This series contains what no other study guides can offer - extensive first-hand interviews with the playwrights and their closest collaborators on all of their major work, put together by top academics especially for the modern student market. As well as invaluable synopses, biographical essays and chronologies, these guides allow the student much closer to the playwright than ever before! In About Friel, teacher and playwright Tony Coult has selected an extensive and stimulating range of documents and interview material that explores Friel's life, work and the experiences of his collaborators and fellow artists who put that work on stage, including Patrick Mason, Connall Morrison, Joe Dowling and actors Catherine Byrne and Mark Lambert. If you want to read just one book on Brian Friel and the titanic power of his work, this is it.

"Welfare State International are brilliant at making an audience of strangers into a community" (Guardian)

Since its foundation by John Fox in 1968, Welfare State International has developed a unique form of celebratory theatre that reaches popular audiences through remarkable combinations of archetypal and contemporary imagery. This handbook is a guide to the basic techniques of the company's work - the making of processions; large scale puppets and sculptures; fixed structures; fire and ice technology; shadow puppets; processional theatre and dance music - set in a context that explains the thinking behind the work, and describes some past Welfare State International events. This is first and foremost a practical book rather than an academic treatise.

"A new play by one of Britain's greatest playwrights is an event...the severity and seriousness of his message is delivered with extraordinary directness" (Carole Woddis, Times Educational Supplement) On a seemingly ordinary day the extraordinary happens. As a student prepares for the first day of exams he meets someone from the past who confronts him with an impossible dilemma. It's a life or death situation. Can he use his imagination to stop the most horrific events from taking place? This play was toured to British schools during 1995 by Big Brum, the Birmingham theatre company. Notes and commentary on the production have been written by Tony Coult.Edward Bond "is one of the two or three major playwrights - and arguably the only one - to emerge since the fifties" (Observer)