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"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times) Benefactors conjures the world of the suburbs observed through the lens of post-imperialism; "dazzling.. This prismatic work circumscribes the disillusionment of an era" (New York Times); Balmoral dares to imagine what Britain would be like if it had gone through the Russian revolution in 1917; "a sophisticated drollery, an educated amusement" (New Statesman); Wild Honey is a reworking of Checkov's first play (also known as Platonov) and is shot through with farce, feminism and eroticism.
Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists The Romans in Britain was the play that brought calls to bring back censorship when it was first staged at the National in 1980. It conjures up "an era that is culturally as well as historically remote which is a notoriously difficult task, but Mr Brenton acheives it with great skill and effect...a very good play indeed." In The Thirteenth Night: "He sets the characters of Shakespeare to find the elements in the British character which could transform an Englishman into a Stalin, and closes in on his creation with an overall wit to match his horror" (The Times). The Genius "is teeming with memorable stage pictures, and bristling with Brenton's very best writing: flinty, impassioned, explosive" (Financial Times). In Bloody Poetry "Brenton is doing something markedly ambitious in this phantasmagoric play. He is celebrating the idea of the committed artist who seeks to stir and provoke sullen, defeated bourgeois England. At the same time, with clear-eyed honesty, he shows how difficult it is to upset the moral order" (The Guardian). Greenland is "on the one hand a cry of disillusionment with established political forms, on the other it is full of typically lively Brentonesque satire and lampoons...Brenton's message is a welcome antidote to the madness in which we all now seem to be living and a sharp blast against patriarchy as well as other attendant woes" (City Limits).
Sarah Daniels is "a writer with a natural talent for disturbance" (Observer) Set in the gutting sheds of the slaughterhouse at the Cattle Market in late Victorian Deptford, The Gut Girls shows how the lives of the girls are changed when their work is made illegal - "Regarded as little better than whores by their contemporaries the gut girls are...a boisterous, beer-swilling, strong-minded bunch, handy with a knife both in the gutting shed and outside it, defiantly independent in attitude and scornful of the illusion of male supremacy." Malcolm Hay (Time Out). Beside Herself is the first of three plays in this volume that deal with women and madness - "a dramatic analogue of a contemporary social tragedy which exists on a scale we are only just beginning to comprehend" (Observer); Head-Rot Holiday commissioned by Clean Break theatre company for ex-offenders, portrays the fate of women detained in special hospitals, a euphemism for an institution for the "criminally insane" - "There is a fine, hard humour, as well as compassion, in the way Head-Rot Holdiay examines the contradictions entangling these women's lives"; The Madness of Esmé and Shaz is "A weird and wondrous black comedy." (Spectator)
Onassis portrays the last years of the life of the wealthy shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who, after a notorious affair with Maria Callas, married Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of US President John F. Kennedy, in 1968. Passing By, first performed in New York in 1975, is both a brave and a charming romantic comedy about a love between two men whose hearts pull them together as their lives pull them apart. “One of the most radical plays ever written. Quirky, funny, touching, romantic and revolutionary. It overturned my life. Perhaps it will do the same for others.” Simon Callow The Miser is Moliere's satirical masterpiece about obsession and status endures. Fast, funny and full of energy, this sparkling new version by Martin Sherman is as pertinent today as it was when first written and performed by Moliere in the seventeenth century. Sherman's adaptation received its world premiere at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, on 11 April 2013.
"Lorca is one of the few indisputably great dramatists of the twentieth century" Observer The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín use an old story of the old man married to the young wife to expose the social attitudes of a traditional Spain bound by rigid concepts of decency, reputation and honour. The Puppet Play deploys the puppets' uninhibited and passionate emotions as a direct attack on the 'tedious triviality' of commercial theatre. The Butterfly's Evil Spell explores the themes of love and frustration, while When Five Years Pass is a surrealist play with references to the film Un Chien Andalou [The Andalusian Dog] by Lorca's friend and collaborator, Luis Buñuel.
This second collection of plays by Simon Stephens, winner of the 2005 Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World, perfectly showcases the development of one of the most exciting and impressive theatre talents of recent years. The range of plays in this volume displays a tough sensibility and a courage to confront the more unsettling challenges of our times. One Minute, first produced in 2003 and revived in London in 2008, has an uncomfortable resonance as it follows five characters variously affected by the disappearance of Daisy, an 11-year-old girl, from Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Country Music spotlights four fateful moments in the life of Jamie Carris during and after the prison sentences he has served for glassing one man and for killing another. Motortown, written in response to the War on Terror, is a blistering account of a young soldier's return home from Basra to an England he no longer recognises or connects with. Pornography captures Britain as it crashes from the euphoria and promise of the 2012 Olympics announcement into the devastation of the London bombings of 7/7. The final play, Sea Wall, is a one-act monologue about grief, following the drowning of a young child.
"David Edgar, like Balzac, seems to be the secretary for our times." - The Guardian This selection of David Edgar's dramatic work features three plays: Ecclesiastes, a late 1970s radio play; his acclaimed stage version of Nicholas Nickleby; and Entertaining Strangers, an English left-wing social drama. Ecclesiastes is a radio play that looks at the rise and fall of a "fundamentalist" Christian clergyman in the US. Nicholas Nickleby: "With uncommon audacity Nicholas Nickleby not only takes on Dickens' sprawling novel, it fractures all the petty limitations we have imposed upon the stage as well ... A landmark." - New Statesman In Entertaining Strangers, a community constructs a nativity play: "English left-wing social drama at its sturdiest and finest: human, argumentative, utterly unafraid of human realities, and seething with indignation and compassion." - The Sunday Times
This second volume of Ridley's stage plays confirms him as one of the most imaginative, daring and unique voices currently working in theatre. All four plays collected here resonant with Ridley's trademark themes - East London, storytelling, moments of shocking violence, memories of the past, fantastical monologues, and that strange mix of the barbaric and the beautiful he has made all his own. Vincent River: '... a grieving mother and a traumatized teenager meet as adversaries, rough each other up and eventually bond over a barbaric act of cruelty...Ridley asks questions, lots of them, about how people respond to the loss of innocence in their lives, how they hold onto their sanity in the face of savagery and how they fight to keep the bonds of humanity intact in a mad, mad world.' Variety Mercury Fur: '...depicts a scary, post-apocalyptic London where, in their struggle to survive, a group of youths are reduced to organising parties that cater for the most perverted tastes.' Independent Leaves of Glass: 'There is a different kind of murder going on here: the murder of truth that goes on in all families to a lesser or greater degree. As with nations, a family's history is written by the victors.' Guardian Piranha Heights: 'The extravagance of Ridley's dark vision suggests a dangerously confused society in which individuals seize on random gobbets of semi-digested information and use them to construct their own personal narrative.' The Times
This second collection of Tony Harrison's poetry for the stage contains his adaptations of Molière, Racine and Victor Hugo. Included are the plays The Misanthrope, Phaedra Britannica and The Prince's Plays.The volume contains introductions, written by Tony Harrison, to each of the plays.
'A superbly written play, a funny play, an agonising play. It is, moreover, a play of truth and insight. A play to savour.' Punch on Otherwise Engaged 'Life in the theatre hasn't brought me anything more rewarding than directing Simon Gray's plays.' Harold Pinter Plaintiffs and Defendants Exceptionally good... the play gave such a rending picture of married mess that it was hard to know where to look.' Clive James, Observer 'Simon Gray is the one [TV playwright] whose work I most relish seeing for his acerbic wit, wonderful ironies and above all for his care with our mother tongue.' Dennis Potter
Dinner 'A cracking black comedy that has you laughing uproariously one moment and jumping with shock the next . . . For those with strong stomachs, Dinner offers a delicious feast of comedy and the macabre.' Daily Telegraph Dying for It 'A subversive Russian classic: one that addresses the ultimate question of "why live?"' Guardian 'The play, freely adapted by Moira Buffini, presents a glorious gallery of comic types.' Independent Welcome to Thebes 'It's thrilling. Moira Buffini's strange and daring play is moving, wise, funny, horrifying . . . Full of resonances you weren't expecting, jokes you didn't see coming . . . It raises huge questions with wit.' The Times Handbagged Winner of the 2014 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre 'A phenomenon.' Sunday Telegraph 'Perfectly pitched between the comic and the serious.' Guardian
On Raftery's Hill 'This is a play that howls to be seen; its courage is matched only by its dramatic power.' Sunday Independent Ariel 'An astonishing piece of theatre. Interweaving themes drawn from Irish, Greek and biblical myth, she spins a tale of power that is honest, emotional, dark and true . . . Die to see it.' Irish Examiner Woman and Scarecrow 'Drama doesn't come much richer or stranger than this death-bed lament. Ravishing in its dense, literary language, it is as visceral as it is intellectual. It lingers not only in the ear and brain, but in the imagination and the gut. An extraordinary brew, bittersweet and totally intoxicating.' The Times The Cordelia Dream 'A brave piece and clearly charged with deep feeling. . . This is certainly unsettling territory and Carr boldly goes for it.' Financial Times Marble 'An extraordinary play that lures us in with a promise of the recognisable only to drag us screaming into the soaring, magnificent possibilities of love and the destruction that it wreaks.' Irish Independent
Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, Volume 2 by Elwyn R. Berlekamp,John H. Conway,Richard K. Guy Pdf
In the quarter of a century since three mathematicians and game theorists collaborated to create Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, the book has become the definitive work on the subject of mathematical games. Now carefully revised and broken down into four volumes to accommodate new developments, the Second Edition retains the original's wealth of wit and wisdom. The authors' insightful strategies, blended with their witty and irreverent style, make reading a profitable pleasure. In Volume 2, the authors have a Change of Heart, bending the rules established in Volume 1 to apply them to games such as Cut-cake and Loopy Hackenbush. From the Table of Contents: - If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em! - Hot Bottles Followed by Cold Wars - Games Infinite and Indefinite - Games Eternal--Games Entailed - Survival in the Lost World
This is the second volume of Plays from New River, showcasing a place where gifted writers of plays and screenplays are paid and nurtured to write whatever they most want to write. These three very different plays are among the results. Mark Eisman's Feasting on Cardigans explores with whimsical humor a pair of dedicated exterminators and the emotional effect they have on those lives they touch. M.Z. Ribalow's Tiger in the Tree is an intriguing thriller that as it proceeds becomes about much more than one might assume at the beginning. James McLure's Baseball Game of the Week is a deceptively moving, always funny meditation on progress, memory and baseball.
