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Barker: Plays Three (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays Claw, Ursula, He Stumbled and The Love of a Good ManThe plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw, a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its terrible conclusion marked the debut of a vivid dramatic imagination. In Ursula Barker's engagement with the pains of the past, and his way of reinvigorating ancient arguments reaches a high point in his treatment of the legend of St Ursula and the martyrdom of 11,000 virgins, where the virtues of celibacy and marriage are set against the catastrophic passion of a woman described as a 'perfect liar'. Barker's scrutiny of the body and its complex meanings is never more intense than in He Stumbled, the tragedy of a celebrated anatomist whose last dissection becomes his own. The body as a site of political and personal investment is also at the heart of The Love of a Good Man, an early work set on the empty battlefields of the Great War, where the burial of the dead becomes a pretext for private ambition as well as national grief.
Barker: Plays Eight (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerThe Trojan legend and the character of Helen form the basis for The Bite of the Night. As with all Barker’s mythical and historical works, it is overlaid and undermined by a contemporary narrative, in this instance the search for the origin of the erotic undertaken by the redundant university teacher Dr Savage and his nihilistic student, Hogbin. Through all twelve Troys, Savage and Helen struggle with a passion both intellectual and physical, and the idea of beauty is refined to a terrifying degree. In Brutopia Barker’s controversial portrait of the humanist Thomas More is shaped around his strained relationship with his daughter Cecilia, here discovered to be the author of a counter-text to her parent’s infamous Utopia. Cecilia’s wit and cruelty mark her out as one of Barker’s least compromising and heroic young women. The Forty is a significant departure from Barker’s dramatic practice, his investment in language reduced to a few phrases which punctuate detailed scenes of conflict and solitude. Physical movement, and intense concentration on gesture show the author’s flair for visuality in a new and surprising way. The theme of sacrifice features increasingly in Barker’s theatre, and in Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward it is a mother’s refusal to apologize for an act of passion – notwithstanding the dire consequence for her own child – that is at the heart of the argument. Set in a home for terminally-ill patients, many of whom create a hilarious chorus around the protagonists, Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward shows Barker’s imagination in its most startling form.
Barker: Plays Four (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays I Saw Myself, The Dying of Today, Found in the Ground and The Road, the House, the RoadHoward Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand her compulsion to transgress the laws of her society comes into collision with the conventions of an art form. In the weaving of a tapestry Barker's13th century heroine privileges private life over public responsibility. If she is cruelly punished she is also granted self-awareness. A critical moment in social decay is also at the centre of The Dying of Today, in which a stranger who luxuriates in the telling of bad news observes the effects of his devastating narrative on a humble barber. The barber's recovery from pain, and the beauty of his sensibility, bring the two strangers into an emotional proximity. Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground, a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his wayward daughter's struggle to make meaning from the atrocities of the 20th century. The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in The Road, the House, the Road. Erasmus' obscure colleague Aventinus was found dead on a wintry road. How he arrived at his solitary death forms the subject of this speculation on scholarship, mischief and the murderer's vocation.
Barker: Plays One (Oberon Modern Playwright's Ser.)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays Victory, The Europeans, The Possibilities and Scenes from an Execution.Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. These plays are among his best-known works, and their energy, poetic language and imagination have fixed them firmly in the international repertoire.Exploring the tragic form defined by Barker as Theatre of Catastrophe, three of the plays speculate on human behaviour in moments of historical crisis. Victory is set in the English Civil War and follows the ethical voyage of a widow towards personal reconstruction. The Europeans takes one of the great eruptions of Islamic imperialism as the background for a young woman's insistence on her right to her own identity. Scenes from an Execution shows the struggle of an independently-minded artist against the power of the Venetian state.The Possibilities, a disturbing series of short plays set in various times and cultures, reveals Barker's unconventional way with moral dilemmas.
Barker: Plays Five (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the FaceHoward Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose.Both The Last Supper and Seven Lears exemplify Barker's way with great religious and literary stories, the first placing the wilful suicide of a Christ-like prophet, Lvov, in the context of modern chaos, illuminating his moral ambiguities with comic or painful parables, the second taking its inspiration from the significant absence in Shakespeare's play, that of Lear's wife, the queen whose murder is here discerned as the origin as the great family tragedy.The execution of the Russian royal family remains shrouded in mystery - not least that of the identity of two bodies discovered in the mass grave years after the event. In Hated Nightfall Barker's speculative imagination leads him to identify these as the children's tutor, Dancer, and a recalcitrant servant, Jane. Dancer is perhaps Barker's archetypal hero, febrile, iconoclastic, yet in search of a self-sacrifice nothing appears to justify. In Wounds to the Face, our complex and sometimes violent relations with our own physiognomy form the psychological link between related scenes of wounding, notoriety, shame and vanity in a play of kaleidoscopic energy and imagery.
Barker: Plays Two (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays The Castle, Gertrude - The Cry, Animals in Paradise and 13 Objects.Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The plays in this volume examine collisions of culture, gender and creed at moments of turmoil, developing the tragic form Barker defines as Theatre of Catastrophe.The Castle is set at the end of Crusades and describes the clashes that occur when returning soldiers bring an Arab architect home with them as a prisoner. Barker's abiding interest in interrogating the great classics for their 'silences' is shown in Gertrude - The Cry, his re-writing of the Hamlet story. Scarcely examined in Shakespeare, the passion of Gertrude for Claudius is made the centre of this harrowing tragedy, casting new light on the personality of Hamlet himself. Animals in Paradise was commissioned by the Swedish and Danish governments to celebrate their connection by bridge, a symbolic finish to centuries of antagonism. Barker's unexpected treatment of the theme provoked unrest on its first showing.13 Objects movingly reveals the investment we make in inanimate things, their power to unsettle us, and how their talismanic qualities license new ways of seeing the world.
Bargains with Fate: Psychological Crises and Conflicts in Shakespeare and His Plays
by Maria JaroszThe enduring appeal of Shakespeare's works derives largely from the fact that they contain brilliantly drawn characters. Interpretations of these characters are products of changing modes of thought, and thus past explanations of their behavior, including Shakespeare's, no longer satisfy us. In this work, Bernard J. Paris, an eminent Shakespearean scholar, shows how Shakespeare endowed his tragic heroes with enduring human qualities that have made them relevant to people of later eras.Bargains with Fate employs a psychoanalytic approach inspired by the theories of Karen Horney to analyze Shakespeare's four major tragedies and the personality that can be inferred from all of his works. This compelling study first examines the tragedies as dramas about individuals with conflicts like our own who are in a state of crisis due to the breakdown of their bargains with fate, a belief that they can magically control their destinies by living up to the dictates of their defensive strategies.Filled with bold hypotheses supported by carefully detailed accounts, this innovative study is a resource for students and scholars of Shakespeare, and for those interested in literature as a source of psychological insight. The author's combination of literary and psychoanalytic perspectives guides us to a humane understanding of Shakespeare and his protagonists, and, in turn, to a more profound knowledge of ourselves and human behavior.
Bargains with Fate: Psychological Crises and Conflicts in Shakespeare and His Plays
by Maria JaroszThe enduring appeal of Shakespeare's works derives largely from the fact that they contain brilliantly drawn characters. Interpretations of these characters are products of changing modes of thought, and thus past explanations of their behavior, including Shakespeare's, no longer satisfy us. In this work, Bernard J. Paris, an eminent Shakespearean scholar, shows how Shakespeare endowed his tragic heroes with enduring human qualities that have made them relevant to people of later eras.Bargains with Fate employs a psychoanalytic approach inspired by the theories of Karen Horney to analyze Shakespeare's four major tragedies and the personality that can be inferred from all of his works. This compelling study first examines the tragedies as dramas about individuals with conflicts like our own who are in a state of crisis due to the breakdown of their bargains with fate, a belief that they can magically control their destinies by living up to the dictates of their defensive strategies.Filled with bold hypotheses supported by carefully detailed accounts, this innovative study is a resource for students and scholars of Shakespeare, and for those interested in literature as a source of psychological insight. The author's combination of literary and psychoanalytic perspectives guides us to a humane understanding of Shakespeare and his protagonists, and, in turn, to a more profound knowledge of ourselves and human behavior.
The Bards of Bromley and Other Plays (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Maureen Lipman Perry PontacHaving produced a new Shakespearean canon in his previous collection of plays Codpieces, Perry Pontac turns his attention to other great names in European culture. The Three Seagulls is a Chekhovian comedy with representative characters drawn from each of Chekhov's major plays, as well as a selection of his plot-lines. The Lunchtime of the Gods is Wagner's Ring recycled into a thirty-minute play telling the entire story, plus several jokes not in the original. And in The Bards of Bromley, the first meeting of a writers' workshop is attended by a group of unusually promising authors: William Wordsworth, George Eliot, August Strindberg, A A Milne and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Barber Shop Chronicles (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Inua EllamsOne day. Six cities. A thousand stories. Newsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world.
Barber Shop Chronicles (Student Editions)
by Inua EllamsNewsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world. These are places where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling.Barber Shop Chronicles, which was partly inspired by verbatim recordings, is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play that leaps from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day.It was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017 and is here publishedas a Methuen Drama Student Edition with commentary and notes by Oladipo Agboluaje.
Barber Shop Chronicles (Modern Plays)
by Inua EllamsBarber Shop Chronicles is a generously funny, heart-warming and insightful new play set in five African cities, Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, Accra, and in London.Inspired in part by the story of a Leeds barber, the play invites the audience into a unique environment where the banter may be barbed, but the truth always telling. The barbers of these tales are sages, role models and father figures who keep the men together and the stories alive.Inua Ellams's celebrated play was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017.
Barber Shop Chronicles (Modern Plays)
by Inua EllamsBarber Shop Chronicles is a generously funny, heart-warming and insightful new play set in five African cities, Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, Accra, and in London.Inspired in part by the story of a Leeds barber, the play invites the audience into a unique environment where the banter may be barbed, but the truth always telling. The barbers of these tales are sages, role models and father figures who keep the men together and the stories alive.Inua Ellams's celebrated play was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017.
Barber Shop Chronicles (Student Editions)
by Inua EllamsNewsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world. These are places where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling.Barber Shop Chronicles, which was partly inspired by verbatim recordings, is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play that leaps from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day.It was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017 and is here publishedas a Methuen Drama Student Edition with commentary and notes by Oladipo Agboluaje.
The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro: The Barber Of Seville, The Marriage Of Figaro, And The Guilty Mother (Penguin Classics Series)
by Pierre-Augustin BeaumarchaisA French courtier, secret agent, libertine and adventurer, Beaumarchais (1732-99) was also author of two sparkling plays about the scoundrelly valet Figaro - triumphant successes that were used as the basis of operas by Mozart and Rossini. A highly engaging comedy of intrigue, The Barber of Seville portrays the resourceful Figaro foiling a jealous old man's attempts to keep his beautiful ward from her lover. And The Marriage of Figaro - condemned by Louis XVI for its daring satire of nobility and privilege - depicts a master and servant set in opposition by their desire for the same woman. With characteristic lightness of touch, Beaumarchais created an audacious farce of disguise and mistaken identity that balances wit, frivolity and seriousness in equal measure.
Barbarians (Modern Plays)
by Barrie KeeffeIt's 1977. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high and the pound is at an all-time low. Paul, Jan and Louis are bored, broke and demoralized by the hand that they've been dealt. How will these young lads fair with the odds stacked against them? How will they cope?Cut off from society with no-where to turn, the play resonates with a modern audience who will no doubt recognize the disaffected youth of 1970s Britain. Barrie Keeffe's tragically dark play crackles with tension throughout, building to a twisted and dramatic end.This programme text edition was published to coincide with the revival of the play by Tooting Arts Club on 3rd October 2015, staged at the former Central St Martins School of Art on the Charing Cross Road, London.
Barbarians: One: Gimme Shelter (gem, Gotcha, Getaway): Barbarians (killing Time, Abide With Me, In The City) (Modern Plays)
by Barrie KeeffeIt's 1977. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high and the pound is at an all-time low. Paul, Jan and Louis are bored, broke and demoralized by the hand that they've been dealt. How will these young lads fair with the odds stacked against them? How will they cope?Cut off from society with no-where to turn, the play resonates with a modern audience who will no doubt recognize the disaffected youth of 1970s Britain. Barrie Keeffe's tragically dark play crackles with tension throughout, building to a twisted and dramatic end.This programme text edition was published to coincide with the revival of the play by Tooting Arts Club on 3rd October 2015, staged at the former Central St Martins School of Art on the Charing Cross Road, London.
The Banshees of Inisherin
by Martin McDonaghWinner: Best Screenplay, Golden Globe Awards 2023.Winner: Best Screenplay, Venice Film Festival 2022.What is he, twelve? Why doesn't he want to be friends with you no more?1923. As shots ring out from the warring mainland, on the island of Inisherin it's the rift between old drinking pals Pádraic and Colm that leads both men to ever more alarming action.
Ballet Beyond Tradition
by Anna PaskevskaFor nearly a century, the training of ballet and modern dancers has followed two divergent paths. Modern practitioners felt ballet was artificial and injurious to the body; ballet teachers felt that modern dancers lacked the rigorous discipline and control that comes only from years of progressive training. Ballet Beyond Tradition seeks to reconcile these age-old conflicts and bring a new awareness to ballet teachers of the importance of a holistic training regimen that draws on the best that modern dance and movement-studies offers.
Ballet Beyond Tradition
by Anna PaskevskaFor nearly a century, the training of ballet and modern dancers has followed two divergent paths. Modern practitioners felt ballet was artificial and injurious to the body; ballet teachers felt that modern dancers lacked the rigorous discipline and control that comes only from years of progressive training. Ballet Beyond Tradition seeks to reconcile these age-old conflicts and bring a new awareness to ballet teachers of the importance of a holistic training regimen that draws on the best that modern dance and movement-studies offers.
Ballade by Anna Sokolow (Language of Dance)
by Ray CookFirst Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Ballade by Anna Sokolow (Language of Dance #No. 5)
by Ray CookFirst Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Ball & Other Funny Stories About Cancer (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Brian LobelUnexpected, quirky and provocative, BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer is a unique collection of performances about illness and the changing body over time. Documenting a trilogy of Brian Lobel’s monologue performances from 2001-2011, this collection challenges the inspirational stories of survivors and martyrs that have come before, infusing the ‘cancer story’ with an urgency and humour which is sometimes inappropriate, often salacious and always, above all else, honest and open.Published together for the first time, this collection of performances goes beyond the chemotherapy to include reflections on politics, sexuality and gender, providing cancer – and cancer narratives – with a much-deserved kick in the ball(s).
Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre
by Nicholas HytnerThe Sunday Times BestsellerThis is the inside story of twelve years at the helm of Britain’s greatest theatre.It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes such as The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors; of opening the doors of the National Theatre to a broader audience than ever before, and changing the public’s perception of what theatre is for. It is about probing Shakespeare from every angle and reinventing the classics. About fostering new talent and directing some of the most celebrated actors of our times. Its cast includes the likes of Alan Bennett, Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren. Intimate, candid and insightful, Balancing Acts is a passionate exploration of the art and alchemy of making theatre.
Balanchine: A special issue of the journal Choreography and Dance
by Robert P. CohanThis detailed portrait of George Balanchine presents new approaches to his choreography. The book examines Balanchine from diverse perspectives and discusses unexplored aspects of his work, such as the notion of Balanchine as an architect, and his experiments with the African-American dance tradition. The articles complement and reinforce each other, taking interdisciplinary perspectives and encouraging a reexamination of, and expansion of, existing opinions.