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National Theatre Connections Monologues: Speeches for Young Actors (Play Anthologies)
by Anthony BanksFor the first time, there is an anthology of monologues for young people available, taken from plays commissioned as part of the National Theatre Connections over the past 20 years. Always drawing together the work of 10 leading playwrights – a mixture of established and current writers – the annual National Theatre Connections anthologies offer young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study. Each play is specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department and reflects the past year's programming at the venue in the plays' ideas, themes and styles. The plays are performed by approximately 200 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional regional theatres where the works are showcased.This anthology of 100 monologues is the ideal resource for teenagers and young people attending auditions either in the amateur or professional theatre world; students leaving secondary school to audition for drama school; as well as teachers of English and Drama looking for suitable dramatic for their students to engage with and perform. It provides suitable scene-study books that are suitable and relevant to the student in terms of tone, style and content. Young actors who have searched for audition material written in the voice of teenage characters will welcome this resource.
Stroke of Luck (Modern Plays)
by Larry BellingShortly after the death of his wife, Lester Riley, an invalid who has suffered a premature stroke, announces to his three estranged middle-aged children that he is getting married again – to his young, sexy Japanese nurse. His children are also shocked to learn that Lester has saved an enormous amount of money from his secret life as the exclusive television and radio repairman to a Long Island Mafia family. To stop the nurse from getting this surprise inheritance they must stop the marriage. They try every trick in the book: legal, religious, psychological and – in the case of one son – criminal. But they fail; or do they? Lester, it seems, has a few tricks up his own sleeve.Stroke of Luck is a dark comedy that explores the themes of greed and guilt, how to reunite families that have been driven apart, and how debilitating physical ailments do not necessarily mean diminished mental faculties.
New Monologues for Men: Volume 1 (Audition Speeches)
by Geoffrey ColmanNew Monologues for Men features forty monologues from plays published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama recently. The monologues are selected by the editor, Geoffrey Colman, on account of their suitability and relevance to drama school students and recent graduates entering the profession. Each monologue is preceded by an introductory paragraph, written by the editor, outlining the setting, character type, and point in the plot. Suggestions are offered for staging, performance decisions, points of significance in the text, and drawing on decisions made in professional production/s.This collection is the go-to resource for auditioning actors with an insatiable appetite for new, original and excellent material.
New Monologues for Women: Volume 1 (Audition Speeches)
by Geoffrey ColmanNew Monologues for Women features forty monologues from plays published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama recently. The monologues are selected by the editor, Geoffrey Colman, on account of their relevance to drama school students and recent graduates entering the profession. Each monologue is preceded by an introductory paragraph, written by the editor, outlining the setting, character type, and point in the plot. Suggestions are offered for staging, character interpretation, points of significance in the text, and how to draw from decisions made in professional productions.This collection is the go-to resource for the auditioning actor with an insatiable appetite for new, original and excellent material.
Four Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and The White Devil
by Thomas Kyd John Ford John Webster Janet ClareFrancis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out.In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a grieving father seeks public justice for the murder of his son by envious princelings. When his attempts are thwarted he turns a court spectacle of murder into the 'real' thing. Blackly comic in its tone and style, The Revenger's Tragedy (anon.) presents vengeance as mimetic art, witty and cruel. Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore represents an innovative re-working of the genre as a brother's love for his sister leads to his spectacular revenge on his rival, her husband, in a society in which brutal retaliation for perceived wrong is the norm. In Webster's The White Devil crimes of passion ignite revenge in the courts of the Italian city states. This student edition contains fully annotated, modernized texts of each play together with an introduction discussing the dramatic and poetic style of each play, focusing on its action and play of ideas.
The Spanish Tragedy (New Mermaids)
by Thomas Kyd Andrew GurrThe first fully-fledged example of a revenge tragedy, the genre that became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, The Spanish Tragedy (1589) occupies a very special place in the history of English Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of Spain during its war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice when his son is murdered for courting Bel-Imperia, the Duke of Castile's daughter, and decides to take justice into his own hands...This new student edition has been freshly revised by Professor Andrew Gurr to incorporate the latest stage history and critical interpretations of the play. It also appends the scenes that were added in 1602, discusses Elizabethan attitudes to revenge, the Senecan features of the play and the significance of the Anglo-Spanish conflict in the 1580s.
Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus (New Mermaids)
by Christopher Marlowe Brian GibbonsThis New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Christopher Marlowe's plays: Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus. The new introduction by Brian Gibbons explores the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as examining their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.
Ibsen Plays: Ghosts; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder
by Henrik Ibsen Michael MeyerThe plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), 'the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury'; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father ('Where,' asked George Bernard Shaw, 'shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?'); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
Ibsen Plays: A Doll's House; An Enemy of the People; Hedda Gabler
by Henrik Ibsen Michael MeyerThis volume contains Ibsen's two most famous and frequently read, studied and performed plays about women: A Doll's House (1879), his first international success, which 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life', and Hedda Gabler (1890), now one of his most popular plays, but greeted at first with bewilderment and outrage ('The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas' Pictorial World). Also included is An Enemy of the People (1883), whose central character was the actor Konstantin Stanislavski's favourite role.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
Ibsen Plays: John Gabriel Borkman; Pillars of Society; When We Dead Awaken
by Henrik Ibsen"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner)The plays shine freshly from the pages ...This will be our definitive Ibsen." (JC Trewin) This volume contains Ibsen's first great modern prose play and his two last symbolic dramas. The Pillars of Society, written between 1875 and 1877, exhibits many of the classic elements which recur in the subsequent plays - a marriage founded on a lie, women stunted by social conventions, an arrogant man destroying the happiness of those around him. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), according to Edvard Munch, is "the most powerful winter landscape in Scandinavian art"; and Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), also dealing with "the coldness of heart", showed, said Bernard Shaw, "no decay of Ibsen's highest qualities. His magic is nowhere more potent.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
Ibsen Plays: Brand; Emperor and Galilean
by Henrik IbsenThe two epic plays in this volume stand, together with Peer Gynt and The Pretenders, at the fulcrum of Ibsen's career. Brand (1865) stated sharply and vividly the necessity of following one's private conscience and 'being oneself'. It created an immediate sensation and was hailed by Strindberg as 'the voice of a Savonarola'. Emperor and Galilean (1873), which Ibsen referred to as his masterpiece, is both his farewell to the epic drama and the forerunner of his great naturalistic prose plays that were to burst on the nineteenth century.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
Strindberg Plays: The Father; Miss Julie; The Ghost Sonata
by August Strindberg Michael MeyerThis volume contains three of Strindberg's most famous plays, spanning twenty years of prodigious creativity and recurrent personal crises: The Father, which displays Strindberg's suspicion of women at its most implacable, 'powerful and profound' (Guy de Maupassant); Miss Julie (1888), which he called his masterpiece, and in which he presents with startling modernity the conflict between sexual passion and social position; and The Ghost Sonata (1907), written in physical pain and spiritual torment, which is a phantasmagoric dream play, 'a direct source for the Theatre of the Absurd' (Martin Esslin)."Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)
Strindberg Plays: Dream Play; Dance of Death; The Stronger
by August Strindberg Michael MeyerThe second volume in the series of authoritative Methuen editions of Strindberg's Collected PlaysThis volume contains two of Strindberg's best-known plays from the years following his mental breakdown: the expressionist masterpiece A Dream Play (1901), which he described as 'my most beloved play, child of my greatest pain'; and both parts of The Dance of Death (1900), a terrifying analysis of a tormented marriage: 'it leaves an astonishing, an almost unaccountable, impression of genius ... as a beggar's cloak full of holes may have a kind of majestic beauty when the wind fills it, so this broken drama, having unmistakably the winds of vision in it, has beauty and dignity and power' (The Times, 1928). Also included is his earlier short play The Stronger (1889), a fascinating study of the power of personality."Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)
Strindberg Plays: Master Olof; Creditors; To Damascus
by August Strindberg Michael MeyerThe third volume in the series of authoritative Methuen editions of Strindberg's Collected PlaysThis volume brings together Strindberg's first great play, Master Olof (1872): 'Michael Meyer's agile translation of a flawed idealist who shrinks from the logic of his own actions and puts compromise before martyrdom' (Guardian); Creditors (1888), portraying a marriage chillingly close to his own: 'one of the finest of his plays ... holds one in its icy grip' (Sunday Telegraph); and To Damascus (Part I) (1898), 'a play so packed with ideas and invective that it makes most contemporary dramas seem trivial' (Scotsman)."Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)
The Krays (Screen and Cinema)
by Philip RidleyWinner of the 1990 Evening Standard Film Award for Best FilmPost-war East End London. Ronnie and Reggie Kray are school ground bullies brought up by a domineering mother and two devoted aunts. National Service and spells in prison expose the brutality that helps establish the twin brothers as the kings of 1960s gangland London.Philip Ridley's original, uncut screenplay, almost as notorious as its subject matter is a stylised meditation on maternal love, childhood, violence and homoeroticism and takes its place as one of the masterpieces of contemporary cinema."Ridley...reveals himself most welcomely as a genuinely innovative film maker, untrammelled by conventions and with an individualistic imagination firing on all cylinders." (The Evening Standard)
Knives in Hens (Modern Classics)
by David Harrower Mark FisherThe village has lied. William has lied. It is not because I am undeserving. Not because I am young and they are old. God has given them nothing. I know this now. Knives in Hens is a brutal fable set in a timeless spartan rural community. First staged at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in June 1995, before transferring to the Bush Theatre, London, in November 1995, the play was playwright David Harrower's first professionally produced work. It has been staged in twenty-five countries around the world and is widely acknowledged as a modern Scottish classic.A remarkable play about the transformative power of knowledge and an emerging consciousness as the world moves from rural to the urban and industrial.With an introduction by Mark Fisher.
Sucker Punch (Modern Classics)
by Roy Williams Harry DerbyshireRight, you know the rules, watch the low blows, if it's a knock-down no messing about, go straight to your corner, and don't come out till called for, are we clear? Touch gloves, let's go.In the red corner: Leon Davidson - Black British champ or Uncle Tom? In the blue corner: Troy Augustus - American powerhouse or naive cash cow? Having spent their youth in the same London boxing gym, vying for the favouritism of inspirational, foul-mouthed trainer Charlie Maggs, the two former friends step into the ring and face up to who they are. Boxing has dominated their lives with an unhoped-for structure and meaning, but it becomes clear that it is no substitute for their health, family, and friends. Roy Williams' Sucker Punch looks back on what it was like to be young and black in the 1980s and asks if the right battles have been fought, let alone won. With an introduction by Harry Derbyshire, Lecturer in English and Drama at the University of Greenwich.
The Romans in Britain (Modern Classics)
by Howard Brenton Philip RobertsFirst staged at London's National Theatre in 1980, having been commissioned by Peter Hall, The Romans in Britain contrasts Julius Caesar's Roman invasion of Celtic Britain with the Saxon invasion of Romano-Celtic Britain, and finally Britain's involvement in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the late twentieth century. As these scenes bleed into one another, Brenton suggests what it might have been like for these people to meet. Three Roman soldiers sexually assault a young druid priest. A lone, wounded Saxon soldier stumbles into a field, a nightmare made real. An army intelligence officer begins to lose his mind in the Irish fields. Brenton's sinewy vernaculars summon a lost history of cultural collision and oppression, of fear and sorrow.This edition features an introduction by Philip Roberts, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, and a foreword by director Sam West.
Contemporary Scottish Plays: Caledonia; Bullet Catch; The Artist Man and Mother Woman; Narrative; Rantin (Play Anthologies)
by Alistair Beaton Rob Drummond Morna Pearson Anthony Neilson Kieran Hurley Trish ReidTo paraphrase Alistair Beaton's Caledonia - the first play in this collection - 'The English have anthologies, the Spanish have anthologies, the French have anthologies . . . why should not Scotland have its anthology?'Scotland is entering a crucial period in its history, where its identity is being debated daily, from everyday conversation to the national and international press. At the same time, its theatre is resurgent, with key Scottish playwrights, theatres and theatre companies expanding their performance vocabularies while coming to prominence in national and international contexts.Caledonia is a tale of hubris and delusion, portraying a crucial slice of Scotland's history and its foray into imperial colonialism told with dark humour and creative flair, by award-winning playwright and satirist Alistair Beaton.Bullet Catch, by Rob Drummond, is a unique theatrical experience exploring the world of magic, featuring mind-reading, levitation, and the most notorious finale in show business.Morna Pearson's The Artist Man and the Mother Woman is a wickedly funny, deceptively simple, surreal portrait of a spectacularly dysfunctional relationship.Rantin', by Kieran Hurley draws on storytelling, live music and an unapologetically haphazard take on Scottish folk tradition, in an attempt to stitch together fragmented stories to reveal a botched patchwork of a nation.First performed at the Royal Court in 2013, Narrative by Anthony Neilson is a theatrical exploration of the the boundaries and possibilities of storytelling.Featuring plays from Alistair Beaton, Rob Drummond, Morna Pearson, Kieran Hurley and Anthony Neilson, this collection is edited by Dr. Trish Reid, a leading critical voice on Scottish theatre.
Roots (Modern Classics)
by Arnold WeskerIt's 1958. Beatie Bryant has been to London and fallen in love with Ronnie, a young socialist. As she anxiously awaits his arrival to meet her family at their Norfolk farm, her head is swimming with new ideas. Ideas of a bolder, freer world which promise to clash with their rural way of life.Roots is the remarkable centrepiece of Wesker's seminal post-war trilogy. It was first performed in 1959 at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, before transferring to the Royal Court. It is the second play in a trilogy comprising Chicken Soup with Barley and I'm Talking About Jerusalem. It went on to transfer to the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End.A true classic, Roots is an affecting portrait of a young woman finding her voice at a time of unprecedented social change. This Modern Classic edition features an introduction by Glenda Leeming.
Harper Regan (Modern Classics)
by Simon Stephens Jacqueline BoltonIf you go, I don't think you should come back.On a startlingly bright autumn night in 2006, Harper Regan walked away from her home, her husband and daughter, and kept walking. She told nobody that she was going. She told nobody where she was going. She put everything she ever built at risk. For two lost days and nights, until it looked as though her entire life might unravel, she didn't turn back.From Uxbridge to Stockport to Manchester and back again, Harper Regan navigates the UK, exploring family, love and delusion. It received its world premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2008.
Love, Love, Love (Modern Classics)
by Mike Bartlett James Grieve1967. Kenneth and Sandra know the world is changing. And they want some of it.Love, Love, Love takes on the baby boomer generation as it retires, and finds it full of trouble. Smoking, drinking, affectionate and paranoid, one couple journeys forty-years from initial burst to full bloom. The play follows their idealistic teenage years in the 1960s to their stint as a married family unit before finally divorced and, although disintegrated, free from acrimony. Their children, on the other hand, bitterly rail against their parents' irresponsibility and their relaxed, laissez-faire attitude.This play by Olivier award-winning writer Mike Bartlett questions whether the baby boomer generation is to blame for the debt-ridden and adrift generation of their children, now adults but far from stable and settled.This edition features an introduction by James Grieve, who directed Love, Love, Love at the Royal Court, London.
Pravda (Modern Classics)
by Howard Brenton David Hare Philip RobertsThe press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart, and democracy itself cannot function. Pravda (which means "truth") is a satire written at the height of Thatcherism when huge political changes were afoot. The play essentially studies, through black humour and close scrutiny, the tabloid ethic and the media industry as a get-rich-quick-fix. In the programme for the original 1985 production of Pravda, Brenton wrote: "Pravda means 'the truth'. English newspapers aren't propaganda sheets. The question is, why do so many of them choose to behave as if they are?"The character of Lambert Le Roux is a South African newspaper tycoon and the owner of several companies, striding his way through the regional papers en route to Fleet Street. Turning broadsheets tabloid, dumbing down the message, and stretching the truth, Le Roux takes no prisoners as he manipulates politicians and creates a media monopoly out of a once-respected industry.Le Roux is bent on dominating England's press as he has elsewhere in the world. As we see Le Roux accomplish his aims, we see also how the press is not the organ of truth we like to think it is. The dissemination of the truth is no longer its primary goal under the 'Lambert Le Rouxs' of our world. What is important now is what sells.The play is an epic satire on the media in the Thatcher era; a morality tale about how Andrew, a young liberal journalist, finally succumbs to Le Roux, who makes him editor of a tabloid; and – allegedly – the play is a direct representation of Rupert Murdoch who, even in 1985, was a major force in media ownership. Howard Brenton's and David Hare's first collaboration since Brassneck in 1973, Pravda was premiered at the National Theatre in May 1985, starring Anthony Hopkins and directed by David Hare, and was awarded the London Standard Best Play Award, the City Limits Best Play Award, and the Plays and Players Best Play Award.This Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Philip Roberts, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, and a foreword by Jonathan Church.
Sleeping Beauty (Modern Plays)
by Jez Bond Mark CameronThere will come a point in every witch's life where the scales are tipped so far to one side that the world, nature, humanity - whatever you want to call it - finally fights back. The demons are expelled and we return to the natural state. Sleeping Beauty is the fairytale of the beautiful princess Arabella who pricks her finger on a spindle and sleeps for a hundred years. Here adapted for the stage, you can join a host of characters for a night of magic, romance and laughter. In this quirky and flamboyant new stage version of the traditional story by Jez Bond and Mark Cameron, the battle of good versus evil is given a facelift, bringing this fairytale vividly to life through comedy, drama and original songs.The songs are included at the back of the edition (melody with chord symbols).
The Nativity Goes Wrong (Modern Plays)
by Henry Lewis Jonathan Sayer Henry ShieldsThe Christian Humanitarian Reading Initiative for Spiritual Theatre (or C.H.R.I.S.T. for short) are putting on a production of The Nativity Story. It's opening night and nothing is going to plan. Despite a collapsing manger, a deranged donkey, and a director on the brink of hysteria, the show must go on.This hilarious tour-de-force is the second farce from Theatre Mischief, creators of the critically acclaimed The Play That Goes Wrong. Once again, we watch as order unravels itself and pandemonium ensues in a piece that will be loved both as a piece to perform and one to watch. The Nativity Goes Wrong received its world premiere at Reading Rep on 22 December.