Tony Coult – författare

"Welfare State International are brilliant at making an audience of strangers into a community" (Guardian) Since its foundation by John Fox in 1968, Welfare State International has developed a unique form of celebratory theatre that reaches popular audiences through remarkable combinations of archetypal and contemporary imagery. This handbook is a guide to the basic techniques of the company's work - the making of processions; large scale puppets and sculptures; fixed structures; fire and ice technology; shadow puppets; processional theatre and dance music - set in a context that explains the thinking behind the work, and describes some past Welfare State International events. This is first and foremost a practical book rather than an academic treatise.

"A new play by one of Britain's greatest playwrights is an event...the severity and seriousness of his message is delivered with extraordinary directness" (Carole Woddis, Times Educational Supplement) On a seemingly ordinary day the extraordinary happens. As a student prepares for the first day of exams he meets someone from the past who confronts him with an impossible dilemma. It's a life or death situation. Can he use his imagination to stop the most horrific events from taking place? This play was toured to British schools during 1995 by Big Brum, the Birmingham theatre company. Notes and commentary on the production have been written by Tony Coult.Edward Bond "is one of the two or three major playwrights - and arguably the only one - to emerge since the fifties" (Observer)

First published in 1977, The Plays of Edward Bond offers help and stimulation to readers and theatre-goers who want to know more about Edward Bond's recurrent concerns as a playwright. In attempting to counter much of the received critical opinion about Bond’s work, Tony Coult sets out to show how Bond’s attitudes to religion and superstition, nature and politics, the family and the individual are given brilliant theatrical form in the plays. There are, too, chapters on the plays in performance, dealing with language and stagecraft, and on the often stormy history of Bond’s relationship with the British Theatre. This makes for a fresh and unusual approach to a playwright’s work, and one particularly situated to the closely related rational theatre of Edward bond. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of theatre and performance studies and British theatre.