his wasted genius, his only hope is a job on the railway. But there's still no one in the capital who can show you a better night on the piss than Karl Heinrich Marx. The Hypocrite April 1642. Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, is charged by Parliament to secure the arsenal at Hull and deny entry to King Charles I. If only it were that simple. With a Royalist siege outside the city walls and the rebellion of the mob within, Civil War seems inevitable and losing his head more than probable.

"I'm a scientist. I don't 'believe' in anything." The study of climate science is the cool degree at the university where Dr Diane Cassell is a lead academic in Earth Sciences. At odds with the orthodoxy over the causes of climate change, she finds herself increasingly vilified and is forced to ask if the issue is becoming political as well as personal. Could the belief in anthropogenic global warming be the most attractive religion of the 21st century. What evidence do we need before deciding on policy? Winner of the 2011 Evening Standard Theatre Best New Play Award.

A murderous black comedy set in Hull's bleak economy, with too many questions and all the wrong answers. Lee, a soldier returning to Hull from two tours of Afghanistan, joins a losing pub quiz team. What they need is a bit of class, a bit of history of art, and a bit of literature.

Hapless MEP Philip Wardrobe has a busy day ahead of him, balancing his less than irreproachable political career with his attempts to start a family. As he prepares for his girlfriend to fly in from Kettering for an afternoon of fertile frolics, his plan to be voted President of the European Parliament is foiled at every turn by unpredictable colleagues: uncouth Yorkshiremen, irate Turks and amorous Frenchwomen...to say nothing of the mysterious man in the linen cupboard. Door-slamming shenanigans ensue as Philip's political and personal life collide in a Strasbourg hotel suite, with hilarious results.

'Fucking Frogs! My grandfather didn't die in the English Civil War so's half the population of France could come over here and live off the soup!' A riotous journey through four waves of immigration from the 17th century to today. As the French Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews and the Bangladeshis in turn enter the chaotic world of Bethnal Green, each new influx provokes a surge of violent protest over housing, jobs, religion and culture. And the emerging pattern shows that white flight and anxiety over integration is anything but new. Written with scurrilous bravura, Richard Bean's great sweep of a comedy follows a pair of star-crossed lovers amid cutters'mobs, Papists, Jewish anarchists and radical Islamists across four tempestuous centuries. England People Very Nice enjoyed a sell-out run at the National Theatre.

In "Toast" seven men come together to bake enough bread to feed the population of Hull. It's just another Sunday. The ovens are cranked up and running...but there's a spanner in the works which threatens bread production in Hull for good, and life as they know it for the men on the shift. In "Smack Family Robinson" things have changed since Dad set up the family business in the 60s: new products, more competition, and a bigger market. At the end of the day though, it's still all about cash and stock. But this is no ordinary family business - the Robinsons are drug dealers. Why has middle manager Stephen England (Mr England) got up in the night and defecated on the living room carpet? His wife Judith doesn't know, nor does his mother Irene. Only Andy, the gauche youth who regularly turns up uninvited to borrow his power tools, can save him (or destroy him). "Honeymoon Suite" deals with love. How can a union cope with poverty, corruption, his ignorance, her aspiration, an ungrateful daughter, no sons, infidelity with an attractive bloke on an evening class, God knows how many miscarriages and even murder!

In May 1875 Lord Primrose Agar, drunk as a skunk, wagered one of his tenant farmers, Orlando Harrison, that his new border collie pup Jip would outlive the 94 year old Harrison. The prize would be the 82-acre Kilham Wold Farm in East Yorkshire. Thirteen years later, having buried his dog, Agar shook hands with Orlando and conferred on the Harrisons a century of struggle..."Harvest" opens at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2005.

The life of Darrel Ascough, a Hull trawlerman, is played out in three acts in the crew's quarters of a distant water trawler: First, at sixteen, Darrel is a deckie learner on the Kingston Jet. Here he meets Hull's "one man circus" Cassidy, and is introduced to his legacy. On the James Joyce, and as a young but skilled trawlerman, Darrel is the only survivor when the trawler capsizes when heavy with ice. In the final act, on the heritage museum ship the Arctic Kestrel, Darrel meets the confused and rootless youth Pat, and is forced to address the meaning of his legacy and his true heritage. A powerful and moving story of fate, choices and men at work, Under the Whaleback opens at the Royal Court Theatre in August 2002.

Why has middle manager Stephen England got up in the night and defecated on the living room carpet? His wife Judith doesn't know, nor does his mother Irene. Only Andy, the gauche youth who regularly turns up uninvited to borrow his power tools, can save him (or destroy him). Mr England was produced at the Sheffield Crucible, October 2000.

Dion Boucicault, the Irish genius of London theatre in the age of Dickens, wrote the brilliantly funny London Assurance in 1841 and thereby created - in Sir Harcourt and Lady Spanker - two of the great comic roles of the English stage, played at the NT by Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw. This stage revival has been brilliantly adapted by the prolific and award-winning playwright Richard Bean.

Dylan isn't your typical snooker player. He's a vegetarian, for starters. This is the biggest week of his life and everybody wants a piece of him - his ex-con Dad, local gangster Waxy Chuff and the snooker corruption squad. The Nap is a laugh out loud comedy thriller about love, honour and not getting snookered. It centres around Dylan Spokes, a professional snooker player, born and raised in Sheffield. Dylan is preparing for a big match, but not only are his friends and family getting in the way, but he is visited by police investigating match fixing. The Nap is a farce by award-winning playwright, Richard Bean, with plenty of sharp lines, jokes and an array of hilarious characters. The play includes a live snooker match, with comic commentary. It opened at the Sheffield Crucible in 2016 and later on Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Social, racial and sexual schisms render the once paradisiac island into a hotbed of discord and bloody violence. Pitcairn vividly explores the conflict between personal freedoms and public responsibilities. Pitcairn is Richard Bean's brutal telling of the colonisation of the remote island of Pitcairn by Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutineers. The play charts - with salty humour and growing horror - the spiralling descent of the colony from a new Eden of freedom and equality to a brutal dystopia.

Richard Bean's fast and furious new play is an anarchic and foul-mouthed satire about the press, the police and the political establishment. Paige Britain is the ambitious, morally-bankrupt young news editor of The Free Press, a tabloid newspaper locked in a never-ending battle for more readers.

A riotous new comedy from award-winning playwright Richard Bean, author of One Man, Two Guvnors. April 1642. Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, is charged by Parliament to secure the arsenal at Hull and deny entry to King Charles I. If only it were that simple. With a Royalist siege outside the city walls and the rebellion of the mob within, Civil War seems inevitable and losing his head more than probable.

The new collection from multi-award-winning playwright Richard Bean. Contains the plays, Great Britain, The Nap, Pub Quiz is Life, Pitcairn and Kiss Me. Foreword by Sir Nicholas Hytner.

Dylan isn't your typical snooker player. He's a vegetarian, for starters. This is the biggest week of his life and everybody wants a piece of him - his ex-con Dad, local gangster Waxy Chuff and the snooker corruption squad. The Nap is a laugh out loud comedy thriller about love, honour and not getting snookered. It centres around Dylan Spokes, a professional snooker player, born and raised in Sheffield. Dylan is preparing for a big match, but not only are his friends and family getting in the way, but he is visited by police investigating match fixing. The Nap is a farce by award-winning playwright, Richard Bean, with plenty of sharp lines, jokes and an array of hilarious characters. The play includes a live snooker match, with comic commentary. It opened at the Sheffield Crucible in 2016 and later on Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Richard Bean's fast and furious new play is an anarchic and foul-mouthed satire about the press, the police and the political establishment. Paige Britain is the ambitious, morally-bankrupt young news editor of The Free Press, a tabloid newspaper locked in a never-ending battle for more readers.

The new collection from Richard Bean, one of Britain's leading playwrights and the fastest-selling playwright in the history of the West End. This volume features an introduction by Mark Lawson and includes the plays: The Heretic, The Big Fellah and England People Very Nice.

This volume brings together four more plays by the award-winning playwright Richard Bean, including the previously unpublished Up on Roof. Harvest is an epic that sweeps through four generations of a family battling to protect their livlihood. Up on Roof revisits the Hull prison riots of 1976. In the Club explores the life and tribulations of the hapless MEP Philip Wardrobe, balancing his less-than-irreproachable political career with his attempts to start a family. The English Game depicts an amateur London cricket team, gathered on a sunny Sunday to face an ethnically diverse and highly talented squad.