Drama

The master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In "The Frogs", written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to the...

How do our experiences of pain and love affect our future? This is the key question. Alice Miller shows us people who have suffered great loneliness in childhood and now,...

"Terry Johnson is that rare creature: a moralist with wit. He writes with responsible gaiety" (Guardian) In Hysteria one of Freud's earliest "cases" returns to haunt the psychoanalyst but finds...

Literature for life

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved...

Toibin's drama brilliantly re-enacts and evokes the personalities and workings of the Abbey Theatre in 1926. Lady Gregory, Yeats and O'Casey defend their daring play against the stifling mores of...

Completed only two months before the author's execution in Granada at the age of thirty-eight, La casa de Bernarda Alba marks the completion of Lorca's 'trilogia de la tierra espanola'...

The four plays in this volume, written late in Ibsen's career as a dramatist, move away from his earlier preoccupation with people at odds with society to instead explore the...

The four comedies collected in this text were written between 1595 and 1602, and demonstrate the evolution of Shakespearean comic form. The collective triumph of these plays lies in their...

All four of Oscar Wilde's famous plays in one volume, with an introduction by Emma French.This volume contains the full text of four of Wilde's irrepressible comedies.The Importance of Being...

Finding good, interesting audition pieces is a demanding and difficult process for actors. Jean Marlow has brought together 50 selections, the majority of which have never appeared in an audition...

In the world of amateur theatre, the role of director is challenging and wide-ranging. As the leader of a team, you can face problems on any aspect of the production...

The one-act play stands apart as a distinct art form with some well known writers providing specialist material, among them Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill. Alan Ayckbourn,...

The book explores how theatre, with its performative capacity, has the power to engage with and affect the politics of its day. It sets the stage for the reader to...

'Do you ever wonder what would happen if we could live our lives all over again but be fully conscious of it the second time?I bet we'd try to do...

Humour, pathos and suffering, and the culminating drama of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, give these plays a wonderful immediacy. Their action was conceived on a cosmic scale and all the...

'Tell me worldlings, underneath the sun, If greater falsehood ever has been done' The Jew of Malta, written around 1590, can present a challenge for modern audiences. Hugely popular in...