Bøker i Oberon Modern Playwrights-serien

Following on from the success of the first collection, this new collection includes 3 from this astonishing European theatre project.

The extraordinary career and impressive literary output of the 'Father' of Polish comedy, Aleksander Fredro, was the subject of much celebration in Poland in 1993, the bicentenary of his birth. These new translations by Noel Clark of three of Fredro's best known plays should do much to repair the relative ignorance of his works in this country. Virgins' Vows- generally regarded as Fredro's most accomplished comedy - and The Annuity, both reflect the author's awareness of the disadvantages suffered by young women in a male-dominated society. Revenge is a seemingly innocent social comedy about a property dispute, but the Russian censors of his day were not slow to spot the subversive potential of the play.Noel Clark's translations of Revenge and Virgins' Vow's have been broadcast, to much acclaim, by the BBC World Service.

Contains four plays by the Scottish-based writer Stanley Eveling, long associated with Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre. In "The Strange Case of Martin Richter", a group of men with a terrible past act out a fantasy in a German country house. In "Onefourseven", concentration camp inmates discuss the nature of jokes and the mysticism of numbers.

Two brand new plays from two acclaimed contemporary writers.

A darkly electrifying collection from a unique dramatic voice, this volume marks the emergence of a distinctive British new writing talent.

The Making Mischief Festival features work from some of today's most exciting playwrights who are challenging and questioning our society. The Festival runs from 24 May to 17 June from The Other Place Studio Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Featuring The Earthworks by Tom Morton-Smith, and Myth by Matt Hartley and Kirsty Housley.

Three plays from Paul Sirett. Includes the plays A Night in Tunisia, Jamaica House and Skaville with an introduction from Jeff Teare.

Includes the plays Prince Friedrich von Homburg, The Broken Pitcher and Ordeal by FireHeinrich von Kleist committed suicide in 1811. His masterpiece, Prince Friedrich von Homburg, is set in the world of Prussian militarism. The young cavalry general of the title achieves swift victory in the field, only to be sentenced to death for rash disobedience. In the comedy, The Broken Pitcher, a visiting judge comes to inspect a small village and finds it rife with corruption. Ordeal by Fire is a beguiling piece about the mysterious love of an armour-repairer's daughter for a young travelling knight.

Includes the plays Flesh to a Tiger, Skyvers and The White Witch Barry Reckord's place in the history of black playwriting in the United Kingdom unfortunately has been almost unrecognised previously. Reckord was among the first modern Caribbean playwrights to have work produced in England. As a Jamaican abroad in the '50s and '60s he laid a solid foundation for later emerging Caribbean playwrights such as Trinidadian Mustapha Matura, Guyanese Michael Abbensetts and Jamaican Alfred Fagon in the '70s, all of whom appreciated how well Reckord's work had paved their way forward. No scripts of Reckord's impressive body of work have been made available previously, many incomplete manuscripts exist but this is the first complete volume of Reckord plays. Here we present three, each from a different decade. These are 'Flesh to a Tiger', 'Skyvers' and 'The White Witch', each with an introduction by a prominent authority on the subject or author.

Keith Waterhouse is one of Britain's most popular writers in nearly every field. This collection brings together for the first time his most celebrated plays from a career spanning more than forty years.Our Song is a warm, tender, romantic drama, infused with moments of great humour. Pulling himself out of the rut of his middle-aged executive lifestyle, Roger Piper stumbles into a sixteen-month tempestuous affair.Billy Liar tells the story of a funeral parlour worker with a humdrum life, who spends most of his time dreaming of ways to escape his drab existence in Yorkshire. Adapted from his celebrated novel.Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell Gambler, journalist, fervent alcoholic, four-times married Jeffrey Bernard writes the'Low Life' column for the Spectator magazine. Locked in The Coach and Horses in Soho overnight, he has time to reflect on a dissolute life.Good Grief is a sensitive, wryly humorous study of a middle-aged widow, coming to terms with bereavement, who finds the courage to break with the past.Mr and Mrs Nobody is an adaptation of George and Weedon Grossmith's comic novel The Diary Of A Nobody and Mrs Pooter's Diary. A respectable Victorian clerk has lofty social aspirations.

Presented here are four epic history plays from Sir Arnold Wesker, which touch on the age-old conflicts caused by religion, science and the Establishment.Set in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, 1563, Shylock (1972) is based on the same three stories from which Shakespeare wove his play, The Merchant of Venice. The core plot remains, but the relationships and characterisations are very different. Caritas (1980) is at once the story of a monastic young woman in the fourteenth century but also a metaphor for the wrong decisions which can imprison us for life. In 1144 a young boy was found brutally murdered in Thorpe Wood. The Jews were accused of slaughtering a Christian child touse his blood for Passover and mock the crucifixion. Blood Libel (1991) investigates a calumny which persists to this day. Meanwhile Longitude (2002) tells of the eighteenth-century race to accurately measure longitude - and claim a £20,000 reward from Parliament.

Music at Night centres on a group of people attending a musical evening to hear a new work. Each act follows a movement in the music, which inspires the listeners to react each in their own way, looking inside themselves for their true feelings and sometimes remembering significant moments from their past. As often in Priestley's work, the relations between the sexes play an important part, a theme which recurs in the other two plays. The Long Mirror recounts the meeting between a composer and a young woman who seems to have been telepathically connected to him for some time, and has experienced much of his life before actually meeting him. Her knowledge of his past can help his future as an artist and a husband. It was based on a true incident. Ever Since Paradise he described as 'A Discursive Entertainment, chiefly referring to Love and Marriage in Three Acts'. Three couples are made up of The Musicians, the Commentators and The Example, and together they illustrate various aspects of relationships, accompanied by appropriate music on two pianos.

THE BOMB - A Partial History is a season of plays from leading contemporary dramatists, charting the political history of the Nuclear Bomb and its proliferation from 1940 to the present day.FIRST BLAST (1940 - 1992) features plays by John Donnelly, Elena Gremina, Amit Gupta, Zinnie Harris & Ron Hutchinson. It is the first year of World War II, and in Whitehall two émigré Jewish scientists are waiting for a meeting to get the British establishment to take their nuclear research seriously. The following plays then trace the history of the Labour party wrestling with the decision to build the Atomic Bomb, the Cuban missile crisis from a Russian perspective, China's war with India and the subsequent development of India's bomb, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the unilateral disarmament of Ukraine.SECOND BLAST (1992 - 2012) features plays by Lee Blessing, Ryan Craig, David Greig, Zinnie Harris, Diana Son & Colin Teevan. A contemporary take on the non-proliferation debate looking at Israel and Iran's nuclear capability, the 'axis of evil' speech and its affect on North Korea, the U.K.'s continuing reliance on Trident in the post Cold War era, through to the current negotiations with Iran and weapons' inspections there.

The latest collection of plays from one of the most celebrated, influential and studied playwrights in the English-speaking world. Howard Barker's plays continue to challenge, unsettle and expose.Barker's theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year in a sordid room. Inevitably they are inspected by God, but in a shape none could have predicted and only he can delight in. In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker's nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful words which arrive in sealed envelopes to prepare her for a succession of ordeals. Deep Wives and Knowledge and a Girl are short pieces, firmly established in the European theatre repertoire. In the first, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog. In Knowledge and a Girl, Barker reinterprets the Snow White fable from the perspective of the Stepmother.

Four new short plays inspired by the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta by internationally renowned playwrights Howard Brenton, Anders Lustgarten, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Sally Woodcock.

Equations for a Moving Body is a story about our bodies in a world that transports our minds places bodies can't follow. It's a story about the physiology of endurance - when our brains tell our bodies to stop - and the psychology of carrying on.

Prize winning adaptations of four seminal Russian plays collected together for the first time. A collection of plays from Richard Crane, these four plays flourished out of a unique collaboration of author and director, which saw them progressing from fringe to mainstream, West End and Off-Broadway.

This collection of short plays tells the story of a love affair from three different angles.

Three short plays parodying some of the greats of the European dramatic and literary canon: Chekhov, Wagner, Wordsworth, Eliot, Strindberg, Milne and Goethe.

An anthology collecting 23 'letters left unsaid' from some of the most exciting voices in the UK and beyond.

Using only Charles Dickens' extraordinary words, Neil Bartlett's powerful stage versions of Dickens have garnered wide critical acclaim.

The first collection of plays from the critically acclaimed Karen Zacarías, one of the ten most produced playwrights in the USA.Contains the plays Native Gardens / The Book Club Play / Destiny of Desire The Book Club PlayA hit comedy about books and the people who love them. When the members of a devoted book club become the subjects of a documentary filmmaker and accept a provocative new member, their long-standing group dynamics take a hilarious turn. Sprinkled with wit, joy and novels galore.Destiny of DesireOn a stormy night in Bellarica, Mexico, two baby girls are born - one into a life of privilege and one into a life of poverty. When the newborns are swapped by a former beauty queen with an insatiable lust for power the stage is set for two outrageous misfortunes to grow into one remarkable destiny. Karen Zacarías infuses the Mexican telenovela genre with music, high drama and burning passion to make for a fast-paced modern comedy.Native GardensYou can't choose your neighbors. In this brilliant new comedy, cultures and gardens clash, turning well-intentioned neighbors into feuding enemies. Pablo, a rising attorney, and doctoral candidate Tania, his very pregnant wife, have just purchased a home next to Frank and Virginia, a well-established D.C. couple with a prize-worthy English garden. But an impending barbeque for Pablo's colleagues and a delicate disagreement over a long-standing fence line soon spirals into an all-out border dispute, exposing both couples' notions of race, taste, class and privilege.