Contemporary Dramatists – serie
Visar alla böcker i serien Contemporary Dramatists. Handla med fri frakt och snabb leverans.
410 produkter
410 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 2001
368 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
When Blasted was first produced at the Royal Court in 1995 it was hailed jointly as a masterpiece and a 'disgusting piece of filth' (Daily Mail). Subsequently that play, and the others that followed, have been produced all over the world. This anthology includes Kane's never-before-published Channel 4 screenplay, Skin."Kane wrote simply and starkly about the world she saw around her...a mature and vividly theatrical response to the pain of living." Guardian
Häftad, Engelska, 1997
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This volume contains the best of David Edgar's work from the seventies The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs is an adaptation of the famous South African writer's diaries and deals with solitary confinement and loneliness - "a remarkable, persuasive picture." (Observer); Mary Barnes is based in a commune in the sixties and focuses on schizophrenia "promulgating the theory that schizophrenia can be effectively treated through behaviourist methods alone"; Saigon Rose tackles venereal disease and is "intriguing and entertaining...Edgar handles his themes - loss of innocence and a sense of betrayal - in a bitty, playful style laced with black comedy" (Independent); Oh Fair Jerusalem deals with the black death and Destiny deals with the loss of Empire and the rise of fascism in contemporary Britain "A play which astonished me with its intelligence, density, sympathy and finely controlled anger." Dennis Potter (Sunday Times).
Häftad, Engelska, 1992
361 kr
Skickas
Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.
Häftad, Engelska, 1987
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixti This collected volume contains three plays which continue Edward Bond's exploration of themes from Shakespeare and other classical authors. Bingo puts Shakespeare himself on stage in a critical account of the writer and Stratford landowner's final days. The Fool is based on the life and madness of the 19th-century working-class poet John Clare and The Woman is set at the end of the Trojan War with Hecuba as a main character, but instead of offering a resolution its Tempest-like second half defines the nature of social conflict. All three plays deal with the origins of the tensions of the modern world. Also included is Stone, a one-act parable of oppression.Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)
Häftad, Engelska, 1978
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixti Lear - "Bond's greatest (and biggest) play ...It is even more topical now and will become more so as man's inhumanity gains subtle sophistication with the twenty-first century's approach" (The Times); The Sea - "It blends wild farce with tragedy and ends with a sliver of hope ...what makes the play fascinating is Bond's bleak poetry and social comedy" (Guardian); Narrow Road to the Deep North - "His best piece so far ...No one else could have written it" (The Times); Black Mass, written for performance at an anti-apartheid demonstration: "A Georg Grosz picture come to life ...the only possible kind of artistic imagery through which to speak of such evil" (Listener); Passion - a play for CND: "Mingles comedy and high anger with absolute sureness." (Guardian)Edward Bond is "one of our outstanding playwrights ...He is already an acknowledged classic" (Plays and Players)
Häftad, Engelska, 1986
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists Christie in Love is based on the story of John Christie, the 19th century serial killer, "like Genet, [Brenton] feels for the outcast...But he's less sentimentally involved with his criminals, clearer about his ultimate strategy to show the unreality of straight lines in a curved universe, of the roles society forces on us." (Observer). "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am to wreck society", Magificence puts the small people and their protests against the bourgeois state on stage; it was described as "A wonderful piece of theatre; annexing whole new chunks of modern life and presenting them in a style at once fruitful and magnified." (The Times) In The Churchill Play, Brenton brings Churchill back to life to view the future that he invented for England and "Brenton finds a way of making us look again at the past which has shaped the future into which he sees us drifting" (New Society).Weapons of Happiness is "a vision of revolution which is quite extraordinary in its creative ambiguity, its richness, its power to stimulate, to threaten and to inspire" (Sunday Times) while Epsom Downs "echoes Bartholomew Fair: a great public festival, held on common land and pulling in punters of every degree...a teaming, Bruegel-like composition" (The Times) The last play in this collection Sore Throats, is a witty and harsh examination of sexual proclivities from within and outside marriage: "No recent play compares for theatrical power and painful bravado." (Observer)
Häftad, Engelska, 1977
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to emerge from the sixties ...the most savagely powerful dramatist writing today ...Bond's plays cannot be ignored" (Independent) Saved - "The most uncompromising, original and un-English English play of the sixties" (Observer); Early Morning - "A gargantuan Swiftian metaphor of universal consumption" (Observer); The Pope's Wedding - "This bizarre and unclassifiable piece is an astonishing tour de force for a first play, and if it comes to that, would be an astonishing tour de force if it were a fifty-first ...Bond is an original" (Bernard Levin, Daily Mail)
Häftad, Engelska, 1984
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Six masterful works by the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright. Death and the King's Horseman: 'A transfixing work of modern world drama' (Independent); Madmen and Specialists: 'A luminous play, examining the way in which war exposes and clarifies human conduct' (Observer); Opera Wonyosi, adapted from Gay's The Beggar's Opera: 'Swaggering and scabrous, at once a verbal spree and a fierce assault on totalitarianism' (Observer). The volume also contains The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero's Metamorphosis, classic comedies of modern Nigerian life based on the hilarious and manipulative transformations of a preacher, and Camwood on the Leaves, a haunting radio play, which evokes a divided community.
Häftad, Engelska, 1985
370 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
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 conditions. that led to hunger for revolution...The play has an austere eloquence that precisely matches its subject." (The Guardian) Cloud Nine sheds light on some of the British Empire's repressed dark side and is "a marvelous play - sometimes scurrilous, always observed with wicked accuracy, and ultimately, surprisingly, rather moving. It plunges straight to the heart of the endless convolutions of sexual mores...and does so with acrobatic wit." (Guardian) Owners:"I was in an old woman's flat when a young man offering her money to move came round, that was one of the starting points of the play" (Caryl Churchill).The plays in this volume represent the best of Churchill's writing up to and including her emergence onto the international theatre scene with Cloud Nine.
Häftad, Engelska, 1985
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times) 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 jealousy,"it is poignantly and unerringly funny" (Guardian); Make and Break is a satirical commentary on British corporate interests abroad "Full of pain, ruthless observation, and a sense of humour which is sardonic, lunatic and warm" (Sunday Times); Noises Off - the West End hit play about a company of actors stepping from a sex farce into their own nightmarish lives backstage "A very intelligent joke about the fragility of all forms of drama...a pulverisingly funny play."(Guardian)"All of these plays are attempts to show something of the world, not to change it or to promote any particular idea of it. That's not to say there are no ideas in them. In fact what they are all about in one way or another is the way in which we impose our ideas upon the world around us...it might be objected that one single theme is a somewhat sparse provision to sustain five separate and dissimilar plays. I can only say that it is a theme which has occupied philosophers for over two thousand years and one which is likely to occupy them for at least two thousand more..."(Michael Frayn)
Häftad, Engelska, 1990
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists The Romans in Britain was the play that brought calls to bring back censorship when it was first staged at the National in 1980. It conjures up "an era that is culturally as well as historically remote which is a notoriously difficult task, but Mr Brenton acheives it with great skill and effect...a very good play indeed." In The Thirteenth Night: "He sets the characters of Shakespeare to find the elements in the British character which could transform an Englishman into a Stalin, and closes in on his creation with an overall wit to match his horror" (The Times). The Genius "is teeming with memorable stage pictures, and bristling with Brenton's very best writing: flinty, impassioned, explosive" (Financial Times). In Bloody Poetry "Brenton is doing something markedly ambitious in this phantasmagoric play. He is celebrating the idea of the committed artist who seeks to stir and provoke sullen, defeated bourgeois England. At the same time, with clear-eyed honesty, he shows how difficult it is to upset the moral order" (The Guardian).Greenland is "on the one hand a cry of disillusionment with established political forms, on the other it is full of typically lively Brentonesque satire and lampoons...Brenton's message is a welcome antidote to the madness in which we all now seem to be living and a sharp blast against patriarchy as well as other attendant woes" (City Limits).
Häftad, Engelska, 1989
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
A selection of plays by "one of the most original and biting comic writers working in Britain" (The Times) The Ruling Class "is a scorching and savage tragedy, yet its jokes are innumerable...they throw wide open the windows of your mind, they enlarge your field of vision and they blow away the accumulated dust of ages" (Sunday Times); Leonardo's Last Supper and Noonday Demons are "two ironic plays of delusion...Peter Barnes' dialogue is rich in surprising verbal twists, intellectual allusions and splendid jokes". The Bewitched is "a feast for intellectuals as well as a rollicking example of folk theatre" (Plays and Players) while Laughter is a vicious satire on comedy itself and Barnes' People are eight monologues written for some of the great stars of the English stage which "let the listener into a whole and private world...their jokes in the face of existence were both burning and bitter." (Daily Telegraph)"Peter Barnes is one of the unrecognised geniuses of the English theatre" (Plays and Players)
Häftad, Engelska, 1990
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Softcops renders the philosophy of Foucault as a music-hall turn and Victorian freakshow "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun" (TLS); Top Girls brings five great and less-than-great women from history together for a dinner party and "has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert" (Sunday Times); Fen scrutinises the lives of the low-paid women potato pickers of the fens (in Eastern England) and "the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of impressive vigour and economy" (Financial Times) while Serious Money is a satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang - "Pure genius...the first play about the city to capture the authentic atmosphere of the place." (Daily Telegraph)
Häftad, Engelska, 1990
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Stephen Poliakoff 'has been one of our sharpest and least predictable writers for the past twenty years' (Daily Telegraph) Clever Soldiers: "is a thoughtful play about violence" (Times) which attacks the mythology of Oxbridge against the background of war; Hitting Town, a powerful play about incest is "a riveting piece of theatre...a stupendous achievement" (Sunday Telegraph); City Sugar: "A savage dissection of that pristine slagheap of Our Times - mass culture" (Time Out); Shout Across the River: "traces the progress of a passionate and extraordinary relationship between a young mother and her teenage daughter played against the background of a vast suburb of south London." (Guardian); American Days: "Into the escapist limbo of a top record company executive's office tumble three teenagers, spotted by an insecure talent scout and now given a hit or miss chance to impress...Poliakoff has the dramatic ability to make you care very much...a completely enjoyable play" (Financial Times); Strawberry Fields is about three young members of the 'lost generation' of the sixties: "Imaginative and controversial...a sort of Pinteresque fantasy with thriller overtones." (Plays and Players)
Häftad, Engelska, 1990
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"David Edgar, like Balzac, seems to be the secretary for our times" (Guardian) Nicholas Nickleby: "With uncommon audacity Nicholas Nickleby not only takes on Dickens' sprawling novel, it fractures all the petty limitations we have imposed upon the stage as well...A landmark" (New Statesman); In Entertaining Strangers, a community constructs a nativity play: "English left-wing social drama at its sturdiest and finest: human, argumentative, utterly unafraid of human realities, and seething with indignation and compassion" (Sunday Times) and Ecclesiastes, a radio play that looks at the rise and fall of a "fundamentalist" Christian clergyman in the US.
Häftad, Engelska, 1990
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The first volume of stage and TV plays by one of the best British TV writers Where the Difference Begins, a naturalist play for television, is about the "difference" between thirties deprivation and fifties affluence, between material prosperity and its accompanying spiritual and political apathy, as embodied by sixty-year-old railwayman Wilf and his sons; A Suitable Case for Treatment, a play for television, portrays a man who, on account of his communist beliefs, is unable to conform to the world around him and associates more with the gorilla he sees in the zoo than with his own wife; The Governor's Lady is set in colonial Africa focussing on a reactionary central figure; broadcast on BBC TV during the lates 60s and early 70s The Kelvin trilogy (On the Eve of Publication, The Cellar and the Almond Tree and Emma's Time) moves between Britain and Eastern Europe, the the past and the present. After Haggerty, Mercer's first major stage success is, in the playwright's own words "an intervention and a commentary on the supposed revolutionary theatre of 1968 and after."Mercer "demands in my mind the saem love and esteem I feel for Gorky.They share a generosity of spirit, a desire for change, and a savage compassion for those who must be changed." David Jones (director)
Häftad, Engelska, 1990
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"Louise Page's intimate, emotional dramas open up vast areas of feeling beneath the surface of ordinary lives" (Independent) Tissue: "The tissue of the title is a left breast and lymph node removed during Sally Bacon's mastectomy...Louise Page catalogues Sally's changing attitudes to what her mother calls her chest, her brother calls her tits and what she calls her bosoms." (Guardian); Salonika "There is in this strange and beautiful new play...a moment when the author crosses the boundaries of naturalism and the seaside sands of Salonika are literally parted and the dead past rises to life" (Guardian); Real Estate "Miss Page, by accurate, detailed, loving writing has created four real people, sensitive to the needs of others yet each, ultimately with an instinct for self-preservation. These are 'ordinary' people to whom nothing special happens. They become special, extraordinary because of the dignity their creator endows them with" (Spectator).Golden Girls: "Not only does this enthralling play take us into the world of women's athletics, it also raises any number of questions about the success ethic, the dubious role of sponsorship and the secondary status of nearly all women's sports." (Guardian)
Häftad, Engelska, 1994
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Duck Variations: "A brilliant little play...about two old men sitting on a park bench discussing ducks" (Guardian); Sexual Perversity in Chicago, bar-room banter and sexual exploits in Mamet's home town "sweet sad understanding and utterly believable" (Chicago Daily News); Squirrels is a sequence of philosophising between a younger writer, an older writer and a cleaning lady which "memorably captures the agony of the creative process" (Daily Telegraph); American Buffalo, one of Mamet's most famous plays, is set in a junk shop where Three small-time crooks plot to carry out the midnight robbery of a coin collection - in the hours leading up to the heist, friendship becomes the victim in a conflict between loyalty and business. The Water Engine is "a propulsive, kaleidoscopic nightmare" and Mr Happiness is a short ironic monologue by a Radio DJ commenting on the letters from his listeners.
Häftad, Engelska, 1992
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
One of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, Edward Bond is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. "Restoration towers like a colossus ...its stylistic wit, moral complexity and theatrical force are of the kind one associates with classic drama" (Michael Billington). In settings both historical and modern, Edward Bond's plays continue to offer a wide-ranging political and moral critique of human society and human relationships. The fourth volume of his collected works contains his plays from the late seventies and early eighties.Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)
Häftad, Engelska, 1991
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"David Edgar, like Balzac, seems to be the secretary for our times" (Guardian) Our Own People: "A courageous and intelligent discussion of race and industrial relations" (City Limits); Teendreams (written with Susan Todd of Monstrous Regiment theatre company) is about the failed revolutionary dreams of a set of teenagers. Maydays compares the phenomenon of post-war social rebellion from Western and Eastern perspectives; That Summer is an "elegantly tangential treatment of the 1984 miners' strike" (Plays and Players) "Edgar never lets his drama simplify into ideological diagram...This elegant, humane play keeps its emphasis on the...results that can ensue when diverse lives briefly brush against each other." (Independent)
Häftad, Engelska, 1991
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
A rich selection from the best of Nichols' work up to and including his award-winning Privates on Parade A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is based on the author's experience of having a mentally handicapped child and won the John Whiting Award; The National Health was commissioned by Kenneth Tynan for the National theatre and follows the story of a Labour MP who goes into a state hospital suffering from a nervous collapse. It won the Evening Standard Best Play Award; Forget-me-not Lane is a trip down memory lane from the author's own childhood growing up in the West Country; Hearts and Flowers is a TV play about the rivalry between two brothers, one a school teacher living in Bristol the other a successful news journalist and their shared interest in a woman; Freeway is set in a traffic jam and attempts to answer the question of why the automobile has come to be seen to represent liberty incarnate in the modern era.
Häftad, Engelska, 1991
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Ripen Our Darkness was the play that established Sarah Daniels as a writer; The Devil's Gateway carries the flavour of life in Bethnal Green in the 1980s; Masterpieces, Daniels' most controversial play is a radical take on the porn industry and caused outrage among critics - "The play has bite, anger and tenacity and many of its arguments are true...the supreme merit of Ms Daniels' combative work is that it makes me want to argue back." (Michael Billington, Guardian) Neaptide looks at lesbianism and prejudice - "A lacerating wit" (City Limits), whilst Byrthrite is set in the 17th century, at the point when the role of the healer was taken over by the male profession of doctor, it examines the implications and dangers of reproductive technology - "Daniels puts her case with vigour and wit" (Financial Times)
Häftad, Engelska, 1991
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This collection brings together some of the best and most frequently performed plays by John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy whose collaboration stems from the political years of the Sixties The Business of Good Government is a nativity play which develops a sense of a disappearing community; Ars Longa Vita Brevis is composed out of children's games and The Royal Pardon tells the story of the adventures of a group of strolling players who fall in with a deserter from the war in Flanders. Other plays in this collection such as Little Gray Home in the West and The Vandaleur's Folly arise from the highly charged political arena of the 1970s in Ireland.Arden and D'Arcy have been consistently interested in using drama to extend the very boundaries of national identity and human freedom.
Häftad, Engelska, 1991
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
A rich selection from the best of Nichols' work up to and including his award-winning Privates on Parade This volume continues the stage plays of Peter Nichols, newly revised and introduced by the author. Chez Nous is about English couples who bring their emotional baggage with them on a holiday to France; Privates on Parade is a hit play inspired by the author's experience in Singapore after the war working for the Combined Services Entertainments where he met among others John Schlesinger and Kenneth Williams at a time when 'mixed' entertainment relied on men dressing up as women; Born in the Gardens is inspired by the author's native city Bristol while Passion Play is a play about passion among the elderly - won Best Play (Evening Standard) in 1981. Poppy (the musical that opened the RSC's residence at the Barbican) is set in the Victorian Far East. It takes a pop at imperial hypocrisy and wickedness and won the Best Musical award.
Häftad, Engelska, 1994
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The first volume of stage and TV plays by one of the best British TV writers Flint premiered just before the 1970 General Election which was to replace the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. It is driven by the figure of Ossian Flint, a seventy-year old swinging vicar who believes in "crossing lines not drawing them" and espouses the romanticised Communism of Lenin and Guevara; In the BBC play The Bankrupt, Ellis Cripper, a woman aged fifty has become bankrupt through operating at "the dishonourable end of the system...capitalism"; An Afternoon at the Festival centres around a version of middle-aged man Leo Brent who is an extreme egoist and a failure in his personal relationships; Duck Song was first produced in the dying days of the failing Heath government and the characters represent a society in decline as the younger characters attempt to find a solution through feminism or psychiatry, it presents "a world to which one cannot relate, which one cannot control, which one can't understand, and which one can't manipulate"; The Arcata Promise centres around the attraction betwen an actor and an inexperienced girl and the destructive conclusion of such an attraction; Find Me returns to the theme of ideological conflict and Eastern Europe; Huggy Bear, a Yorkshire Television production that depicts Hooper, an infantile and philosophical dentist with a "failure to integrate".
Häftad, Engelska, 1992
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times) Benefactors conjures the world of the suburbs observed through the lens of post-imperialism; "dazzling. This prismatic work circumscribes the disillusionment of an era" (New York Times); Balmoral dares to imagine what Britain would be like if it had gone through the Russian revolution in 1917; "a sophisticated drollery, an educated amusement" (New Statesman); Wild Honey is a reworking of Checkov's first play (also known as Platonov) and is shot through with farce, feminism and eroticism.
Häftad, Engelska, 1992
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The first collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel Famine portrays the Great Hunger of the Irish in 1840s, with fresh pathos and insight, Patriot Games is a documentary drama charting the 1916 Easter rising and The Blue Macushla is a live gangster movie on stage set in the Republic of the 1970s with the politics of the Troubles emerging in Northern Ireland spilling over into the South.
Häftad, Engelska, 1992
375 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Anthony Minghella's writing "sets a standard of emotional truth and clarity so sublimely high that everything around it looks stale, flat, tawdry and obvious" (The Times) Whale Music is: "genuinely tender, poignant and spikily anti-amle all at once" (Daily Mail); A Little Like Drowning "makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you think" (Guardian); Two Planks and A Passion "is one of the best new plays I have seen in the past decade" (Financial Times)
Häftad, Engelska, 1992
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
"David Storey is a writer who genuinely extends the territory of drama" (Guardian) The Contractor: "A subtle and poetic parable about the nature and joy of skilled work, the meaning of community and the effect of its loss" (Observer); Home: "about the solitude and dislocation of madness and...the decline of Britain itself...part of the play's appeal is that Storey leaves it to us to draw our own conclusions...a play that contains within itself the still, sad music of humanity." (Guardian); Stages: "...an elegy for lost times and places, an obituary that has been free-associated by the corpse-to-be...Storey once said that a play 'lives almost in the measure that it escapes and refuses definition'. He has always been a writer who hints rather than states, let alone hectors." (The Times); Caring, a companion piece to Stages, reflects a reassessment and renegotiation of the conflict between life and art.
Häftad, Engelska, 1993
374 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The second collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel In Conversations on a Homecoming, Michael returns from America to Ireland for a long-awaited reunion with his drinking companions: "A bilious bar-room comedy on the irreducible elements in the Irish character and the death of the Kennedy dream" (Observer), Bailegangaire "is as complex and haunting as one of Yeats' later poems...A senile bedridden old woman rehearses over and over again an epic tale of a village laughing match...Meanwhile her two granddaughters struggle to release themeselves from the prison of remembered unhappiness. "Here is a potent allegory - of the need to exorcise the past and its myths if one is to be happy in the future." (Sunday Telegraph) Tom Murphy was born in Tuam, County Galway, his other plays include Conversations on a Home Coming, Balegangaire and A Thief of Christmas; The Morning After Optimism, The Sanctuary Lamp and The Gigli Concert as well as more recently Cupa Coffee and The Wake (1996), and She Stoops to Folly.His career has been closely associated with The Abbey Theatre, Dublin who have produced many of his plays.