Provoking riots at its opening in 1896, Ubu is acclaimed as the touchstone for the Dada and Surrealist movements, the Theatre of the Absurd, and much of the rest of experimental theatre in the 20th century.

    The Tony Award-winning play that focuses on the meaning of art (in the form of a solid white painting) as well as the meaning of friendship, to both the man who bought the painting and the two friends who come to see it."

    Here men from all walks of life don the garb of their fantasies and act them out: a man from the gas company wears the robe and mitre of a bishop; another customer becomes a flagellant judge, and still another a victorious general, while a bank clerk defiles the Virgin mary. These costumed diversions take place while outside a revolution rages on which has isolated the brothel from the rest of the rebel-controlled city. In a stunning series of macabre, climactic scenes, Genet presents his caustic view of man and society.

    A rhinoceros suddely apears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two, then three, until the "movement" is universal: a transformation of average citizens into beasts, as they learn to "move with the times." Finally, only one man remains. "I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end. I'm not capitulating!" Rhinoceros is a commentary on the absurdity of the human condition made tolerable only by self-delusion. It shows us the struggle of the individual to maintain integrity and identity alone in a world where all others have succumbed to the "beauty" of brute force, natural energy and mindlessness.

    The first of the plays, The Real Inspector Hound, is the longer of the two; here the author has created a looking glass comedy of great suspense and intrigue about two drama critics. The second play, After Magritte, is 'a surrealist comedy in detective form-or is it a comedy in surrealist form? A husband and wife argue whether the figure they saw in the street was a one-legged football player with the ball under his arm, or a man in pajamas with a tortoise under his arm. The play shows that Stoppard is as amusing and clever as always.'

    He keeps "one up, one down and one pending" until unexpected schedule changes bring all three to Paris and Bernard's apartment at the same time.

    In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations: tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical. Beginning with the 1904 premiere at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, this study traces the performance history of one of the landmark plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists, periods and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy of failure and hope.

    Césaire’s rich and insightful adaptation of The Tempest draws on contemporary Caribbean society, the African-American experience and African mythology to raise questions about colonialism, racism and their lasting effects.

    With Steffy, his sometime paramour, at his side, Herb decides to take another stab at fatherhood and hopefully this time, get it right.

    In Michael Meyer's fluent, idiomatic translations, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler stand as masterpieces of naturalist drama.

    Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

    Here Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, often seen as symbols of the doomed youth of the jazz age, become two halves of s single creative psyche, each part alternately feeding and then devouring the other.Set in Highland Hospital near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda spent her last confinement, this “ghost play” begins several years after Scott’s death of a heart attack in California. But the past is “still always present” in Zelda, and Williams’s constant shifting of chronology and mixing of remembrance with ghostly re-enactment suggest that our real intimacy is with the shadow characters of our own minds. As Williams said the Author’s Note to the Broadway production: “Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character."Williams poses the inevitable, unanswerable questions: Did Scott prevent Zelda from achieving an independent creativity? Did Zelda’s demands force Scott to squander his talents and turn to alcohol? Whose betrayal — emotional, creative, sexual — destroyed the other? But he poses these questions in a new way: in the act of creation, Zelda and Scott are now aware of their eventual destruction, and the creative fire that consumed the two artists combines symbolically with the fire that ended Zelda’s life.

    This short play by Caryl Churchill was an entry in the 1997 London International Festival of Theatre.

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