Drama

John Galsworthy (1867-1933), novelist and dramatist, is most widely known as the author of The Forsyte Saga, but recent productions testify to the power that his plays still exert over...

'It was like we were two children - two innocent children just...playing' Mrs C wants a baby not a Christmas tree. B wants a real hairdresser's scissors and a wife....

Adapted for the stage from the best-selling memoir, The Speckled People tells a profoundly moving story of a young boy trapped in a language war. Set in 1950s Ireland, this...

Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is 'simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy...

The story of Oedipus has captured the human imagination as few others. It is the story of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother, a man...

This exquisitely illustrated edition of Bill Bryson's best-selling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling journey through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship. Bill Bryson's...

In Dona Rosita the Spinster, set in Granada around 1900, Lorca paints a sympathetic picture of a young girl as she waits in vain for her fiance to return and...

A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of theatrical craft which, for the first time portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle class marriage on stage. The play ushered in...

This major new edition of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy of love argues that that play is ultimately Juliet's. The play text is expertly edited and the on-page commentary notes discuss issues...

Powerful, passionate and frighteningly relevant, the drama of Arthur Miller deals in the hard currency of 'social' realism and tragedy. "All My Sons" (1947), which brought Miller his first major...

A provocative, highly engaging essay on the art of pretending on the stage, on screen, and in daily life Does acting matter? David Thomson, one of our most respected and...

The screenplay of Poliakoff's award-winning BBC drama about the forgotten son of King George V and Queen Mary The Lost Prince follows the life and times of Prince John, the...

Classical tragedy is timelessly powerful - not only does it still move us, but it heals, too. Bryan Doerries produces performances of Greek tragedies for soldiers returned from conflict, addicts,...

Tang Xianzu (1550-1616) is acclaimed as the 'Shakespeare of the East' and widely regarded as China's greatest playwright, yet his work has not reached Western readers in its entirety. The...

Dramatically compressing the reign of Edward II and enlivening the historical narrative with humour, romance, and horrific violence, Marlowe interrogates how the transgression of accepted codes of behaviour affects even...

Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge lost his life in Flanders Fields in 1917. One of Ireland's finest poets, Ledwidge left the familiarity of his Co. Meath home and loved ones and...

This collection brings together three of Tom Murphy's finest plays, Famine, A Whistle in the Dark and Conversations on a Homecoming. Together, they tell the story of Irish emigration -...

Over a decade, Fishamble commissioned and called for submissions of tiny plays that reflected major changes in Irish society from 2011-2021. Inviting playwrights to submit plays of less than 600...

'Training for Performance is the first work of its kind; not in the sense that it addresses training for performance, but in that it invites a critical questioning of the...

Vronsky What were you thinking about with your head stuck to the watering can? Anna Oh, the same, always the same. I was thinking about my happiness and about my...

People find me. When it's dark.1863. An asylum.A woman locked in a windowless cell, with no memory as to who she is, or how she arrived there.When spiritualist medium Mrs...

People find me. When it's dark.1863. An asylum.A woman locked in a windowless cell, with no memory as to who she is, or how she arrived there.When spiritualist medium Mrs...

Verbal brilliance, urbane sophistication and sexual conquest are the measures of success for the fashionable set who watched themselves being represented on the Restoration stage. Yet idealisation and satire, as...

If theatre were a religion, explains David Mamet in his opening chapter, 'many of the observations and suggestions in this book might be heretical'. As always, Mamet delivers on his...

In Force, Drive, Desire, Rudolf Bernet develops a philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis focusing on human drives. Rather than simply drawing up a list of Freud's borrowings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,...

Disco Pigs is the award-winning play about two warped teenagers that confirmed Enda Walsh's place in the forefront of young Irish dramatists and was filmed in 2001 with Cillian Murphy...

In 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger changed the course of English theatre.'Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is. To have done this at all...

A step-by-step guide to Physical Theatre in both theory and practice - full of detailed exercises and inspiring ideas. In Through the Body, based on twelve years of teaching physical...

Do you belong to an amateur theatre group wanting to 'do an Ayckbourn'? Are you the Artistic Director of a professional theatre seeking to slot an Ayckbourn into next season?...

The three plays in this volume focus on the tumultuous relationships between men and women, whether they are father and daughter, brother and sister or lovers. Miss Julie is a...

The text of a talk given by renowned theatre director Peter Brook in Berlin in 1998, addressing essential questions about performing Shakespeare today. Brook invites us to consider the actual...

'All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players' Rosalind, banished by her cruel uncle, travels secretly to the Forest of Arden, where her exiled father...

A profound, luminous masterpiece by one of Ireland's greatest playwrights.This edition was published in 2023 with a beautifully redesigned text and cover, to coincide with the National Theatre' revival. It...

A moving yet straightforward dramatisation of Barry Hines's popular novel, Kes, the story of how fifteen-year-old Billy Casper trains a kestrel. It is not the training of the young hawk...

Breezeblock Park is set on a northern council estate and takes a look at the suffocating effect of possessions and possessiveness: "Trenchantly observed...hilarious, upsetting and somewhat seditious." (Variety); Our Day...

Boisterous and unrestrained like the age itself, the Elizabethan theatre has long defended its place at the apex of English dramatic history. Shakespeare was but the brightest star in this...

In the stormy years before Ireland at last gained her independence a brilliant revival of Irish drama took place and culminated in the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904....