METHUEN DRAMA

(P/B) WRITING FOR STAGE AND SCREEN
"This book does what no other playwriting book in my experience has done, it offers a new way of seeing and conceiving how theatre makes meaning and carries emotional impact in performance." Suzan Zeder, Professor Emerita and former Head Of Playwriting at University of Texas at Austin, USA Combining a step-by-step analysis of the technique of writing for stage and screen with how the mystery, poetry and emotional momentum is achieved for the audience, Sherry Kramer offers an empowering, original guide for emerging and established writers. ...
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(P/B) EDUCATING RITA
- "Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is 'simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending'". (Sunday Times) - "Like Roots and Pygmalion... a touching play about the melancholic ways education often pulls people apart instead of bringing them together". (Guardian) - "Mr Russell has taken a look at two segments of English society and engineered a collision that is as full of regret as it is of promise...
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(P/B) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and the capital cities. And every prime number up to 7507. Christopher, fifteen years old, stands beside Mrs Shears's dead dog. It has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight, and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain and is exceptional at maths, but he is ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventu...
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(P/B) THREE SISTERS
Chekhov's iconic characters are relocated to Nigeria in this bold new adaptation. Owerri, 1967, on the brink of the Biafran Civil War. Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo are grieving the loss of their father. Months before, two ruthless military coups plunged the country into chaos. Fuelled by foreign intervention, the conflict encroaches on their provincial village, and the sisters long to return to their former home in Lagos. Following his smash-hit Barber Shop Chronicles, Inua Ellams returns to the National Theatre with this heartbreaking retelli...
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(P/B) 4.48 PSYCHOSIS
4.48 Psychosis was written throughout the autumn and winter of 1998-99 as Kane battled with one of her recurrent bouts of depression. On February 20, 1999, aged 28, the playwright committed suicide. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE
Set in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, The Beauty of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain, lonely woman in her early fortied, and Mag, her manipulative ageing mother, whose interference in Maureen's first and possibly final chance of a loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that leads inexorably towards the play's terrifying denouement. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth...
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(P/B) RAVENHILL: PLAYS 1
"Ravenhill has more to say, and says it more refreshingly and wittily, than any other playwright of his generation" Time Out "There are few stage authors writing more interestingly than Mark Ravenhill ... He is - it is now yet more evident - a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual sensationalism." - Financial Times Shopping and Fucking: "is a darkly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings ... a real coup de theatre" - Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard Faust: "...an...
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AN ACTOR'S HANDBOOK
Here in concise form is what Stanislavski said about acting, alphabetically arranged to aid students, professionals and laymen interested in stage craft. These collected short statements on a variety of subjects cannot replace the full expression of Stanislavski’s ideas and discoveries in his other books, but they will serve to refresh the reader’s memory and pinpoint what Stanislavski has to offer inquiring minds both in and out of the theatre. (AΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΠΑΡΟΥΣΙΑΣΗ ΣΤΟ ΟΠΙΣΘΟΦΥΛΛΟ ΤΟΥ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΥ)...
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(P/B) A DOLL'S HOUSE
The slamming of the front door at the end of A Doll's House shatters the romantic masquerade of the Helmers' marriage. In their stultifying and infantilised relationship, Nora and Torvald have deceived themselves and each other both consciously and subconsciously, until Nora acknowledges the need for individual freedom. A revised student edition of classic set text: A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of theatrical craft which, for the first time portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle class marriage on stage. The play usher...
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(P/B) CLOSER
Love and sex are like politics: it's not what you say that matters, still less what you mean, but what you do. Patrick Marber understands this perfectly, and in Closer he has written one of the best plays of sexual politics in the language: it is right up there with Williams' Streetcar, Mamet's Oleanna, Albee's Virginia Woolf, Pinter's Old Times and Hare's Skylight.' (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) HEDDA GABLER
Too frightened of scandal to become involved with a brilliant writer, Hedda Gabler opts instead for a conventional but loveless marriage. But, when her first love returns with a masterpiece that might threaten her husband's career, Hedda decides to take drastic and fatal action. Universally condemned in 1890 when it was written, Hedda Gabler has subsequently become one of Ibsen's most performed and studied plays. Blending comedy and tragedy, Ibsen probes the thwarted aspirations and hidden anxieties of his characters against a backdrop of ...
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(P/B) Educating Rita
'One way of describing Educating Rita would be to say that it was about the meaning of education ... Another would be to say that it was about the meaning of life. A third, that it is a cross between Pygmailion and Lucky Jim. A fourth, that it is simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending.' Sunday Times This new student edition includes an introduction covering the play's context; chronology; dramatic devices; critical reception; produ...
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(P/B) A RAISIN IN THE SUN
A Raisin in the Sun is a classic American play: a groundbreaking 1950s civil rights drama and has a strong claim to be the greatest play of the black American experience. Deeply committed to the black struggle for equality and human rights, Lorraine Hansberry's brilliant career as a writer was cut short by her death when she was only 34. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Hansberry was the youngest and the first black writer to receive ...
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(P/B) MODERN TRAGEDY
What distinguishes modern tragedy from other forms of drama? How does it relate to contemporary political and social conditions? To what ends have artists employed the tragic form in different locations during the 20th century? Partly motivated by the urgency of our current situation in an age of ecocidal crisis, Modern Tragedy encompasses a variety of drama from throughout the 20th century. Beginning with John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1904), which it argues demonstrates how environmental awareness might be expressed through t...
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(H/B) AFFAIR OF THE HEART
A book of selected theatre reviews from 1992 to 2020 from one of the foremost authorities on British theatre. Each chapter starts with a brief commentary on the developments of that era and the social, political and cultural context within which British theatre was being produced. Key obituaries and letters in response to reviews written are also included, providing a rich collection of curated archival material. Following on from his first collection, One Night Stands, Michael Billington's chronicle offers a rich, authoritative insight i...
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(P/B) PLAYS 1
Duck Variations: "A brilliant little play... about two old men sitting on a park bench discussing ducks" (Guardian); Sexual Perversity in Chicago, bar-room banter and sexual exploits in Mamet's home town "sweet sad understanding and utterly believable" (Chicago Daily News); Squirrels is a sequence of philosophising between a younger writer, an older writer and a cleaning lady which "memorably captures the agony of the creative process" (Daily Telegraph); American Buffalo, one of Mamet's most famous plays, is set in a junk shop where Three ...
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(P/B) PLAYS 6
Race Sparks fly when three lawyers - two black and one white - and a defendant clash over the issue of race and the American judicial system. Drawing on one of the most highly charged issues of American history, David Mamet forces us to confront deep-seated prejudices and barely healed wounds in this unflinching examination of the lies we tell ourselves and the truths we unwillingly reveal to others. November It's November in a Presidential election year and incumbent Charles Smith's chances for re-election are looking unlikely. Approval ...
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(P/B) CLEANSED
A provocative play from the notorious author of Blasted, which probes the nightmarish world of twenty-somethings coming to grips with sexuality, social ostracism and the effects of drugs. Cleansed premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in spring 1998. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) PLAYS 5
The fifth volume of Miller's plays reissued with a new jacket in the Methuen Drama World Classics series to coincide with the publication of the sixth and final volume of his plays. This fifth volume of Arthur Miller's work contains two plays from the early nineties: his highly acclaimed "The Last Yankee" (1993), "a fine and moving play...Like all Miller's best work, it effortlessly links private and public worlds by connecting personal desperation to insane American values" (Guardian); and "The Ride Down Mount Morgan" (1991), which explor...
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