Secondhand Drama Books

A thrilling friend of her parents casts a spell over a young girl. A study in the glamour of brutal ideas.Susie, he's not just an individual like you and me...

Fed up with the dreary round of life in Ballybeg, with his uncommunicative father and the humiliating job in his father's grocery shop, with his frustrated love for Kathy Doogan...

A Liverpudlian West Side Story: twin brothers are separated at birth because their mother cannot afford to keep them both. She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons...

I want you to do yourself proud, Joey. You go and drive those Germans back where they've come from, and then come home to me. At the outbreak of World...

Actor Julie Hesmondhalgh's working diary begins in November 2016 at the end of a full and exciting year of theatre-making with her company, Take Back. The company is a northern-based...

A modern classic about one woman's struggle to come to terms with her past.Brutally separated from her German Jewish parents at the age of nine, Eva is brought to England...

A Liverpudlian West Side Story, Blood Brothers is the story of twin brothers separated at birth because their mother cannot afford to keep them both. One of them is given...

A Raisin in the Sun is a classic American play: a groundbreaking 1950s civil rights drama and has a strong claim to be the greatest play of the black American...

Winner of the 2020 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate TheatreI looked at her, wanting her to laugh. Wanting her to share in the joke. But she didn't. She...

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end...

John Gabriel Borkman, wealthy, powerful, revered, sacrificed love for success and was handsomely rewarded. Now, disgraced and destitute after financial scandal and a jail sentence, he paces out each day...

One of the key poets of the Romantic period and friend and collaborator of William Wordsworth,THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER is one of Coleridge's best-known poems.

Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of 12 groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television. At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully...

Snow is falling all over Dublin. It is half an hour to the start of the New Year. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, a 10-year-old boy clings to...

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...

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...

This introduction offers an overview of early English theatre from the earliest recorded vernacular texts in the late medieval period to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Where most...

Welcome to our war.The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is a soldier's view of service, injury and recovery. Moving from the war in Afghanistan, through the dream world of morphine-induced...

Actors and other professional voice users need to speak clearly and expressively in order to communicate the ideas and emotions of their characters - and themselves. Whatever the native accent...

After the restoration of King Charles II to the British throne in 1660, dramatists experienced new freedom in an age that broke from the strict morality of puritan rule and...

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'...

Both Sheridan and Goldsmith lamented the popularity of sentimental comedy in the later eighteenth century and wrote their witty and satirical plays (though never lascivious in the manner of Restoration...

Of all of Jonson's plays, Bartholomew Fair with its focus on the conflict between a carnivalesque enjoyment of the flesh and society's desire for order and control, speaks most directly...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The quality of mercy is not strain'd,It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven' Bassiano, a noble Venetian,...

This anthology offers a full introduction to Renaissance theatre in its historical and political context, along with newly edited and thoroughly annotated texts of the following plays:* The Spanish Tragedy...

In an era obsessed with celebrity and glamour, 'sophistication' has come to be perceived as the most desirable of human qualities but it was not always so. In this fascinating...

The "revenge" play became the most durable and commercially successful type of drama on the Elizabethan stage. This example by Thomas Kyd, who was one of the originators of the...

Weary of academic study, an eminent scholar turns to magic and makes a deal with the Devil. Mephistopheles will serve him and give him whatever he wants, but after twenty-four...

The "revenge" play became the most durable and commercially successful type of drama on the Elizabethan stage. This example by Thomas Kyd, who was one of the originators of the...

"The next good mood I find my father in, I'll get him quite discarded" With these chillingly offhand words, Beatrice-Joanna, the spoilt daughter of a powerful nobleman, plots to get...

'Shaw's refusal to moralise about the sex trade, only about the system that supports it, provides the play with its dramatic tension and surprising modernity.' GuardianShaw's 1893 play centres on...

An improved, larger-format edition of the Cambridge School Shakespeare plays, extensively rewritten, expanded and produced in an attractive new design. The Rex Gibson active approach to classroom Shakespeare enables students...

The first collection of plays by one of France's most prominent playwrights Overboard: "Combines Shakespearian tragedy, Aristophanic farce and a Chekhovian drama of lives consumed and memories that fade." Le...