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Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2008
by Harold PinterVarious Voices is the only collection of Harold Pinter's prose, poems and political writing to span his career. This new edition includes a remarkable interview in which he reflects on his time as an evacuee in Cornwall during the Second World War, as well as new prose, poems and his Nobel Speech.
Gethsemane
by David HareNothing is more important to a modern political party than fund-raising. But the values of the donors can't always coincide with the professed beliefs of the party. And family scandal within the cabinet has the potential to throw both the money-raisers and the money-spenders into chaos.This richly imagined ensemble play about British public life looks at the way business, media and politics are now intertwined to nobody's advantage, as, in an unforgiving world, one character after another passes through Gethsemane.Gethsemane, David Hare's fourteenth original play for the National Theatre, London, premiered in November 2008.
Ivanov: in an English version (Drama Classics Ser.)
by Anton ChekhovOnly a year ago, the landowner Nikolai Ivanov was full of energy and optimism, in love with his wife and working hard. Now, for no reason he can understand, Ivanov is overcome with inertia and self-disgust. His wife is dying and he feels nothing. He is drowning in debt and despair, and he does nothing. Is it him? Is it Russia? And is the possibility of happiness with the young woman who loves him just a cruel illusion? Ivanov was the 27-year-old Chekhov's shot at despatching the 'superfluous man' of Russian literature, and in surrounding him with a brilliantly drawn set of provincial types he created some of the best comedy he was ever to write.
Leaving
by Vaclav HavelChancellor Rieger is leaving office. But does leaving office necessarily mean that he, his mistress and his extended family have to leave the state villa, which has been their home for years?While his former secretary, and the former secretary to his former secretary, grapple with the mechanics of change and his family prepare to vace an uncertain future, the chancellor himself considers his legacy amid visits from journalists, an infatuated student and his arch-rival and possible successor, Patrick Klein.With echoes of both King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, Vaclav Havel's Leaving addresses the themes of change, dispossession and the transfer of power from one generation to the next. The play received its English-language world premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in September 2008.Leaving is Vaclav Havel's first play since he was propelled to political office in 1989.
Moonlight: Betrayal; Monologue; One For The Road; Mountain Language; Family Voices; A Kind Of Alaska; Victoria Station; Precisely; The New World Order; Party Time; Moonlight: Ashes To Ashes; Celebration; Umbrellas; God's District; Apart From That
by Harold Pinter'A dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes.'Sunday Times'A deeply poignant, raffishly comic, emotion-charged study of the gulf between parents and children and the anguish of approaching death... Beckett, the poet of terminal stages, inevitably comes to mind. What instantly moves one is Pinter's image of a man confronting death in a spirit of rage, fear and uncertainty... The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there. But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes - the subjectiveness of memory, the unknowability of one's lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past - and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face "death's dateless date" in a state of mortal terror.'Guardian'Pinter has written few more fascinating plays.' Times First staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 1993, Moonlight was revived at the Donmar, London, in April 2011. 'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.' Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005
Harold Pinter: Betrayal; Monologue; One for the Road; Mountain Language; Family Voices; A Kind of Alaska; Victoria Station; Precisely; The New World Order; Party Time; Moonlight: Ashes to Ashes; Celebration; Umbrellas; God's District; Apart from That
by Harold PinterThis revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. The Homecoming 'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph 'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times Old Times 'A rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.' Financial Times 'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' Independent No Man's Land 'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times
The Absence of War
by David HareThe Absence of War offers a meditation on the classic problems of leadership, and is the third part of a critically acclaimed trilogy of plays (Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges) about British institutions.Its unsparing portrait of a Labour Party torn between past principles and future prosperity, and of a deeply sympathetic leader doomed to failure, made the play hugely controversial and prophetic when it was first presented at the National Theatre, London, in 1993.
The Brass Butterfly
by William GoldingCommissioned by the leading actor Alastair Sim (1900-1976) The Brass Butterfly was Golding's only original stage play. Starring Sim himself, and also the popular actor George Cole, it opened for a provincial pre-West End run in Oxford in early 1958 and premiered at the Strand Theatre in London in April. In his biography of Golding, John Carey describes it as 'a comic scherzo' dealing with the conflict between science and religion, transposed to the Greco-Roman world of antiquity.
In the Republic of Happiness: Fewer Emergencies; Cruel And Tender; The City; In The Republic Of Happiness
by Martin Crimp- What're you doing here Robert? - Well to be frank with you, I've really no idea. I thought I would just suddenly appear, so I did. I suddenly appeared. A family Christmas is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Uncle Bob. Who is he? Why has he come? Why does his wife stay out in the car? And what is the meaning of his long and outrageous message? All we can be sure of is that the world will never be the same again.A provocative roll-call of contemporary obsessions, In the Republic of Happiness premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in December 2012.
No Quarter
by Polly StenhamYou were brought up on mythology. Hollow mythology. That's why you're all stuck, all angry, a prince in the wrong story. A prince with a black eye.Fleeing a world he has rejected, Robin finds solace in his music and the sanctuary of his remote family home. But as his kingdom begins to crumble around him, how far will he go to save it and at what cost?Polly Stenham's No Quarter premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in January 2013.
The Dead: by James Joyce in a dramatisation by
by Frank McGuinnessThe year is 1904 in the city of Dublin. Gretta and Gabriel Conroy attend the Morkan Sisters annual dinner on the Feast of the Epiphany and the last day of Christmas. An evening of laughter, music and dance ends in an epiphany for Gabriel.Recognised as a masterpiece, The Dead, the short story from James Joyce's Dubliners, is dramatised by Frank McGuinness. The play premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in December 2012.
Pink Mist
by Owen SheersWinner of Wales Book of the Year Pink Mist is a verse-drama about three young soldiers from Bristol who are deployed to Afghanistan. School friends still in their teens, Arthur, Hads and Taff each have their own reasons for enlisting. Within a short space of time they return to the women in their lives (a mother, a wife, a girlfriend), all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of their service. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity and emotional intensity, Pink Mist uses everyday yet heightened speech to excavate the human cost of modern warfare. Drawing upon interviews with soldiers and their families, as well as ancient texts such as the medieval Welsh poem Y Gododdin, it is the first extended lyric narrative to emerge from the devastating conflict in Afghanistan.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: The Night Season; Shoreditch Madonna; Her Naked Skin; The Painter
by Rebecca LenkiewiczThe Night Season'The Night Season is unusual; no politics, no issues, no history - just a bold attempt to grapple with the messy nature of living. It's also delightfully, rudely funny.' Financial Times 'Look out for the name Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It's once in a blue moon that a writer gets her second-ever play staged at the National. It's even more remarkable when you wander away at the end, walking on air.... Lenkiewicz is quite extraordinarily talented.' Independent on Sunday Shoreditch Madonna'A strong absorbing work, full of passion, pathos and sly humour, set in the hip art scene of London's East End... There is a rare combination of pain, wit and originality in Lenkiewicz's writing.' Daily TelegraphHer Naked Skin'It is shocking to think that this is the first full-length work by a woman to be seen on the Olivier stage. But Lenkiewicz makes up for lost time by exploring the hunger for political and personal emancipation that fuelled the suffragette movement in 1913... Her play colonises this daunting space with bravura confidence.. Her power lies in her ability to recapture the triumphs and tribulations of a history movement... Lenkiewicz's play plants a defiant feminist flag on the Olivier stage.' Guardian 'This is a big play with a big heart and I recommend it with a matching warmth. Lenkiewicz is making history here and, in so doing, demonstrating that she's got a great future.' Daily TelegraphThe Painter'An intimate portrait of Turner... Understated and quietly superb.' Independent on Sunday
Quartermaine's Terms: Quartermaine's Terms; The Rear Column; Close Of Play; Stage Struck; Tartuffe; A Month In The Country; The Idiot
by Simon Gray'A masterly portrayal of an innocent.' Harold Pinter, from 'Directing Simon Gray's Plays', Simon Gray Plays 1'Superficially, it is a light comedy about a group of educated, often eccentric English characters in an academic backwater in the early sixties. But though the jokes are excellent, the piece cuts deep. There are Strindberg-like glimpses of wretchedly unhappy marriages and, as in Ibsen, a sense of chickens coming home to roost. But the primary impression here is of an English Chekhov. As in the plays of the Russian master, the characters talk a lot, but they rarely listen, still less understand, so they are often at cross-purposes. And like The Seagull, the long time scheme in Quartermaine's Terms - it spans several years - creates a poignant sense of transience and mortality.' Daily Telegraph'Gray's selection of details and exchanges is immaculate: he achieves drama and mystery in mundane lives; the comedy is beautifully stated and even personal tragedies are underlined with running gags that ring with truthfulness. No false hothouse effect is necessary to make bare the bewilderment of spirit of his central figure, the grinning, forgetful and deeply kind staff lecturer, St John Quartermaine, an inarticulate character of awesome loneliness who rivals the tragic force of Willy Loman.' The Times 'A play that is at once full of doom and gloom and bristling with wry, even uproarious comedy. The mixture is so artfully balanced that we really don't know where the laughter ends and the tears begin: the playwright is in full possession of the Chekhovian territory where the tragedies and absurdities of life become one and the same.' New York Times
Trelawny of the 'Wells': An Original Comedietta
by Arthur Wing PineroLondon, the 1860s. Rose Trelawny is the brightest young star at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. But she's prepared to give it all up for the love of her noble stage door suitor, Arthur Gower. Meanwhile, her colleague at the 'Wells', Tom Wrench, is writing a new kind of play for Rose to star in. And her friend, Imogen Parrott, hopes to take a theatre in which to produce it. Rose will be forced to choose between her two great loves. Set amongst theatrical folk and the non-theatricals they seek to please and provoke, Trelawny of the 'Wells', by Arthur Wing Pinero, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in January 1898. This version, with revisions and additions by Patrick Marber, premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in February 2013.
Difficult Men: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad
by Brett MartinIn the late 1990s and early 2000s, a wave of TV shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television's inventiveness, emotional resonance and ambition. Shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Shield tackled issues of life and death, love and sexuality, addiction, race, violence and existential boredom. Television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This revolution happened at the hands of a new breed of auteur: the all-powerful writer-show runner. These were men nearly as complicated, idiosyncratic, and "difficult" as the conflicted protagonists that defined the genre. Given the chance to make art in a maligned medium, they fell upon the opportunity with unchecked ambition.Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players, including David Chase and James Gandolfini (The Sopranos), David Simon, Dominic West and Ed Burns (The Wire), Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), Matthew Weiner and Jon Hamm (Mad Men), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood) and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), in addition to dozens of other writers, directors, studio executives and actors. Martin takes us behind the scenes of our favourite shows, delivering never-before-heard story after story and revealing how TV has emerged from the shadow of film to become a truly significant and influential part of our culture. Brett Martin is the author of The Supranos: The Book(2007). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Food and Wine and Vanity Fair. Difficult Men is an insightful history of popular US TV drama which traces the emergence of shows such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Wire, and explores their engagement with important social issues around love, sexuality, race and violence.
The Audience
by Peter MorganFor sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve prime ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace, a meeting like no other in British public life. It is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses.The Audience breaks this contract of silence. It imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. From Churchill to Cameron, each prime minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional - sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive.From young mother to grandmother, these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next prime minister.The Audience by Peter Morgan premiered at the Gielgud Theatre, London, in March 2013.
Children of the Sun
by Maxim GorkyI didn't read your books. I licked them, I rubbed them all over my naked body and licked them.Protasov, detached and idealistic, wants only to immerse himself in chemical experiments to perfect mankind. He's more or less oblivious to the voracious advances of the half-crazed widow Melaniya and his best friend's unrelenting pursuit of his wife, let alone the cholera epidemic and the starving mob at his gates. While Nanny fusses round, Protasov's admiring circle, variously skeptical, romantic and lovesick, spar over culture and the cosmos. Only Liza, neurotic and patronized, feels the suffering of the peasantry and senses that their own privileged world is in jeopardy.Gone? They're everywhere. Have you heard about the riots? The starvation and the flagrant disregard of authority. This disregard is building walls and barriers between us all. And they are massing. The crowds of angry people. And the hate... the hate between us all... kills everything.Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky's darkly comic Children of the Sun depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but likeable, as they flounder around, philosophizing, yearning, or scuttling between test tubes, blind to their impending annihilation.This is Andrew Upton's fourth English version of a play for the National by one of the great Russian masters, including his acclaimed adaptation of Gorky's Philistines.
N. F. Simpson: A Resounding Tinkle; The Hole; Gladly Otherwise; One Way Pendulum; The Cresta Run; Was He Anyone?; If So, Then Yes
by N. F. SimpsonN. F. Simpson was one of the leading exponents of the theatre of the absurd, and is best known for his play A Resounding Tinkle, made famous by its premiere at the Royal Court in 1957, and later to star Peter Cook. But beyond that he was a major force in the satire boom of the sixties, and wrote much exceptional comedy for film and TV for the likes of John Cleese, Beryl Reid, Hattie Jacques and Eric Sykes, as well as a number of brilliantly funny plays for theatre, which starred big names such as Harold Pinter and Kenneth Williams. His influence on everyone from Peter Cook's much-loved character E. L. Wisty to Monty Python's Flying Circus helped spawn a generation of incredible comic talent.Plays included in the collection are A Resounding Tinkle, The Hole, Gladly Otherwise, One Way Pendulum, The Cresta Run, Was He Anyone? and his final work, If So, Then Yes, first performed in 2010.This collection celebrates the work of this lost comic genius, and seeks to put his reputation back at the heart of British - and world - comedy.
Theatre Craft: A Director's Practical Companion from A to Z
by John CairdTheatre Craft is an all-encompassing, practical guide for anyone working in the theatre, from the enthusiastic amateur to the committed professional. With entries arranged alphabetically, Theatre Craft offers advice on all areas of directing, from Acting, Adaptation, and Accent to Sound Effects, Superstition, Trap Doors and Wardrobe.Enlightening and entertaining by turns, the celebrated director John Caird shares his profound knowledge of the stage to provide an invaluable companion to anyone creating a play, musical or opera. Whatever the theatre space - the backroom of a bar, a studio theatre, or the biggest stages of the West End or Broadway - this authoritative volume is an essential reference tool for the modern theatre practitioner.Internationally renowned theatre director John Caird has directed and adapted countless productions of plays, operas, and musicals for the Royal Shakespeare Company, London's National Theatre, in the West End, and on Broadway-from Les Misérables and Nicholas Nickleby to Hamlet and Peter Pan.
Frost/Nixon
by Peter MorganIn 1972, a break-in was foiled at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC. Within days a connection had been made with the White House and President Nixon's closest aides. It unleashed one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics and ended with Nixon's humiliating resignation. David Frost's interviews with Richard Nixon drew the largest audience ever for a news interview. Could this British talk-show host, with no known political convictions and a playboy reputation, be the one to elicit an apology from the man who committed one of the biggest felonies in American political history? Frost/Nixon premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in August 2006.
The Seagull: Large Print (Modern Plays Ser.)
by Anton Chekhov- Idea for a story. A beautiful young girl lives by a lake all her life. She loves this lake. She's happy and free, like that bird was once. Then a man comes along and for no reason at all... what do you think he does?- He destroys her.A story about how we make stories, a story about unrequited love, The Seagull is one of the great plays of the modern era. Chekhov explores emotion and creativity with the clarity of a doctor and the heart of a poet.John Donnelly's version of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull premiered in a Headlong and The Nuffield, Southampton co-production, in association with Derby Playhouse. The play opened in April 2013, followed by a UK tour.
Simon Gray: Common Pursuit; Holy Terror; After Pilkington; Old Flames; They Never Slept
by Simon Gray'Sharp, funny and clever . . . What a pleasure to re-encounter a play that combines unabashed intelligence and zinging wit with a rare generosity of spirit.'Daily Telegraph on The Common Pursuit'Gray's stature as one of the handful of great tragi-comic English dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century would appear now to be undisputed.' Howard Jacobson, Critical QuarterlyHidden Laughter'A sad divine comedy, superbly written. Gray nurses his characters and cares for them, but he never pampers them, or pities them, or presumes to use them as his spokesman. In this respect, he has become an English Chekhov... At the same time, Gray dispenses some of the incandescent malice and moral savagery of Coward at his acid best... But, of course, comparisons can only help you get your bearings. Gray is entirely his own man in this painful, querulous, warm, hard and mature play.' Sunday Times
Simon Gray: Quartermaine's Terms; Stage Struck; Close of Play; Rear Column; Month in the Country; Tartuffe
by Simon Gray'The brave little lives that Gray so compassionately illuminates could be lived by any of us, and that's why they arouse emotions that are anything but small.'New York Times on Quartermaine's Terms
Simon Gray: Butley; Wise Child; Dutch Uncle; Spoiled; Sleeping Dog
by Simon GrayButley 'What is so wondrous about a play so basically defeatist and hurtful is its ability to be funny. The stark, unsentimental approach to the homosexual relationship, the cynical send-up of academic life, the skeptical view of the teacher-pupil associations are all stunningly illuminated by continuous explosions of sardonic, needling, feline, vituperative and civilised lines.' Evening Standard