The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Modern Plays) Reprint by Haddon, Mark (2012) Paperback

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner)
This volume contains Ibsen's famous early epic, Peer Gynt, and the historical tragedy The Pretenders, which together with Brand and Emperor and Galilean form a magisterial quartet at the fulcrum of Ibsen's career. George Bernard Shaw praised Peer Gynt (1867) for the power of Ibsen's 'grip on humanity …The universality of Ibsen makes his plays come home to all nations'. The Pretenders (1863), described by Kenneth Tynan as Ibsen's 'first great play', was also his first real success in the theatre. Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)

Ibsen Plays: 6: Peer Gynt and The Pretenders (World Classics)

IBSEN, HENRIK

Humor & Entertainment

Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

Fo Plays: 1: Mistero Buffo; Accidental Death…; Trumpets and Raspberries; Virtuous Burglar; One Was Nude… (Contemporary Dramatists)

Literature & Fiction

Hood, Stuart

Fo, Dario

Dramas & Plays

Edward Bond's version of Lear's story embraces myth and reality, war and politics, to reveal the violence endemic in all unjust societies. He exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this false morality as a source of the aggressive tension which must ultimately destroy that society. In a play in which blindness becomes a dramatic metaphor for insight, Bond warns that 'it is so easy to subordinate justice to power, but when this happens power takes on the dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is really changed'.

Lear (Modern Plays)

Bond, Edward

A major reissue of a book which is used by students of Meyerhold across the world
This was the first collection of Meyerhold's writings and utterances to appear in English and covers his entire career as a director from 1902 to 1939. These are supplemented by a critical commentary, relating Meyerhold to his period and containing descriptions, based on eye-witness accounts, of all his major productions.

Meyerhold On Theatre (Performance Books)

Meyerhold, Vsevolod

The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), 'the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury'; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father ('Where,' asked George Bernard Shaw, 'shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?'); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman. Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)

Ibsen Plays: 1: Ghosts; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder (World Classics)

Meyer,Michael

First produced in 1925, Hay Fever is technically a masterpiece. A comedy of bad manners which starts with the arrival of four guests, invited independently by different members of the Bliss family for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead. The promise of an idyllic and peaceful weekend is quickly trounced by the self-absorbed eccentricities of the family who leave the guests to slink away humiliated, embarrassed and abandoned.
 "It does not date... it is in the highest mood of fantastic comedy, it is deliciously heartless and therefore delicioiusly alive and fresh" The Times

Hay Fever (Modern Classics)

Noël Coward

Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires
Can't Pay Won't Pay is set in Milan, but "the problems are desperately familiar…Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times); Elizabeth "It portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo's characteristically rollicking vein…A triumph for Gillian Hanna as translator" (Marin Hoyle, Financial Times); The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a society in which both the social system in which they live and its dominant ideology are shaped by men.

Fo Plays: 2: Can't Pay? Won't Pay!; Elizabeth; The Open Couple; An Ordinary Day (Contemporary Dramatists)

A Man for All Seasons dramatises the conflict between King Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More. It depicts the confrontation between church and state, theology and politics, absolute power and individual freedom. Throughout the play Sir Thomas More's eloquence and endurance, his purity, saintliness and tenacity in the face of ever-growing threats to his beliefs and family, earn him status as one of modern drama's greatest tragic heroes.
The play was first staged in 1960 at the Globe Theatre in London and was voted New York's Best Foreign Play in 1962. In 1966 it was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Fred Zinneman starring Paul Scofield.

A Man For All Seasons (Modern Classics)

BOLT, Robert

Maugham's unerring hold over audiences and readers is amply demonstrated by the five plays in this selection.
 Sheppey, his last and one of his very best, is the comedy of a Cockney barber who wins a sweepstake.
 The Sacred Flame gives an unusual note of noir-ish suspense to a moving drama of protective maternal love.
 The Circle, widely regarded as Maugham's masterpiece, deals wittily with the dilemma of a woman intent on leaving her pompous husband.
In The Constant Wife, an abrasive, war-between-the-sexes comedy, his heroine is an early feminist.
 Our Betters, whose London opening was delayed through fear of lawsuits, exposes the amoral society of an English aristocracy funded by American heiresses.

Maugham Plays One: Sheppy/the Sacred Flame/the Circle/the Constant Wife/Our Betters

Maugham, W.Somerset

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