METHUEN DRAMA

(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...

(P/B) COMPLETE PLAYS
This volume contains everything Wilde wrote in dramatic form Wilde's masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest is printed here in its usual three-act form, but with an appendix containing the best material from the original four-act version. Also included are his three 'problem plays', Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, as well as his once-banned Salome and several other little-known but fascinating dramas....
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) GETTING THE JOKE
Comedy is changing: stand-up comedians routinely sell out stadia, their audience-figures swollen by panel-show appearances and much-followed Twitter feeds. Meanwhile, the smaller clubs are filling up, with audiences as well as aspirants. How can we make sense of it all? This new edition of Getting the Joke gives an insider's look at the spectrum of modern comedy, re-examining the world of stand-up in the internet age. Drawing on his acclaimed first edition, Oliver Double focuses in greater detail on the US scene and its comedians (such as ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MCDONAGH: PLAYS 1
Martin McDonagh's plays have been produced in Galway, Dublin, London and New York. They have created excitement and have won numerous awards....
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE POLITICAL THEATRE
'The Political Theatre' is among the most important documents of the modern stage. It tells of the foundation and flowering in Weimar Germany of a new form of theatre - epic theatre - designed to bring on to the stage the real political issues of the time, and to do so with all the aids that modern technology could supply....
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PLAYS 1
The plays in this volume were all written between 1973 and 1979, those grey years when the last residue of sixties optimism was quickly fading and before the harsh divisive upheavals of the Conservative eighties. A period which already seems strangely distant: the years of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan, of Wimpey bars, the Bay City Rollers, punk and the National Front. The plays, to some extent, lasso the atmosphere of that time, but they also look forward to many of the anxieties and desires of the late eighties. In this introduction I disc...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE
This Student Edition of Brecht's classic dramatisation of the conflict over possession of a child features an extensive introduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion of the context, themes, characters, style and language as well as questions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text. It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature. Brecht projects an ancient Chinese story onto a realistic setting in Soviet Georgia. In a theme that echoes the Judgment of Solomon, two women argue ove...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MICHAEL CHEKHOV'S ACTING TECHNIQUE
Intended for actors, directors, teachers and researchers, this book offers an exceptionally clear and thorough introduction to the renowned acting technique developed by Michael Chekhov. Sin?ad Rushe's book provides a complete overview of the whole method, and includes illuminating explanations of its principles, as well as a wide range of practical exercises that illustrate, step by step, how they can be applied to dramatic texts. Part One provides an outline of the ideas that underpin the work, which help to prepare practitioners to beco...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE CHERRY ORCHARD
A civilised and complacent culture is on the brink of collapse... The tide of change is coming. Madam Ranyevskaya's liberal world of privilege and pleasure is beginning to show cracks, but she and her family live on in denial. Lopakhin wants to rescue Ranyevskaya. The hard-working son of one of her family's serfs, his new-found wealth can offer shelter and security to the woman he has loved since boyhood, but it will come at a high price. Meanwhile, revolution hangs in the air, the poor and hungry are pushing at the doors, and the tutor Tr...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE SECRET THEATRE
'It's not enough that men are watched; they must think themselves watched, even when they are not' Spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham oversees a vast surveillance network from the heart of Elizabeth I's court. As the nation's relationship with Europe deteriorates and civil unrest grows, Walsingham adopts ever more extreme tactics to keep his queen and country safe. But does he risk losing control of the apparatus he has created and destroying the lives of those closest to him? And can such safety ever be achieved? The Secret Theatre asks wha...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE GLASS MENAGERIE
The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams' first great popular success. When the play premiered in Chicago in 1944 it launched the brilliant and controversial career of this ground-breaking American playwright. Set in St Louis during the depression era of the 1930s, it is the poignant drama of a family's gradual disintegration, under pressure both from outside and within. A frustrated mother persuades her rebellious son to provide a 'gentleman caller' for her shy crippled daughter, but her romantic dreams are shattered by the intervention...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) STAND UP - ON BEING A COMEDIAN
Stand-Up! is the first book to both analyse the background of stand-up comedy and take us inside the world of being a solo comedian. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) ORTON COMPLETE PLAYS
"I suppose I'm a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad but irresistibly funny", Joe Orton. This volume contains everything that Orton wrote for the theatre, radio and television from his first play in 1964, The Ruffian on the Stair, up to his violent death in 1967 at the age of 34. It includes his major successes: Entertaining Mr Sloane, which 'made more blood boil that any other British play in the last ten years' (The Times); Loot, 'a Freudian nightmare', which sports with superstitions about death - as well as life; his fa...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) FRAYN: PLAYS 1
Alphabetical Order: "A comic essay about two types of woman... a very intelligent comedy because of its classic simplicity, and unusual in the way that the two types of women do not become stereotypes" (Daily Telegraph); Donkeys' Years, a satire on the establishment and British Institutions "Gorgeous farce, all the funnier for emerging from credible aspirations and natural anxieties... the play is richer and cannier than we expect farces to be." (New Statesman); Clouds, is a satire on government sponsored trips and a portrait of sexual jea...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) PLAYS 1
Marber Plays: 1 brings together three of this award-winning playwright's first plays produced at the National Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse, London. Dealer's Choice premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London, in 1995 and subsequently transferred to the West End. It won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and, the Writers' Guild for Best West End Play. After Miss Julie relocates August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888) to an English country house in July 1945. In this radical re-imagining of theatre's first 'naturalistic tr...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE SHIFTING POINT
Hailed as "the theatrical event of this century" (Sunday Times), Peter Brook's unique dramatisation of India's great epic poem, The Mahabharata played to ecstatic audiences worldwide. In The Shifting Point, his first book since The Empty Space, Brook assesses the lessons of his pioneering work from his brilliant debut at Stratford and the West End in the 1960s to the triumphant success of The Mahabharata. With the bravura and insight of a great practitioner and explorer he reveals some of the inspiration behind his extraordinary career. (F...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...