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    By one of America's most talented playwrights, this play won the Dramatists Guild's prestigious Hull-Warriner Award, four Tony nominations, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. 'night, Mother had its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 1982. It opened on Broadway in March 1983, directed by Tom Moore and starring Anne Pitoniak and Kathy Bates; a film, starring Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, was released in 1986.

    "Its a ghost story, a thriller, an action-packed murder mystery, and a great tragedy that is profoundly moving." With an outstanding cast of international actors--including Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Julie Christie as Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Charlton Heston as the Player King, Robin Williams as Osric, and Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo--Branagh's version, in which he will play the title role as well as direct, is sure to go down in film history.This beautiful volume includes Branagh's introduction and screenplay adaptation of Shakespeare's text, color and black-and-white stills, and a production diary that takes us behind the scenes for a day-to-day look at the shooting of his film.

    While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a detective thriller, it is also a philosophical play about social conscience and the crumbling of middle class values. Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before belong to Priestley's 'time'plays, in which he explores the idea of precognition and pits fate against free will. The Linden Tree also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war.

    Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados.

    Her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers", was adapted from the play a year after its debut. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts on August 8, 1916. In the original play, Glaspell played the role of one of the characters, Mrs. Hale. It is frequently anthologized in American literature textbooks. The play begins as the county attorney, the sherrif, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Hale enter the Wright's empty farm house. On prompting from the county attorney, Mr. Hale recounts his visit to the house the previous day, when he found Mrs. Wright behaving strangely and found her husband upstairs with a rope around his neck, dead. Mr. Hale notes that, when he questioned her, Mrs. Wright claimed that she was fast asleep when someone strangled her husband.Often hailed as one of the quintessential feminist plays, 'Trifles' earned Glaspell a Pulitzer Prize and renewed literary recognition.

    Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero--Cyrano De Bergerac--and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage.This translation, by the American poet Brian Hooker, is nearly as famous as the original play itself, and is generally considered to be one of the finest English verse translations ever written.

    Salford 1970: the Khan children, caught between bellbottoms and arranged marriages, are buffeted this way and that by their Pakistani father's insistence on tradition, their English mother's laissez-faire and their own wish to be citizens of the modern world.

    At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas’s play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in “real life” while writing fantasies for a living.   An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting—onstage and off.

    Set in and around a large pool of water onstage, Metamorphoses juxtaposes the ancient and the contemporary in both language and image to reflect the variety and persistence of narrative in the face of inevitable change. Nominated for three 2002 Tony Awards, including "Best Play," Metamorphoses earned Zimmerman a Tony for "Best Direction of a Play."

    The First Folio is a literary icon and is the version of Shakespeare's text preferred by many actors and directors, yet no one has edited it in its entirety for over three hundred years.At the request of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmunssen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, have used the very latest techniques and research to correct the errors and variations in the early printed copies and to present the First Folio for modern readers. The result is a fresh and definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century.This edition includes all the material that might be needed by a student of Shakespeare. The Sonnets, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles, Shakespeare's scene from Sir Thomas More, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and Turtle, and a number of other interesting passages not published in the First Folio are also included.'This is a glorious edition of one of the world's most important books. It's the essential reference book for anyone who's ever been in love, felt jealousy, hatred, or desire. All human life is here — and every home should have one.'-Dame Judi Dench'A splendid edition … the general introduction is among the best 50-page guides to Shakespeare you could hope to find, while the short essays prefixed to each play are informative, thought-provoking and humane. Marginal notes help readers imagine what's happening onstage … the RSC's edition allows you to lose yourself in the wonder of the works.'-Dr Colin Burrow, Oxford University'A triumphant addition to our times.'-Fiona Shaw, The Times'The scholarly apparatus is discreet, elegant and pertinent. For each play, we get brief accounts of plots, dates and sources … footnotes are found snugly and legibly at the bottom of each page … there is a universe to be found in these annotations: the Renaissance world of power and fate, sex and death, language and philosophy … an edition full of endless fascination.'-Tom Deveson, Times Educational Supplement'Bate's general introduction to Shakespeare's life, stage and reputation is superb, and the short introductions to individual works are among the best of their kind available … they manage to speak about what really matters about the plays.'-Professor Michael Dobson, London Review of Books'Excellent, succinct notes and introductions to each play.'-John Carey, Sunday Times'Outstanding … Jonathan Bate writes with as much elegance as insight about the making of theatre and the creation of the plays … an impeccably informative introduction gives a comprehensive theatrical, social, political and biographical context to the plays … exemplary notes at the foot of each page translate verbal and topical obscurities … for actors and directors it will be incomparably useful, but for any curious reader of Shakespeare's plays it provides an invaluable guide to reading them not as novels or dramatic poems, but as they were intended to be read: blueprints for live performance.'-Richard Eyre, Sunday Telegraph

    This extraordinary drama, produced to acclaim at the Actors Theatre of Louisville originally, and at NYC's Second Stage is about a celebrated 1930's French murder case, in which two maids sisters were convicted of murdering their employer and her daughter. This very cinematically structured work explores the motivations whi

    When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed.

    Searching Manchester in desperation, she finds all roads lead to Pomona - an abandoned concrete island at the heart of the city.Here at the centre of everything, journeys end and nightmares are born.A sinister and surreal thriller from Alistair McDowall, Pomona received its world premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, on 12 November 2014.

    It is goodbye to a Berlin wild, wicked, breathtaking, decadent beyond belief and already -- in the years between the wars -- welcoming death in through the door, though more with a wink than a whimper.~from the back cover