METHUEN DRAMA

(P/B) BRECHT COLLECTED PLAYS 4
Now in paperback, the long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930s Volume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930s, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus, a starkly pacifist text originally written in response to a commission from Swedi...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) BRECHT COLLECTED PLAYS 3
The most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language Volume Three of Brecht's Collected Plays includes St Joan of the Stockyards - a play which recasts St Joan as Joan Dark springing hope into the hearts of factory workers at the mercy of meatpacker king Pierpont Mauler threatening cuts in the Depression; and the Lehrstucke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Lindbergh's Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes / He Sa...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE HIDDEN PLOT
This collection of passionate and polemical essays deals with drama from its origin in the human mind to its use in history and the present. It explains the hidden working of drama behind the state, religion, family, crime and war. It is a revolutionary understanding of the human world with drama at its centre. A ruthless critique of the theatre's present state and its trivialisation as entertainment by the media, it reveals and sees a radical new theatre for the future. Edward Bond is internationally recognised as a major playwright and a...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD
My Mother Said I Never Should follows the story of four generations of women, a great-grand-daughter a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, grappling with social forces that threaten to split them apart as the twentieth century grows older. Widely studied on Drama syllabuses the play moves back and forth through the lives of the women, it sets the enormous social changes of this century against the needs of the individual. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE STREET OF CROCODILES
The Street of Crocodiles is inspired by the life and stories of Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). Originally co-produced by Theatre de Complicite and the Royal National Theatre it opened at the Cottesloe in 1992 and toured all over the world until 1994. The original production was remounted in 1998 and played in New York, Toronto, Minneapolis and Tokyo before opening at the Queen's Theatre London in January 1999. (From the publisher) "This astounding production creates a vision of provincial Poland in the early part of the century a...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) SIX PLAYS
A collection by a leading playwright of the '70s and '80s. As Time Goes By, Matura's first play is a satirical comedy of manners set among first-generation immigrants and won the George Devine and John Whiting awards. Nice (1973) is a deeply ironic monologue by a recent immigrant commenting on his experience of the hypocrisy of British officialdom; Play Mas (1974) recreates the impact of the heady political momentum generated by the People's National Movement in Trinidad in the early fifties and won the Evening Standard Most Promising Play...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) A RAISIN IN THE SUN (0413762408)
In south side Chicago, Walter Lee, a black chauffeur, dreams of a better life, and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who rejects the liquor business, uses some of the money to secure a proper house for the family. Mr Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighbourhood, tries to buy them out. Walter sinks the rest of the money into his business scheme, only to have it stolen by one of his partners. In despair Walter contacts Lindner, and almost begs to buy them out, but with the help of ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Anthony Burgess's stage play of his infamous cult novel and film of the same name. Alex and his vicious teenage gang revel in horrific violence, mugging and gang rape. Alex also revels in the music of Beethoven. The Gang communicates in a language which is as complicated as their actions. When a drug-fuelled night of fun ends in murder, Alex is finally busted and banged up. He is given a choice - be brainwashed into good citizenship and set free, or face a lifetime inside. Anthony Burgess's play with music, based on his own provocative 19...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) "TWO" AND "BED"
"Two": 'A sharp, salty, quickfire evocation of the surface gaiety and underlying melancholia of English pub life'. The Guardian "Bed": 'Its insights into the twilight world of old age are remarkable, Cartwrights ode to sleep fizzes with puns and free association and brims with the confidence of a craftsman who can work as happily with surrealism as naturalism as he teases out snippets of life story from the ancient occupants of the bed. City Limits This extraordinarily gifted and original voice... populates the space with broad humour, dry...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PLAYS 2
This second volume of Arthur Miller's plays contains four stage plays from the sixties and seventies, taking up the theme of individual responsibility from his earlier work. The volume is introduced by the author. (From the publisher) The Price (1968) is 'a beautifully intelligent play about two brothers who are pinned in positions of flight from their own histories that are as fruitless as the movements of the men at Pompeii...For Miller, heroism lies on the scale of a man's sense of the possibility of controlling his own life' (Observer...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) CONTRACTIONS
Emma's been seeing Darren. She thinks she's in love. Her boss thinks she's in breach of contract. The situation needs to be resolved. An ink-black comedy about work and play, which invites the audience to a meeting at the centre of the Royal Court building. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PLAYS 1
Reissued with a new jacket to mark the publication of the sixth and final collection of Miller's plays, this volume contains four of the most important and famous plays of the American theatre. All five plays were written by Arthur Miller within a ten-year period which began with his first Broadway hit in 1947: 'With the production of All My Sons, wrote Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, 'the theatre has acquired a genuine new talent.' This hit was followed by an even greater play: Death of a Salesman. 'A great play of our day', wrote ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) FESTEN
Helge, the patriarch of a chain of restaurants, is celebrating his sixtieth birthday and everyone is coming home from the party including Helge's sons, Christian, Michael and his daughter Helene. Missing from the roster of invitees is Christian's twin sister, Linda, who recently committed suicide. The reason for her action and the repercussions from it, form the basis of the shocking and painful events that transpire during a twenty-four hour period. In the midst of dinner, Christian makes a startling accusation and, even as the disbelievi...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PORNOGRAPHY
Pornography is Simon Stephens' stark and shattering new play that powerfully captures a portrait of a fractured, insecure Britain. Written in reaction to London crashing from the euphoria and promise at being awarded the 2012 Olympics into the chaos and reality of the 7/7 bombings, the play is composed of seven stories that serve as a countdown to the catastrophic attack on London. Each playlet focuses on a different individual dramatising their life in the run-up to the tragedy. Published to coincide with the English language premiere at ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PLAYS 3
Glen Garry Glen Ross (also made in to a film starring Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino) "his superb play about real estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition" (New Society); in Prairie du Chien a railway carriage speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide, told within shooting distance of a card-hustler and his victim. "A short poignant study in violence and the twin drives of love and money, told with hypnotic power thorugh a travelling raconteur" (City Limits); The S...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE
Jerzy Grotowski created the Theatre Laboratory in Opole, South-West Poland, in 1959. His work since then, with a small permanent company, became one of the most potent sources of information for modern actors and directors. This is a record of the ideas that motivated the work of the Theatre Laboratory, and of the company's methods and discoveries. In his Preface Peter Brook writes: "Grotowski is unique. Why? Because no one else in the world, to my knowledge no one since Stanislavski, has investigated the nature of acting, its phenomenon, ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PLAYS 2
In the 1990s playwright Anthony Neilson garnered a reputation for hard-hitting, morally disturbing plays that saw him labelled as one of the 'In Yer Face' dramatists who emerged from that decade. This second volume of plays showcases the comic, surreal and gloriously off-kilter side of his more recent work. Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness! (Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 2002) mixes Victorian melodrama with a catalogue of grotesque comic tales; The Lying Kind (Royal Court, 2002), a black farce set at Christmas involving two hapless po...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) SHOPPING AND F***ING
Shopping and F***ing is...Falling in love with your best friend - if you can get the right mix of Es and whizz...Passion buried beneath layers of bubble and wrap and cellophane A world where microwaves are the only source of heat A place where Shopping is sexy and F***ing is a job...And if you killed someone what would it feel like? Or maybe there are no feelings left...Shopping and F***ing is a witty and shocking look at a corrosive disposable world whose values have been determined by a disinherited generation..(From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) CHURCHILL: PLAYS 1
In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions" (Plays and Players); Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century..." (Tribune); Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the Civil War and "unflinchingly shows the intolerance that was the obverse side of the demand for common justice. Deftly, it sketches in the kind of social condit...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MISS JULIE
Miss Julie (1888), written in a fortnight, was regarded by Strindberg as his masterpiece, 'the first naturalistic tragedy of the Swedish drama'. Shocking in subject-matter, revolutionary in technique, it was fiercely attacked on publication for immorality. On Midsummer Eve, Miss Julie, the daughter of a count, sleeps with her father's valet, Jean. The subsequent conflict between sexual passion and social position, which leads to her suicide, is presented with startling modernity. The play's premiere at Strindberg's experimental theatre in ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...