Modern Plays – serie

Three political parties, in and out of bed with each other like drunken intellectuals, fifteen warring cabinet ministers, and sixty million separate egos. All making deals with each other and breaking them. All looking round at every moment to see the expression on everyone else's face. All trying to guess which way everyone else will jump. All out for themselves and all totally dependent on everyone else. Not one Germany. Sixty million separate Germanies. The tower of Babel!Set in West Germany in 1969, DEMOCRACY follows Willy Brandt as he begins his brief but remarkable career as the first left-of-centre Chancellor for nearly forty years. Always present but rarely noticed is Gunter Guillaume, Brandt's devoted personal assistant - and no less devoted in his other role, spying on Brandt for the Stasi. Published to tie in with major new production at the Royal National Theatre directed by Michael Blakemore starring Roger Allam, Conleth Hill, Nicholas Blane, Jonathan Coy, Christopher Ettridge, Paul Gregory, Glyn Grain, Steven Pacey and David Ryall.

First single volume edition of this bold version of a classic by Sarah Kane Sarah Kane's radical reworking of Seneca's classical tragedy of incest and unrequited lust. Phaedra's Love is a bold and provocative revisioning of the story of Phaedra's obsessive and destructive love of her son Hippolytus and his violent punishment by Theseus.Kane's achievement is to have humanised the antics of the pounding royals. Her sulphurous dialgoue is full of reeking toughness' Evening Standard 'Sarah Kane's writing is both daring and accomplished' Time Out 'Pure theatre or rather impure theatre: dirty, alarming, dangerous' Observer 'delivered with punch and laced with black humour' Financial Times

When Don Revie took over this club, Leeds were a rugby league town. No interest in football. Gates under 10,000. We’d never won a thing. He built one of the great clubs of English football, one of the great teams of English football, from scratch on barren ground from nothing more than spirit and fight and nous, which are the exact same qualities you used at Derby. And out of jealousy, you never tried to understand that. Never tried to make the most of that. Sad. 1974. Brian Clough, the enfant terrible of British football, tries to redeem his managerial career and reputation by winning the European Cup with his new team, Leeds United. The team he has openly despised for years, the team he hates and that hates him. Don Revie’s Leeds.A West Yorkshire Playhouse and Red Ladder Theatre Company co-production, adapted from David Peace’s ingenious and much-lauded novel, which was subsequently made into a film starring Michael Sheen, The Damned United takes you inside the tortured mind of a genius slamming up against his limits, and brings to life the beauty and brutality of football, the working man’s ballet.Anders Lustgarten's stage adaptation of David Peace's novel received its world premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on 3 March 2016.

A stunning new play by the great American dramatist Described by Sam Shepard as 'a take-off on Republican fascism', this uncompromising black comedy was written just before the 2004 US presidential election.Frank and Emma are American dairy farmers, alone in the Mid-West. Nothing ever happens. Nothing has happened for years. But now there's a mysterious man hiding in their basement and a government official has come knocking at their door.The God of Hell had its European premiere at the Donmar Warehouse, London, on 20 October 2005.'A robust new farce [that] shows Shepard's gift for finding deadpan surrealism in bucolic speech ...As hilarious as it is sobering' New York Times'Deliriously entertaining and deeply scary ...A shivering work of existential mystery' Newsday'A funny and furious stab at the Bush Administration' The Times

Twenty monologues for women Twenty monologues in this volume which range from the deeply serious to the extravagantly comic and accessible to a wide range of audiences"The pieces are comic, grotesque, on purpose. First of all because we women have been crying for two thousand years. So let's laugh now, even at ourselves" - Franca Rame"Set at the point where reality and ideology rub up against each other, [these] monologues are vivid, concise and entertaining comments on the female condition...comic-but-angry, raw-but-precise" - Independent

Nominated for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play at the Olivier Awards 2026 If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once feeling crushingly depressed, then you probably weren’t paying attention.You’re seven years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s ‘done something stupid’. She finds it hard to be happy. You start a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything worth living for. You leave it on her pillow. You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling. A child attempts to ease their mother’s depression by creating a list of all the best things in the world. Through adulthood, as the list grows, they learn the deep significance it has on their own life.From Olivier Award-nominated writer Duncan Macmillan (People, Places and Things), Every Brilliant Thing is a comedy about the lengths we will go for those we love. This edition was published to coincide with the West End premiere at @sohoplace in August 2025. Co-directed by Jeremy Herrin (Best of Enemies), this production featured Lenny Henry, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, Minnie Driver, and the show’s original performer Jonny Donahoe.

Winner: Fringe First Award 2024‘I loved being a Mum. Until he started to get a personality’Son of a Bitch is a brutally honest and darkly funny monologue about a woman who is caught on camera calling her 4 year old son a c*nt during an air-rage incident.When the video goes viral, Marnie’s life violently unravels. Now the whole world knows her darkest secret, but what happened before someone pressed record and captured the worst 10 seconds of her life?The debut play from Award Winning Comedian Anna Morris is a bold and playful one woman piece about maternal ambivalence. Winner of a Fringe First Award after it premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024, this edition was published to coincide with the production’s transfer to London’s Southwark Playhouse in February 2025.

For as long as there is barsaat, you will be my friend. Santi and Naz are bestest-best friends living in a village in pre-partition India. One Sikh, one Muslim; they have little understanding of how religion will divide them.As partition draws closer, the girls remain oblivious to the spreading social unrest and violence. They’re too busy stealing books, swimming in the lake and spying on Rahul (the local hottie). When Naz is betrothed to a tailor from the soon-to-be capital of Pakistan the threat of separation for the youngwomen looms on the horizon. Bound by their love for each other we learn how far they will go to avoid the inevitable.Guleraana Mir and afshan d’souza-lodhi’s Santi & Naz explores female friendship, coming of age, and coming out set against the backdrop of a country soon to be changed forever.Recipient of the Fringe Society’s Keep It Fringe Fund and Winner of the Charlie Hartill Fund 2023.This edition was published to coincide with the Thelmas’ production at London’s Soho Theatre in January 2025.

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER‘Devastating’ Daily Telegraph‘Heartbreaking’ The Times‘Unforgettable’ Isabel Allende‘Haunting’ IndependentAfghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

Along with Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya is credited as one of Chekhov's masterpieces and a significant precursor of modern drama. Set on a country estate in late nineteenth century Russia, Uncle Vanya is in part a study of the enervation of Russian middle-class provincial life. The major dynamics between the characters themselves are centred on two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere and a flirtation that brings disaster. Mixing the tragic and the absurd and dealing with a form that allows for ambiguity and contradiction, Uncle Vanya has been deemed "the first modernist play". (David Lan)

"The greatest American playwright of his generation" (New York Magazine) Winner of the New York Drama Critics Award as the best play of the year. A Lie of the Mind is described by its author as a "love ballad...a little legend about love". Frank Rich of the New York Times described it as "a variously rending and hilarious reverie about parents and sons and husbands and wives, all blending into mythic wildernes..." The play was revived by the Donmar Warehouse in 2001.

"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times) One spring morning a quiet, shy man in his sixties sets out from Land's End to walk the length of his native land. He has never walked more than a dozen miles in his life before, his health is uncertain, his boots are new, and he is too diffident to talk to anyone he meets along the way. His slow, solitary progress up the spine of Britain is watched by an unseen audience - his family and friends at home. How far will he get before he is forced to give up? Is he being heroic or merely selfish? As the days of his absence go by the old alliances and quarrels inside the family shift and alter. What emerges is a story about the arbitrariness of human endeavour and about the tenacious complexity of human relationships; about one man's glimpse of the country he lives in; about courage and about love.First and Last was directed by Alan Dossor in a production for BBC television, with Joss Ackland as the walker.

A Piece of My Mind "transforms a self-confessed case of writer's block into a continuously inventive and thought-provoking comedy" (Charles Spencer, London Daily News) "The portrait of a marriage and his strained relationship with his teenage children all seem to come straight from the heart. They are all the more affecting for being described in the context of such immaculate artifice" (Charles Spencer, London Daily News)

A triumphant transformation of mediaeval mystery plays into radical political theatre Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, recreates the irreverent vitality of the popular mediaeval theatre. It is based on careful research into the work of the strolling players of Italy in the middle ages. Essential to an understanding of the well-springs of Fo's remarkable genius, this is the first translation of the play into English."Fo is the determined enemy of pomp, ceremony and the material aspects of religion but what shines out of this exhilarating show is the love of humanity and truth." (Michael Billington, The Guardian)

A unique dramatization of India's greatest epic poem, fifteen times longer than the Bible, The Mahabharata has played to enthralled audiences throughout Europe, the Far East and America. Regarded as the culmination of Peter Brook's extraordinary research into the possibilities of theatre, the production has been hailed as the 'theatrical event of this century' (Sunday Times). British audiences encountered The Mahabharata, on stage and television, in the late eighties. This volume contains the complete script of Carriere's adaptation in Peter Brook's translation, with introductions by each of them.

By the author of Lucky Bag, Up to You, Porky and Barmy, two plays that provided an early vehicle for Victoria Wood's own performance teamed with Julie Walters. Friendship comes under uncommon strain in both plays as a community arts centre prepares to host the annual rally of cystitis sufferers in Good Fun and Maureen helps Julie dress for a night-club talent contest in Talent.

'Kaspar is based on the historical case of a 16-year-old boy who appeared from nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828 and who had to be taught to speak from scratch . . . Handke's play is a downright attack on the way language is used by a corrupt society to depersonalise the individual'. - Michael Billington, the Guardian.'Handke's most sustained study in social indoctrination . . . there could be no better introduction to Handke.' - Irving Wardle, The Times.Kaspar is the most extraordinary and impressive play to date by Peter Handke. First staged in Germany in 1968, it was hailed by Max Frisch as 'the play of the decade'. The central character is Kaspar, a figure based on the historical Kaspar Hauser, an autistic adolescent, who is guided and taught until he speaks 'normally', by the voices of unseen prompters. As the words begin to coincide with reality, Kaspar learns to manipulate both. In the latter part of the play the tension between the individual and 'the others' is further expressed through the image of the original Kaspar surrounded by a host of identical 'Kaspars'.Having chosen language as a vehicle, Peter Handke explores it as a means of oppression - a means of creating artificial uniformity by teaching people to comprehend the world only in terms of the speech patterns they are given.

"Unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably one of her finest" (New York Times Book Review) These hilarious and vicious two plays examine the corruption of Nigerian society through a study of the rise and fall of one of its self-made charismatic preachers."Wole Soyinka's Nobel Prize for Literature is a triumphant affirmation of the universality of this novelist, poet, film-maker and political activist." (Guardian)

Reissue of this Methuen classic to tie in with a major new productionThe republic of Andorra is invaded by totalitarian forces. The populace capitulates to the anti-Semitism of the aggressor and betrays Andri, the foundling son of the local schoolmaster. But Andri it seems, is not a Jew at all.Andorra explores the mechanism of racism with the story of a non-Jew brought up as a Jew, who falls victim to anti-Semitic hostility.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury died, Henry II forced his companion and political lieutenant, Thomas Becket to take his place. Becket told his King: 'If I become archbishop, I shall cease to be your friend.' Becekt, who with Henry had fought the church for the good of the State, now felt responsible for the honour of God. Conflict was inevitable and was followed, just as inevitably, by murder and remorse.

The play was intended as a tragedy on the purposeless of life imposed on the women of his time, both by their upbringing and by the social conventions which limited their activities. When it was first produced it met with misunderstanding and abuse. It has nevertheless become one of the most popular of Ibsen's plays.

The Lehrstucke (or 'learning-plays') lie at the heart of Brechtian theatre. Written during 1929 and 1930, years of far-reaching political and economic upheaveal in Germany and the period of Brecht's most sharply Communist works, these short plays show an abrupt rejection of most of the trappings of conventional theatre. The Lehrstucke are spare and highly formalized pieces intended for performance by amateurs, on the principle that the moral and political lessons contained in them can best be taught by participation in an actual production. There is nothing in the drama of the twentieth century to match the precision of their language and the economy of their theatrical technique.

"Frayn's translation, which strikes me as splendidly lucid and alive...will be acted again and again" (New Statesman) In Chekhov's tragi-comedy - perhaps his most popular play - the Gayev family is torn by powerful forces deeply rooted in history and the society in which they live. Their estate is hopelessly in debt and when urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, they are confronted by an impossible decision. "At the time when The Cherry Orchard was written, the years before the revolution of 1905, Chekhov considered revolution in Russia irreversible and desirable." (Melchinger: Anton Chekhov)

Described as 'the funniest woman dramatist since Shelagh Delaney (Michael Billington, Guardian), Debbie Horsfield has created a formidable quartet, Alice, Nita, Phil and Beth: these are the 'Red Devils' four young women from Salford whose personal and political development is charted through a series of love affairs, employment crises, domestic dramas and steadfast devotion to Manchester United. The plays in the Red Devils Trilogy can be read and enjoyed in isolation: they were premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1983 and were then played in London: Red Devils at the Man in Moon in 1984, and True Dare Kiss and Command or Promise at the National Theatre in 1985.In the first play, Red Devils, the four are football crazy teenagers. 'They will give their all, or almost, to see their home team playing Arsenal in the 1979 Cup Final. But Debbie Horsfield's play... uses the sporting contest to view the lives and limited horizons of the quartet, their conflicts and tensions' The Times.'Totally absorbing, funny, disturbing and true' Financial TimesIn True Dare Kiss and Command or Promise, the four girls have become women: Alice is disastrously married to Kevin, Nita wants to set up her own hairdressers, Phil has left home for the alien world of university and Beth is into punk gear and football. These two plays have been 'accused and applauded for their resemblance to soap opera, but Debbie Horsfield's wit and her abililty to carry several strands of storytelling simultaneously sets her apart as a talent to watch' Words'Funny, bitingly intelligent, full of raw, vital experience' The Times'New writing at its most promising' Sunday Times

These five short plays date from Brenton's early involvement in such 'shoestring' groups as Portable Theatre. They are deliberately intended for the 'poor theatre' - as relevant today as when they were first written - since each play requires a small cast and minimal set, yet yields maximum theatricality.Christie in Love, Gum and Goo, Heads and The Education of Skinny Spew, were all first staged in 1969. The Saliva Milkshake was first staged in 1975.

Written in 1892, The Weavers was a response to an extraordinary, disorganised and doomed rebellion by factory workers in Silesia in the 1840s. Fifty years later, conditions had not significantly changed and Hauptmann's dramatisation, which places the workers centre stage, was a radical departure from German romantic drama. It is now considered a classic of socialist theatre and the first play with a collective hero.This edition also provides an introduction to the play and to Hauptmann's life and work.'Hauptmann has written two or three masterpieces - a little immortal thing like The Weavers for instance' James Joyce'His work stands with that of Ibsen and Strindberg as the source and inspiration of all modern drama' Eugene O'Neill.

Strathoykel, Sutherland. "When the Sheriff and his men arrived, the women were on the road and the men behind the walls. The women shouted 'Better to die here than America or the Cape of Good Hope'. The first blow was struck by a woman with a stick. The gentry leant out of their saddles and beat at the women's heads with their crops." (John McGrath)

Schnitzler's masterpiece, La Ronde, shows a spectrum of social class from prostitutes to noblemen in a series of drily observed, loveless sexual encounters. Remembered by many as the basis of a famous film in 1950, the real notoriety of La Ronde goes back to 1900 when it was privately printed and subsequently banned. It was not performed until 1920 in Berlin, where anti-Semitic riots broke out, resulting in the arrest and trial of the cast and director, allegedly for obscenity. The controversy continued with David Hare's adaptation, The Blue Room, which starred Nicole Kidman, at the Donmar Warehouse.This translation is by the playwright and critic Frank Marcus, who has also provided a full introduction to Schnitzler's life and work.

'Germany in the Thirties. Nothing, I should have thought, was harder to dramatise. Witness all those turgid films and telly-plays full of stuffed SS uniforms. But C. P. Taylor's Good is an original and intelligent play, light in texture but serious in content, that tries to work out how decent, liberal, humane men came to be swept up by the Nazi juggernaut.' - Michael Billington, Guardian'Taylor's play is about moral compromise in a political fog, and like all good plays is as much abou tnow as then.' - Snoo Wilson, Time Out'A fine mature new play from one of our best (though underrated) dramatists.' John Elsom, ListenerThe first production of Good, with Alan Howard in the lead, was by the Royal Shakespeare Company at their London Warehouse in September 1981. The production was revived in January 1982.