He has taken the ordinary West End drawing room comedy convention - understatement, upper-class accents and all - and used it as a vehicle for utterly serious ideas.' Observer

    Phaedra's Love is a bold and provocative revisioning of the story of Phaedra's obsessive and destructive love of her son Hippolytus and his violent punishment by Theseus.

    The author carries us through a number of varied scenes and shows us not only a somewhat unflattering picture of womanhood, but digging under the surface, reveals a human understanding for and sympathy with some of its outstanding figures. The plot involves the efforts of a group of women to play their respective roles in an artificial society that consists of vain show, comedy, tragedy, hope and disappointment.

    An entirely new introduction sets the tragedy in the context of pre-Civil War England and gives a revealing view of its imagery and dramatic action.From its well-documented early performances to the two productions seen in the West End of London in the 1995-96 season, a stage history gives an account of the play in performance. Students, actors, directors and theatre-goers will all find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre, which highlights why it has lived on stage with renewed force in the last decades of the twentieth century.

    Outrageous, charming, and unforgettable, she’s been portrayed on stage and screen by Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe and has become the archetype of the footloose, good-hearted gold digger, with an insatiable appetite for orchids, champagne, and precious stones. Here are her “diaries,” created by Anita Loos in the Roaring Twenties, as Lorelei and her friend Dorothy barrel across Europe meeting everyone from the Prince of Wales to “Doctor Froyd” – and then back home again to marry a Main Line millionaire and become a movie star. In this delightfully droll and witty book, Lorelei Lee’s wild antics, unique outlook, and imaginative way with language shine.

    Banks learns that one of the young men he has seen occasionally about the house is about to become his son-in-law. Daughter Kay announces the engagement out of nowhere. Mrs. Banks and her sons are happy, but Mr. Banks is in a dither. The groom-to-be, Buckley Dunstan, appears on the scene and Mr. Banks realizes that the engagement is serious. Buckley and Kay don't want a "big" wedding just a simple affair with a few friends! We soon learn, however, that the "few" friends idea is out. Then trouble really begins. The guest list grows larger each day, a caterer is called in, florists, furniture movers and dressmakers take over, and the Banks household is soon caught in turmoil.

    Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way - a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles. Setting out with an open mind, good intentions and a friendly voice on his SatNav for company, Maxwell finds that this journey soon takes a more serious turn, and carries him not only to the furthest point of the United Kingdom, but into some of the deepest and darkest corners of his own past. In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book, Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time.

    This songbook contains easy piano arrangements of a dozen songs from Mel Brooks' Broadway blockbuster, the winner of a record 12 Tony Awards! Includes: Along Came Bialy * Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop * Goodbye! * Haben Sie Gehort Das Deutsche Band? * I Wanna Be a Producer * In Old Bavaria * Keep It Gay * Prisoners of Love * Springtime for Hitler * That Face * 'Til Him * When You Got It, Flaunt It.

    But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama. Its thought is as modern as today's police states and The Bomb; its theatrical impact has everywhere been called a major innovation. It is total theatre: philosophically problematic, visually terrifying. It engages the eye, the ear, and the mind with every imaginable dramatic device, technique, and stage picture, even including song and dance. All the forces and elements possible to the stage are fused in one overwhelming experience. This is theatre such as has rarely been seen before. The play is basically concerned with the problem of revolution. Are the same things true for the masses and for their leaders? And where, in modern times, lie the borderlines of sanity?

    I'm not obsessed with sex. I just can't stop thinking about it.’ The Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life.Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s debut play is an outrageously funny monologue for a female performer. It premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for several successful runs, followed by a UK tour. It won a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, the Most Promising New Playwright and Best Female Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards, The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer and the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. It received a Special Commendation in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and ‘utterly riveting’ (Guardian) BBC television series.This edition also features an introduction by the author.‘Believe the hype, Waller-Bridge’s raw writing… really is as good as everyone says’ - The Stage'Sucker-punch funny... I've never seen a play quite like it' - Scotsman'frank and sometimes brutally funny... devastatingly good' - The Times'blessed with a rare and compelling life force... deliciously dirty and scabrously funny' - Evening Standard

    The first published play by an African American writer, The Escape explored the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. This new volume presents the first-edition text of Brown’s play and features an extensive introduction that establishes the work’s continuing significance.The Escape centers on the attempted sexual violation of a slave and involves many characters of mixed race, through which Brown commented on such themes as moral decay, white racism, and black self-determination. Rich in action and faithful in dialect, it raises issues relating not only to race but also to gender by including concepts of black and white masculinity and the culture of southern white and enslaved women. It portrays a world in which slavery provided a convenient means of distinguishing between the white North and the white South, allowing northerners to express moral sentiments without recognizing or addressing the racial prejudice pervasive among whites in both regions.John Ernest’s introductory essay balances the play's historical and literary contexts, including information on Brown and his career, as well as on slavery, abolitionism, and sectional politics. It also discusses the legends and realities of the Underground Railroad, examines the role of antebellum performance art—including blackface minstrelsy and stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin—in the construction of race and national identity, and provides an introduction to theories of identity as performance.A century and a half after its initial appearance, The Escape remains essential reading for students of African American literature. Ernest's keen analysis of this classic play will enrich readers’ appreciation of both the drama itself and the era in which it appeared.The Editor: John Ernest is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and author of Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper.

    Savage has been left ten million dollars by her husband and wants to make the best use of it, in spite of the efforts of her grown-up stepchildren to get their hands on it. These latter, knowing that the widow's wealth is now in negotiable securities, and seeing they cannot get hold of it, commit her to a "sanatorium" hoping to "bring her to her senses." But Mrs. Savage is determined to establish a fund to help others realize their hopes and dreams. In the sanatorium she meets various social misfits, men and women who just cannot adjust themselves to life, people who need the help Mrs. Savage can provide. In getting to know them, she realizes that she will find happiness with them and plans to spend the rest of her life as one of them. But when the doctor tells her there is no reason why she should remain, she hesitates to go out into a hard world where people seem ready to do anything for money. The self-seeking stepchildren are driven to distraction by their vain efforts to browbeat Mrs. Savage, but she preserves her equanimity and leads them on a merry chase. At last her friends conspire to get rid of her stepchildren, and through their simple belief in the justice of her cause, they enable Mrs. Savage to carry out her plans. The last scene, a farewell party, is a delightful fantasy where each "guest" in the sanatorium realizes at last some hopeless dream for something he was never able to realize. The dominant mood is high comedy, and the audience is left with a feeling that the neglected virtues of kindness and affection have not been entirely lost in a world that seems motivated at times only by greed and dishonesty.

    When others begin to speak freely around him, he not only becomes privy to secrets both dangerous and frivolous, he also discovers an adventurous extrovert within himself.

    In the earlier play Ostrovsky had adopted a satiric tone that proved him a worthy disciple of Gogol, the great founder of Russian realism. Not one lovable character appears in that gloomy picture of merchant life in Moscow; even the old mother repels us by her stupidity more than she attracts us by her kindliness. No ray of light penetrates the "realm of darkness" -- to borrow a famous phrase from a Russian critic -- conjured up before us by the young dramatist. In Poverty Is No Crime we see the other side of the medal. Ostrovsky had now been affected by the Slavophile school of writers and thinkers, who found in the traditions of Russian society treasures of kindliness and love that they contrasted with the superficial glitter of Western civilization. Life in Russia is varied as elsewhere, and Ostrovsky could change his tone without doing violence to realistic truth. The tradesmen had not wholly lost the patriarchal charm of their peasant fathers. A poor apprentice is the hero of Poverty Is No Crime, and a wealthy manufacturer the villain of the piece. Good-heartedness is the touchstone by which Ostrovsky tries character, and this may be hidden beneath even a drunken and degraded exterior. The scapegrace, Lyubim Tortsov, has a sound Russian soul, and at the end of the play rouses his hard, grasping brother, who has been infatuated by a passion for aping foreign fashions, to his native Russian worth. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886) was an early Russian Realist whose work led to the founding of the Moscow Arts Theatre and to the career of Stanislavsky. He has been acknowledged to be the greatest of the Russian dramatists.

    A work outing offers promise for Freda, and terror for Brenda, passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after the outing never returns to normal.