Oberon Modern Playwrights – serie

‘Hanoch Levin is the modern world on the stage... we badly need to hear what he has to say.’ David LanHanoch Levin was one of Israel’s leading dramatists. Born in Tel Aviv in 1943, his work includes comedies, tragedies, and satirical cabarets, most of which he directed himself. He received numerous theatre awards both in Israel and abroad and his plays have been staged around the world. Levin was awarded the Bialik Prize in 1994. Published in brand-new English translations, these selected volumes of Hanoch Levin, one of Israel's leading dramatists, aim to bring one of the most important playwrights of the Middle East to English speaking audiences.Plays Two contains the plays Suitcase Packers (1983), The Lost Women of Troy (1984), The Labour of Life (1989), Walkers in the Dark (1998) and Requiem (1999).

The extraordinary career and impressive literary output of the 'Father' of Polish comedy, Aleksander Fredro, are the subject of much celebration in Poland in 1993, the bicentenary of his birth. These new translations by Noel Clark of three of Fredro's best known plays should do much to repair the relative ignorance of his works in this country. Virgins' Vows - generally regarded as Fredro's most accomplished comedy - and The Annuity, both reflect the author's awareness of the disadvantages suffered by young women in a male-dominated society. Revenge is a seemingly innocent social comedy about a property dispute, but the Russian censors of his day were not slow to spot the subversive potential of the play. Noel Clark's translations of Revenge and Virgins' Vow's have been broadcast, to much acclaim, by the BBC World Service.

The only collection of plays by "the father of Portuguese theatre" available in English, this deeply religious trilogy judges the whole of humanity at the point of death.

The latest collection of plays from one of the most celebrated, influential and studied playwrights in the English-speaking world. Howard Barker's plays continue to challenge, unsettle and expose.Barker's theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year in a sordid room. Inevitably they are inspected by God, but in a shape none could have predicted and only he can delight in. In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker's nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful words which arrive in sealed envelopes to prepare her for a succession of ordeals. Deep Wives and Knowledge and a Girl are short pieces, firmly established in the European theatre repertoire. In the first, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog. In Knowledge and a Girl, Barker reinterprets the Snow White fable from the perspective of the Stepmother.

Robert Icke's thrilling and radical adaptations of some of the great texts of Western theatre have enthralled theatregoers in London, in New York and around the world. This is the first collection of his multi-awardwinning work.Includes:Oresteia: Orestes' parents are at war. A family drama spanning several decades, a huge, moving, bloody saga, Aeschylus' greatest and final play asks whether justice can ever be done - and continues to resonate more than two millennia after it was written.Uncle Vanya: Chekhov's late masterpiece examines human behaviour in all of its beautiful, terrible, laughable contradiction. Mary Stuart: Schiller's political tragedy takes us behind the scenes of British history's famous rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. The Wild Duck: A new version of Ibsen's masterpiece about the nature of truth, in which a stranger intervenes to reveal the lies in the past of a family, with tragic consequences.The Doctor: Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke has written a gripping moral thriller that uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality.

‘If one of the problems facing new playwrights is the expectation that each of their plays should be similar in style, Wade…proved that you could radically change both form and content… Not every writer delivers on their early promise. As this collection clearly shows, Wade certainly has.’ Aleks Sierz, from his IntroductionColder Than Here: ‘Laura Wade’s play is a 90-minute masterpiece, a jewel, dark bu ttranslucent. It is a play of love, death and grief: the grief that is hardest to bear, because it begins before the loved one dies.’ Sunday TimesBreathing Corpses: ‘The tension, the emotions and the sense of absurdity and fear are brilliantly handled... A terrifying tour de force.’ Sunday TimesOther Hands: ‘This is an extraordinary feat – a vicious satire with a heart of gold –wrought with peculiar subtlety and intelligence.’ The Spectator

Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, A Red Butterfly's Wings, Warm, Telemakos and SleepIn their different ways, these plays are existential suspense stories, centred around a common concept of time. The past is recreated through present moments, the future hinted at through shared memories, yet experienced from different perspectives. Fosse’s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters’ relationships.The whole life of Suzannah Ibsen unfolds as she waits for her playwriting husband to come home. In Sleep, one day captures the lives of a young woman and a young man as they grow into middle-age and old age. Living Secretly asks questions about how to live with and open up to one’s actions through sequences of time. In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the directions of their future. Warm’s characters move back and forth through time to capture past images and actions, in an effort to make sense of the present. Telemakos reinvents an old classic from a contemporary point of view. Fosse’s damatic voice is full of poetic intensity, yet wryly ironic, and with a sense of the comedy of the human condition. Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, Telemakos, Sleep and A Red Butterfly s Wings.

Jon Fosse has been called ‘the Beckett of the 21st century’ (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed ‘Waiting for Godot without the gags’. Just as Beckett’s plays — and those of all great playwrights — grew out of their time, and influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward, so do Fosse’s plays now. Fosse: Plays Six marks the culmination of this Norwegian playwright’s body of work for the stage to be published in the English language.The volume includes the plays Rambuku, Freedom, Over There, These Eyes, Girl in Yellow Raincoat, Christmas Tree Song and Sea.Rambuku: Two people. One finds it difficult to speak. The other attempts to understand. But what is Rambuku? Or who is Rambuku?Freedom: There is a sense of otherness in Fosse’s work that challenges our notions of a concept such as ‘freedom’. This play questions if freedom, as we often understand it, is perhaps a prison.Over There: A woman follows a man to his death. But do they see the same images on the way to the top of the mountain?These Eyes: A snapshot of the dreamlike state of life. The characters exist in an in-between space which becomes their reality.Girl in Yellow Raincoat: An examination of our collective weakness, and the fragility of children. It asks questions about notions surrounding fear.Christmas Tree Song: A man celebrates Christmas alone (and reflects in a somewhat ironic way) on his life as he attempts to put up a Christmas tree.Sea: A group of people gathered in a kind of limbo, on a ship, disappearing into something unknown.

Trash Cuisine is winner of the Impatto Totale Award 2013 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2013.Trash Cuisine:Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada Devised by Belarus Free Theatre Banned from performing in their own country, Belarus Free Theatre serve up food, music, dance and Shakespeare as they share true stories from inmates, executioners, human rights lawyers and families of the executed. This provocative and urgent play pierces the imagination with moments of the darkest humour as it challenges capital punishment in our contemporary world, where 95 countries still carry out the death penalty.Minsk 2011 (A Reply to Kathy Acker):Devised and written by Belarus Free Theatre Dramaturgy by Vladimir Shcherban If scars are sexy, Minsk must be the sexiest city in the world...Strip clubs, underground raves and gay pride parades pulse beneath the surface of a city, where sexuality is twisted by oppression. A love letter to a home that exiles those willing to fight for it, Minsk, 2011 celebrates and mourns a land that has lost its way...

When theatre began, two and a half millenia ago in ancient Greece, it drew from a well of even older myths, the Great Epic Cycle. These stories and characters from the beginning of our imagination inspired John Barton to write the great cycle of human life, Tantalus, an epic theatre myth for the new millenium, and one of the most ambitious theatrical ventures of our times produced by the RSC and The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, directed by Sir Peter and Edward Hall. (UK tour Jan-May 2001)

Sex, political violence in Stockholm, Tel Aviv and Paris.Political murder in suburban London.Death, love and homicide in New York.War in the belly of a whale. These are the themes in Julia Pascal's latest collection which takes place in London in 1946, Europe in 1982, Manhattan today and in a whale at anytime.Honeypot: Ten years after the massacres at the Munich Olympics, Susanne joins Mossad as a secret agent. This beautiful Swedish woman is at the heart of a struggle between desire and destruction, between love and infidelity, between motherhood and freedom. Between Arab and Jew.Broken English: An exploration of a secret history that happened in London just after the end of the war. Why was there a plot to assassinate Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary by right-wing Jewish activists? When does loyalty to nation state conflict with loyalty to nation? Nineveh: What happens when four former soldiers are trapped in a whale? How can they live with the atrocities they have committed and escape from this hell which imprisons them? Based on research in Kashmir, Israel, Rwanda and Lebanon, this Beckettian play fuses absurd humour, the horror of war and the possibility of redemption in a ninety-minute drama.Woman on the Bridge: Judith, a London journalist, goes to the Brooklyn Bridge. Does she want to jump off? On her disturbing journey she spends a night with a very young man, she meets Anna, her hundred-and-ten-year old great aunt and Gloria, a homicide cop. Her encounters with these New Yorkers forces her to change her life.

NEW IN PAPERBACKFirst performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, The Cherry Orchard remains a classic of the theatre. Completed less than a year before his death at the age of forty-four, Chekhov's last 'comedy' still ranks supreme as a human tragedy of dispossession with audiences and actors alike. Peter Gill’s luminous version brings the psychological realism of Chekhov’s characters into sharp focus; fragile souls poised on the brink of happiness which never comes, or trapped in a void between the old world and the new.

Dea Loher is one of the most powerful and individual voices in German theatre today. This volume brings together three of her plays to be performed in English.Olga’s RoomCommunist. Jew. Revolutionary. Lover. Mother. Olga Benario’s story is a searing tale of survival as alongside her fellow prisoners she struggles to hold onto her disintegrating sense of self. Based on real events of the 1930s-40s, Dea Loher’s gripping first play spans Brazilian revolution and Nazi dictatorship. Innocence A city by the sea. 14 people on the edge. Illegal immigrants afraid of being arrested for a good deed. A philosopher who burns her own books. A woman seeking forgiveness for crimes she didn’t commit. A young married man who finds fulfilment laying out corpses. A blind stripper who spends her life being watched by men she cannot see. Innocence is a darkly comic panorama of urban restlessness.Land Without Words War meets art in this intimate parable. A painter seeks the perfect image, but in K., a Middle Eastern city, she experiences the effects of war, violence and poverty, impossible to depict. Now she is forced to confront her lifelong beliefs in the value of art, and how to deal with her position in the world today.

Using only Charles Dickens’ extraordinary words and a chameleon ensemble of actors, Neil Bartlett's powerful stage versions of Dickens have gathered wide critical acclaim. This collection includes:Great Expectations: From its opening image of little Pip, alone on the windswept marshes, to the haunted darkness of mad Miss Haversham's cobweb-strewn lair, this adaptation takes its audience on a journey right to the heart of Dickens’ great exploration of childhood terrors and hopes – and of adult dreams and regrets. This version was recently directed by Bartlett himself to great acclaim at the Bristol Old Vic.A Christmas Carol: Dickens's story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has proved one of his most well-loved works, and has profoundly influenced our attitude towards the season. Oliver Twist: Bartlett’s powerful version of Oliver Twist brings the dark underbelly of nineteenth-century London back to bold theatrical life. The unforgettable characters inhabit a world filled with images of danger and fear, innocence and hope; a world seen through the eyes of an astonished child. Between them, these adaptations have had over a hundred productions. They have been widely performed by schools, universities and community theatre groups throughout the English-speaking world and theatres that have produced them include London’s Lyric Hammersmith, the Bristol Old Vic, the Southwark Playhouse, the Glasgow Citizens, the American Repertory Theatre in Boston and the La Jolla Playhouse (USA).

Jon Fosse has been called 'the Beckett of the 21st century' (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed 'Waiting for Godot without the gags'. Just as Beckett's plays - and those of all great playwrights - grew out of their time, and influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward, so do Fosse's plays now. Fosse: Plays Six marks the culmination of this Norwegian playwright's body of work for the stage to be published in the English language. The volume includes the plays Rambuku, Freedom, Over There, These Eyes, Girl in Yellow Raincoat, Christmas Tree Song and Sea. Rambuku: Two people. One finds it difficult to speak. The other attempts to understand. But what is Rambuku? Or who is Rambuku? Freedom: There is a sense of otherness in Fosse's work that challenges our notions of a concept such as 'freedom'. This play questions if freedom, as we often understand it, is perhaps a prison. Over There: A woman follows a man to his death. But do they see the same images on the way to the top of the mountain? These Eyes: A snapshot of the dreamlike state of life. The characters exist in an in-between space which becomes their reality. Girl in Yellow Raincoat: An examination of our collective weakness, and the fragility of children. It asks questions about notions surrounding fear. Christmas Tree Song: A man celebrates Christmas alone (and reflects in a somewhat ironic way) on his life as he attempts to put up a Christmas tree. Sea: A group of people gathered in a kind of limbo, on a ship, disappearing into something unknown.

The 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.

Roland Schimmelpfennig is the most performed contemporary German playwright. This collection demonstrates the breadth and formal innovation of his writing.The Animal Kingdom depicts the unremitting battle for human survival in a merciless environment: the theatre.Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God has been likened to a post-colonial Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Here two doctors who have returned from Africa reveal the true cost of their failure to combat a terrible and frightening disease.Idomeneus is a narrative play written for a large chorus which re-tells the classical Idomeneus myth in contemporary terms; a fractured, mythic tidal wave, brought to life with astounding theatricality by an ensemble of storytellers.A small narrative piece, The Four Points of the Compass is an urban fable of crossed destinies and uncanny coincidences and a compelling contemporary tale of lust for life and the fragility of existence.

The second collection of plays from the German Expressionist playwright. Includes the plays: The Machine Breakers, The German Hinkemann, The Revenge of the Lover Scorned, Wotan Unbound, Day of the Proletariat and German Revolution.Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was a formative figure in the development of theatrical modernism. He was also a revolutionary activist who experienced fully the unbearable cataclysms of his times: war, revolution, imprisonment, the chaos of Weimar life, Nazi persecution, exile and the Holocaust. His revolutionary intensity infuses these three innovative plays, all of which inspired landmark productions and substantially extended the language of theatricality. These stage-worthy new translations capture that spirit of artistic and political combustion and should help to restore Toller's rightful place in the modern repertoire.

The third volume in the successful Theatre Café series contains three contemporary European plays in English translation. All fairly short two-handers, the plays make a great volume for teachers and students looking for suitable material to work on in schools, colleges, and youth theatre groups. The volume contains:Clyde and Bonnie by Holger Schober (translated by Zoe Svendsen)Mothers, hide your children! Fathers, hide your savings! Clyde and Bonnie are back in town! A brief synopsis of what happened before: Clyde, whose real name is Werner, and Bonnie, which is her real name - parents can be so cruel - meet each other, fall in love, and start robbing banks. On the occasion of their 10th bank robbery, Bonnie gets shot and killed. Clyde takes refuge in a bar and is actually still sitting there. So much for part one. But what Clyde did not know is that he and Bonnie have a daughter, who is now 16 and somehow feels that she doesn't fit in with the family she lives with. She doesn't know that they are her foster family. If the first part of the play was a love story, then the second is the story of a father and a daughter: An evening about responsibility, love and also about how to stay cool when the cops are hot on your heels. The play won the Austrian Theatre for Young People award ‘Stella’ in two categories (incl best production in Theatre for Young People), 2009.Helver’s Night (Polish) by Ingmar Villqist (Translated by Jacek Laskowski)Helver’s Night is an expressionist drama about the relationship between Carla and her young charge, Helver. Helver is fascinated by fascism – not by the ideology, which he is unable to grasp, but by the show-off aspects of the movement. In the end he becomes a victim of this fascination.Busstopkisser (German) by Ralf N.Höhfeld (Translated by Vanessa Fagan)A boy. A girl. A bus stop. 18 Kisses over 18 months. Coffee and conversation by candlelight, a picnic under the Eiffel Tower. Then the girl vanishes. But was she ever really there? Can anyone without an email address or mobile phone actually be real? A funny, unusual take on the classic boy-meets-girl scenario, Busstopkisser takes the audience on a mind-bending tweet-sized journey through adolescent romance.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has written extensively for stage, screen and radio. Her first play Behsharam (Shameless) broke box office records when it was produced in 2001. Her second play Behzti (Dishonour) won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2005. Behzti rocked the world of theatre when it was cancelled after protestsin Birmingham, forcing the playwright into hiding. The play’s closure sparked an international debate about offence and freedom of expression. In 2014, Khandan(Family) was co-produced by the Birmingham Rep and the Royal Court Theatre. This is her first collected works’ volume.Behsharam (Shameless) Two daughters, two mothers, one father, a cardboard cut-out and a foul-mouthed granny – a household at war and a family which will do anything to protect its secrets.Behzti (Dishonour) Past her prime, Min happily spends her life caring for her frail, vicious mother, Balbir. Today, for the first time in years, they’re heading out to the local Sikh temple. In a community where public honour is paramount, is there any room for the truth?Behud (Beyond Belief) A playwright attempts to make sense of her past by visitingthe darkest corners of her imagination. Inspired by the events surroundingBehzti, Behud is the compelling story of an artist struggling to be heard.Fourteen. 1983. Brainbox Tina’s parents are always shouting, her mum says she’s developing too quickly and her best friend Sharon has a dark secret. Thirty years later, Tina’s life hasn’t turned out quite how it was supposed to...Khandan (Family) Widowed matriarch Jeeto has a strong sense of her past and principles. She’s spent her life working hard and making sacrifices for her children. But eldest son Pal isn’t following in her footsteps. What happens when the legacy of a father collides with the dreams of his son?

Molora - Based on The Oresteia by AeschylusIn this reworking of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Klytemnestra and Elektra face one another in a dramatic confrontation. Attempts to come to terms with their violent past echo testimonies delivered in Apartheid’s wake throughout South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.RAM: The Abduction of Sita into Darkness - Based on The Ramayana by ValmikiFarber’s potent revisioning of this age-old text is a raw and probing contemporary work which places the loss of the Feminine Divine, and thus our lack of spiritual and moral equilibrium, at its visceral core. This is a Ramayana for a new world.Mies Julie - Based on Miss Julie by August StrindbergTransposed to a post-apartheid kitchen – a single night, both brutal and tender, unfolds between a black farm-labourer, the daughter of his master and the woman who has raised them both. The visceral struggles of contemporary South Africa are laid bare, as John and Mies Julie spiral in a deadly battle over power, sexuality, mothers and memory.

A volume of four new plays as part of the RSC’s Midsummer Mischief by Alice Birch, E. V. Crowe, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Abi Zakarian.The writers had the famous quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Well-behaved women seldom make history” as an initial provocation and each writer has responded to this line in a unique and distinctive way.Contents:The Ant and the Cicada by Timberlake WertenbakerA mysterious investor has set his sights on a prime piece of Greek real estate. Owned by two sisters whose lives and beliefs are at odds, and with debts rising all the time, the property's future is uncertain. In a Greek tragedy, everybody loses.Through the struggle between two very different sisters for control of their family home, Timberlake Wertenbaker's new play explores why we are willing to let the home of art and democracy crumble as the rest of Europe looks on.Revolt. She said. Revolt again. by Alice BirchYou are expected to behave… Use the right words Act appropriately Don't break the rules Just behave This play is not well behavedAlice Birch examines the language, behaviour and forces that shape women in the 21st century and asks what's stopping us from doing something truly radical to change them.Winner of the George Devine Award for Most Promising New Playwright 2014I can hear you by E.V. CroweTommy is dead. It's always tragic when they die young.People have posted loads of nice stuff on his Facebook page. His sister Ruth has returned for the funeral and wants to get it just right. Proper cutlery and a good spread. The send-off he deserved, and certainly better than they managed when mum died.The following Sunday Ruth's plans to leave again are interrupted as the doorbell rings and in walks a still very much dead, Tommy.E.V. Crowe's naturalistic supernatural play examines what the possibilities are for the women in Tommy's family, and questions if it's as easy for everyone to reveal what it is they want.This is not an exit by Abi ZakarianYou wake up, tied to a radiator. Your hands are bound and there is a bag over your head.You know you should fight, but you don't know how or against whom. But you can't have it all: where would you put it?Abi Zakarian's new play is a funny and ferocious drama about the absurdity at the heart of modern womanhood, and what really stands in the way of fulfilment.

Tiny Dynamite: An impossible love story is given a second chance and three scorched characters are about to learn that lightning does strike twice.Splendour: Inside a beautiful state residence on the edge of a city, four women wait. They talk: films, Prada, chilli vodka, anything. Outside civil war looms ever nearer.Tender: In a city of fast talk and chance encounters, how much faith can we put in other people? Abi Morgan’s acerbic play takes a scalpel to modern love and friendship.Lovesong: The story of one couple, told from two different points in their lives – as young lovers in their twenties and as worldly companions looking back on their relationship.27: Dr Richard Garfield has given Ursula a difficult choice. She is the Mother Superior in waiting of a convent that has been given the opportunity to take part in his revolutionary scientific study. Ursula must weigh up the value of preserving her faith, versus embracing science.

Includes the plays: Give Up! Start Over! (In the darkest of times I look to Richard Nixon for hope); A Thousand Natural Shocks; Particularly in the Heartland; Architecting; Mission Drift.Founded in 2004, the TEAM is an internationally-acclaimed Brooklyn-based collaborative ensemble. Once described as “Gertrude Stein meets MTV,” the TEAM's mission is to make new work about the experience of living in America today. Released in celebration of the company's 10th anniversary, Five Plays by the TEAM includes a timeline of events, exclusive production and rehearsal images, personal introductions to the plays by members of the company, and a foreword by John Tiffany (Blackwatch, Once).

'The effect of the entire creation is perhaps best measured by occasional involuntary gasps coming from the audience…' The StageBELIEVE – Traitor, adulteress, widow and martyr: a contemporary re-imagining of the stories of four female characters from the Old Testament. Re-cast in a psychologically truthful light, their tales are shocking even by today’s sensationalist standards. From seduction, torture and decapitation to infanticide and rape, these are women surviving in violent times. Believe explores what ‘God’ and faith means to the prostitute Rahab, the army wife Bathsheba, the seductress Judith and the martyr Hannah. A play for one actress.'…in turns funny, knowing and profoundly sad.' The Sunday Telegraph (Five Stars)THE MAN JESUS – This extraordinary play looks at key moments in the life of Jesus through the eyes of the men and women around him. A startling and moving account of New Testament stories including the beheading of John the Baptist, the Sermon on the Mount and his final journey to Jerusalem. Hurt’s powerful portrayal of the tyrants, traitors and madmen in Jesus’ life asks people of all faiths and none: what sort of man was able to inspire the history of the world? A play for one actor.

The first collection of plays from Booker Prize and Orange Prize finalist and author of international bestseller Room, Emma Donoghue.Contains the plays Kissing the Witch, Don’t Die Wondering, Trespasses, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I Know My Own HeartKISSING THE WITCHAdapted from her book of thirteen revisionist fairy tales of the same name, this play interweaves four classic plots – Beauty and the Beast, Donkeyskin, the Goose Girl, the Little Mermaid – with an invented one about a desperate girl going to a witch for help. Kissing the Witch finds the gritty in the fantastical, and excavates magic to find what’s really going on.TRESPASSESSet over three days in 1661, Trespasses is inspired by the judge’s own account of one of the tiny handful of witch trials that ever took place in Ireland. It asks why a servant girl who fell into fits would have put the blame on an old beggarwoman – but also, more timeless questions about the clashing cultures that have to share a small island country. Trespasses is about faith and superstition, politics and class, sadism and love.LADIES AND GENTLEMENThis play with songs, set mostly in the dressing rooms of busy vaudeville theatres all over North America, was inspired by a real same-sex wedding that took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1886. It resurrects a ragtag troupe of emigrants - most notably, male impersonator Annie Hindle, ‘a man’s widow and a woman’s widower’, as the tabloids called her. With a light touch, Ladies and Gentleman explores the ways we perform our roles, both on and off stage. I KNOW MY OWN HEARTInspired by the secret coded diaries of Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister, this play subverts all the conventions of Regency romance. Teasing out the entangled lives of mannish, arrogant Lister (nicknamed 'Gentleman Jack') and three of her many lovers, I Know My Own Heart explores the different choices women made in a time of limits and prohibitions. DON’T DIE WONDERINGWhen a restaurant cook loses her job because of a homophobic customer, she mounts a one-woman picket in protest. The police officer assigned to protect her is her nemesis from schooldays. This one-act comedy, set in a fictional small town, stages a battle between old and new elements of Irish culture.

Inside a beautiful state residence on the edge of a city, four women wait. They talk: films, Prada, chilli vodka, anything. Outside civil war looms ever nearer. With wit and delight in the unusual, Splendour encompasses both the cruel veneer of our lives and the beating heart within.In Tender, in a city of fast talk and chance encounters, how much faith can we put in other people? Abi Morgan’s acerbic play takes a scalpel to modern love and friendship.

John Osborne (1929-1994) was the leading playwright of the post-war British theatre revival: a rennaissance that is said to have started when his Look Back in Anger was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre. It led to the coining of the phrase 'angry young man', which applied not only to Osborne but also to many new writers who criticised the system.But Osborne was not a conventional revolutionary; his attack on the present was in fact a mourning for the loss of past values, a stance that became clearer in his later plays. The Blood of the Bambergs, the first of the two companion "Plays for England" (1963), is a satirical account of a royal wedding. The second play, Under Plain Cover depicts a marriage in crisis that becomes a tabloid 'human interest’ story. Watch it Come Down (1975) is the story of a man waiting for death, while his friends trash and scar each other around him.

Includes the plays A Sense of Detachment, The End of Me Old Cigar, Jill and Jack and A Place Calling Itself RomeOsborne here delivers his trademark eloquence, rage and devastating wit. A Sense of Detachment satirises our heartless, profiteering society, while defending timeless human values. The End of Me Old Cigar examines the decadent lives of a collection of leading media figures. The television play Jill and Jack is a comic gem that satirises the conventions of its own genre while also being a close study of sexual warfare.A Place Calling Itself Rome is a powerful reworking of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.