Robert M. Adams, Scott McMillin

Peter Bailey

Samuel Beckett Beckett's first stage play portrays two tramps, trapped in an endless waiting for the arrival of a mysterious personage named Godot, while disputing the appointed place and hour of his coming. They amuse themselves with various bouts of repartee and word-play.

Michael R. Booth

M.C. Bradbrook

Bertolt Brecht "One of the greatest poets and dramatists of our century."-Observer

Brecht projects an ancient Chinese story onto a realistic setting in Soviet Georgia. In a theme that echoes the Judgment of Solomon, two women argue over the possession of a child; thanks to the unruly judge, Azdak (one of Brecht's most vivid creations) natural justice is done, and the peasant Grusha keeps the child she loves, even though she is not its mother.

Written in exile in the United States during the Second World War, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a politically-charged, much-revived, and complex example of Brecht's epic theatre.

This volume contains expert notes on the author's life and work, historical and political background to the play, photographs from stage productions, and a glossary of difficult words and phrases.

Beatrix Christian

Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

Humphrey Hall John Cripps

William Coyle and Harvey G. Damaser

John F. Danby

Dario Fo Fo Plays: 1 contains some of the playwright's best work, including: Mistero Buffo, a work based on research into medieval mystery plays; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which 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; and Trumpets and Raspberries, a play in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer, FIAT, is mistaken for a left-wing terrorist.

The volume also contains two of Fo's previously unpublished short farces: The Virtuous Burglar and One was Nude and One Wore Tails.

Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires.

Richard Fotheringham

Athol Fugard The five plays collected here offer a unique insight into the role of theatre in a situation of oppression. They were produced in close collaboration with their original black amateur casts, drawing on their lives and everyday experiences in the townships. They range from the early apprentice work of the brash but vital Sophiatown plays, No-Good Friday and Nongogo, to the freer, more urgent, and profound New Brighton plays, including the most famous Sizwe Bansi is Dead and IThe Island, and the previously unavailable The Coat.

Alma De Groen Liz retreats to the mountains away from the furore created by her latest book. Her husband is shaken when a woman runs into the path of his car (2 acts, 2 men, 4 women).

John Guare

Hemendra Nath Das Gupta The stage constitutes a very important chapter in the social and political history of a people and the blend of the national genius can't be fully comprehended without its study. A puritan may look askance at the play-house, but its influence over the mass can't be ignored, and it is no exaggeration to say that a "nation is known only by its theatre." One can know more about Greek character from their immortal plays than from the pages of a formal history. Likewise the Mricchakatika or the "Toy-cart" gives us a more graphic picture of the ancient Indian society than any other treatise of that time. From the pure standpoint of art, dramas and the stange have an ethical and historical value of their own.

Bengali drama, like Bengali language, has its origin in the remote past, but like many other modern institutions of the country, is an adoption after the western ideal, and the modern Bengali stage was, in fact, first founded in imitation of the early English theatre of Kolkata. Still the spirit of a Bengali drama is essentially eastern, and some of the present techniques of the Bengali stage can't be fully understood without a study of Sanskrit drama and the ancient Indian stage.

Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton (eds)

Eric Irvin

Robert G. Lawrence

W. Macqueen-Pope

W. Macqueen-Pope

Christopher Marlowe

Arthur Miller

Allardyce Nicoll

Allardyce Nicoll

Allardyce Nicoll

Luigi Pirandello, Robert Rietty

Thomas Postlewait

George Rowell

William Shakesepeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare Traditionally seen as one of Shakespeare's more romantic and enchanting plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream has more recently been seen as a darker and more sinister play than generations of schoolchildren have ever imagined. The play has usually been seen as a comical tale and confused identities and the fickleness of youthful love, as the young lovers, Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena escape parental control and the "sharp Athenian law" of their elders by eloping into the forest outside the city. Unfortunately they stumble into civil war in fairyland, where King Oberon and Queen Titania fight over possession of a beautiful young Indian "changeling" boy. The appearance of the "rude mechanicals", a group of Athenian workers, including the weaver Nick Bottom, compounds the confusion. Chaos, confusion and "shaping fantasies" reign before the final settlement of the play, but underneath all the hilarity many critics have discerned more ambivalent attitudes towards coercive parental control, bestial sexuality and the destructive power of desire. These approaches in no way detract from the exquisite lyricism of many sections of the play, but make it a more complex and effective comedy than has often been appreciated. —Jerry Brotton

William Shakespeare Undoubtedly the most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet remains one of the most enduring but also enigmatic pieces of western literature. The story of Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark, his tortured relationship with his mother, and his quest to avenge his father's murder at the hand of his brother Claudius has fascinated writers and audiences ever since it was written around 1600.

For many years interest focused on both Hamlet's inability to avenge his father's death, claiming that "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", and, according to none other than Freud, his oedipal fixation with his mother. However, more recently critics have turned their attention to Hamlet's bold theatrical self-reflexivity (most famously reflected in the performance of "The Mousetrap"), its fascination with issues of theology and Renaissance humanism, and its dense, complex poetic language. What is so remarkable about the play is the way in which it tends to uncannily reflect the concerns of different epochs. As a result, Hamlet has been at different moments defined as a romantic rebel, an angst-ridden existentialist, a paralysed intellectual and an ambivalent New Man. Whatever subsequent generations make of Hamlet, they are unlikely to exhaust the possibilities of this most extraordinary play. —Jerry Brotton

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Wole Soyinka '"The Lion and the Jewel" alone is enough to establish Nigeria as the most fertile new source of English-speaking drama since Synge's discovery of the Western Isles.' - "The Times". The ironic development and consequences of 'progress' may be traced through both the themes and the tone of the works included in this second volume of Wole Soyinka's plays. "The Lion and the Jewel" shows an ineffectual assault on past tradition soundly defeated. In "Kongi's Harvest", however, the pretensions of Kongi's regime are also fatal. The denouement points the way forward. "The Two Brother Jero" plays pursue that way, the comic 'propheteering' of the earlier play giving way to the sardonic reality of "Jero's Metamorphosis". "Madmen and Specialists", Soyinka's most pessimistic play, concerns the physical, mental, and moral destruction of modern civil war.

Tom Stoppard

William Duncan Taylor, Simon Trussler

Ellen Terry

John Cargill Thompson

Simon Trussler

Don B. Wilmeth, Christopher Bigsby