1999 - In a world of scientific chaos, cloning and genetic engineering, the cellar of the same house reveals a dark secret buried for 200 years.

    Despite its success in performance, and being hailed by Sir Terence Rattigan as 'the best first play' he'd seen in 'thirty odd years', it was not until the London production of Loot in 1966 - less than a year before Joe Orton's untimely death - that theatre audiences and critics began to more fully appreciate the originality of Orton's elegant, alarming and hilarious writing. Introduced by John Lahr, the author of Orton's biography Prick up Your Ears, Entertaining Mr Sloane is now established as an essential part of the repertoire of the modern theatre.

    

    'It's an object of pure, virtuoso craft and display, as luxuriously self-sufficient as a netsuke or Faberge Easter egg. But it's as nearly perfect in its kind as a P.G. Wodehouse plot; tiny, ludicrous and beautiful as an ivory Mickey Mouse...It's time we stopped dismissing comedy as an inferior genre.' Observer

    Hold tight as the ordinary turns extraordinary in Mark O’Rowe’s exhilarating new play. A blackly comic vision of Dublin infested with demons, from the author of Howie the Rookie.

    Struggling to contain his men and the ambitions of his superiors, the commanding officer attempts to negotiate the unspoken rules of this alien country. He seeks to restore peace to a country ravaged by war. This is Scotland in the eleventh century at the height of the fight for succession of the Scottish throne.David Greig's Dunsinane premiered in February 2010 at Hampstead Theatre, London, in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

    A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening's end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play's razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as "a brilliantly original work of art--an excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come."

    He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."

    Symbolist poets and writers — Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck among them — defended the play's literary brilliance. Beyond its notoriety, the drama's haunting poetic imagery, biblical cadences, and febrile atmosphere have earned it a reputation as a masterpiece of the Aesthetic movement of fin de siècle England.Written originally in French in 1892, this sinister tale of a woman scorned and her vengeance was translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas. The play inspired some of Aubrey Beardsley's finest illustrations, and an abridged version served as the text for Strauss' renowned opera of the same name. This volume reprints the complete text of the first English edition, published in 1894, and also includes "A Note on Salomé" by Robert Ross, Wilde's lifelong friend and literary executor. Students, lovers of literature and drama, and admirers of Oscar Wilde and his remarkable literary gifts will rejoice in this inexpensive edition.

    

    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

    First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom.The action covers a fateful, heart-rending day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage.One theme of the play is addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. All three males are alcoholics and Mary is addicted to morphine. They all constantly conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and half-sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation.

    Overseas, war is raging in Vietnam, Civil Rights marches are on the streets, and women’s liberation is stirring – but at home in Corrigan Charlie Bucktin dreams of writing the Great Australian Novel. Charlie’s 14 and smart. But when 16-year-old, constantly-in-trouble Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie’s out of his depth. Jasper has stumbled upon a terrible crime in the scrub nearby, and he knows he’s the first suspect – that goes with the colour of his skin. He needs every ounce of Charlie’s bookish brain to help solve this awful mystery before the town turns on Jasper. Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Craig Silvey’s award-winning novel is wise and beautiful. A coming-of-age story, Jasper Jones interweaves the lives of complex individuals all struggling to find happiness among the buried secrets of a small rural community.Whether you know the book or not, this piercing adaptation is very much worth seeing for the way it depicts – and shows ways across – some of the deep and enduring divides in our society." - Jason Blake SMH

    Edited with an introduction, notes and a glossary by Dennis Walder, a leading critic of South African literature, this book collects his five township plays: Nongogo, No-Good Friday, Sizure Bansi is Dead, The Island and The Coat, the latter of which has never been published in Britain before.