Led by the title character, the women of the warring city-states of Greece agree to withhold sexual favours with their husbands until they agree to cease fighting. The war of the sexes that ensues makes Lysistrata a bawdy comedy without peer in the history of theatre.

    Robert Markham, an Englishman in Constantinople, is newly posted to the British legation with his imperious wife and overly curious son. Markham's hidden life is about to make itself known as he forgets familial and patriotic ties in order to absolve a deep-seated guilt. Twelve years before, he had been involved with an Armenian woman. On the evening of their engagement, the Armenian massacres erupted. Saved by his British citizenship, he witnessed the brutal rape and murder of his fiancee. Amid the breakdown of the Turkish empire, he now seeks revenge.

    She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons and they grow up as friends in ignorance of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a blood-bath. 'Willy Russell is less concerned with political tub-thumping than with weaving a close-knit story about the working of fate and destiny … it carries one along with it in almost unreserved enjoyment" Guardian One of the longest-running and most successful ever West End musicals, Blood Brothers premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in January 1983.

    To his beautiful secretary-mistress, he was a god-like hero to be served with her mind, soul and body. To his aristocratic young wife, he was an elemental force of nature to be tamed. To his millionaire father-in-law, he was a giant whose single error could be used to destroy him.What kind of man was Bjorn Faulkner? Only you, the reader, can decide.On one level, Night of January 16th is a totally gripping drama about the rise and destruction of a brilliant and ruthless man. On a deeper level, it is a superb dramatic objectification of Ayn Rand's vision of human strength and weakness. Since its original Broadway success, it has achieved vast worldwide popularity and acclaim.

    He almost made it. Instead, he finds himself free-falling through a world of hallucinatory absurdity, low comedy, and epic degradation. A Hollywood bottom-feeder who moonlights as a limo driver to pay the bills, both tormented and vicariously aroused by his contact with the industry's elite, Mr. Wiggins bears poignant, paranoid witness to the horror and hysteria that are by-products of "the Business." His phantasmagoric saga, by turns picaresque, pornographic, and poetic, Force Majeure is the first of a projected quartet called "Scriptures" that will chronicle the misadventures and transcendental fall and rise -- comic, tragic, and tragicosmic -- of Bud Wiggins, Quixote of Babylon.

    THIS 20 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Representative British Dramas Victorian and Modern V2, by William Butler Yeats.

    They illuminate as with a flash of lightning a deadly serious problem--and they bring an eloquent and exceptionally powerful voice to the American theatre.Dutchman opened in New York City on March 24, 1964, to perhaps the most excited acclaim ever accorded an off-Broadway production and shortly thereafter received the Village Voice's Obie Award. The Slave, which was produced off-Broadway the following fall, continues to be the subject of heated critical controversy.

    Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's harshest and most challenging studies of power, politics and masculinity, based around the life of Caius Marcius. Based on the Roman chronicles of Plutarch's Lives and Livy's History of Rome, the play is set in the early years of the Roman Republic. Its famous opening scene, particularly admired by Bertolt Brecht, portrays its citizens as starving and rebellious, and horrified by the arrogant and dismissive attitude of Caius Marcius, one of Rome's most valiant but also political naive soldiers. Spurred on by his ambitious mother Volumnia, Caius takes the city of Corioles, is renamed Coriolanus in honour of his victory, and is encouraged to run for senate. However, his contempt for the citizens, who he calls "scabs" and "musty superfluity" ultimately leads to his exile and destructive alliance with his deadly foe, Aufidius. Despite its relative unpopularity, Coriolanus is a fascinating study of both public and personal life. Its language is dense and complex, as its representation of the tensions built into the fabric of Roman political life. Yet it also contains extraordinarily intimate scenes between Coriolanus and both his mother, who ultimately proves "most mortal" to her own son, and his enemy Aufidius, whose "rapt heart" is happier to see Coriolanus than his own wife. One of Shakespeare's darker and more disturbing plays. --Jerry Brotton

    Rajiv Joseph's groundbreaking new American play explores both the power and the perils of human nature.

    Structured as the text of seven statements parents might say to their children either in response to the events or attempting to explain them, they express regret, anger, intelligence, blind hatred, fear, and compassion.

    Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.

    It's November in a Presidential election year, and incumbent Charles Smith's chances for reelection are looking grim. Approval ratings are down, his money's running out, and nuclear war might be imminent. Though his staff has thrown in the towel and his wife has begun to prepare for her post-White House life, Chuck isn't ready to give up just yet. Amidst the biggest fight of his political career, the President has to find time to pardon a couple of turkeys — saving them from the slaughter before Thanksgiving — and this simple PR event inspires Smith to risk it all in attempt to win back public support. With Mamet's characteristic no-holds-barred style, November is a scathingly hilarious take on the state of America today and the lengths to which people will go to win.

    They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers.The United Arab States declares a War on Terror. Arabian and Persian troops invade the Eastern Seaboard and establish a Green Zone in Washington, D.C. . . .Summer, 2009: Arab Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi interrogates a captured suicide bomber. The prisoner claims that the world they are living in is a mirage--in the real world, America is a superpower, and the Arab states are just a collection of "backward third-world countries." A search of the bomber's apartment turns up a copy of "The New York Times," dated September 12, 2001, that appears to support his claim. Other captured terrorists have been telling the same story. The president wants answers, but Mustafa soon discovers he's not the only interested party.The gangster Saddam Hussein is conducting his own investigation. And the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee--a war hero named Osama bin Laden--will stop at nothing to hide the truth. As Mustafa and his colleagues venture deeper into the unsettling world of terrorism, politics, and espionage, they are confronted with questions without any rational answers, and the terrifying possibility that their world is not what it seems.Acclaimed novelist Matt Ruff has created a shadow world that is eerily recognizable but, at the same time, almost unimaginable. Gripping, subversive, and unexpectedly moving, "The Mirage" probes our deepest convictions and most arresting fears.

    Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara’s lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on all of the group.One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it’s the hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police—the fox was ever the hunter.Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated with fear, where it’s hard to tell victim from perpetrator.In The Fox Was Always a Hunter, Herta Müller once again uses language that displays the "concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose"—as the Swedish Academy noted upon awarding her the Nobel Prize—to create a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of the corruption of the soul under totalitarianism.

    Penguin Books published it in 1968 with reprints in 1972 and 1974. Each story in the collection, whose title refers to people burnt by society, has a reference to burning actually and in metaphor.Seven of the stories are set in Australia and four are set in Greece or concern Greek migrants. The suburb of Sarsaparilla, the setting for several stories, is like Our Town of Thornton Wilder, but with White's "beadily disapproving gaze".In White's first collection of a series of three, The Burnt Ones are haunted by feelings of isolation, intense self-examination, and an acute awareness of how they are different from others. The stories follow the theme of loneliness as do the second collection titled The Cockatoos, and Three Uneasy Pieces, his third and last collection. Dead Roses Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight A Glass of Tea Clay The Evening at Sissy Kamara's A Cheery Soul Being Kind to Titina Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover The Letters The Woman who wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats Down at the Dump