No family photograph can truly prepare Rowena for her first meeting with Maurice's three wives and teenage son. Young, nervous and extremely pregnant, she is warmly welcomed into the fold but her presence soon has the family questioning the nature of their delicate balance. Then Fay brings home a one-night stand, with far-reaching consequences for them all. Set in an ordinary house in a tree-lined street in Lewisham, Matt Charman's new play takes a provocative look at married life, and the alternatives.
“If Lee Harvey Oswald did it, he could not have done it alone. If he did not, he must be the hit of the century. If he was involved and somehow double-crossed, alive today must be persons with the guilt of awful silence.” Dallas, Texas. 12.30pm. Friday, 22 November 1963. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. 48 hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald himself was murdered. Told through the eyes of Oswald’s wife and mother, coupled with extracts from the Warren Commission’s report, we follow the unsettled drifting life of Lee Harvey Oswald – his loveless marriage to his Russian wife, his challenging relationship with his mother and his pathological hatred of Kennedy’s life and achievements. Oswald had the means, motive and opportunity, but did he even do it? Could a man who never did anything on his own murder a President?
A new version, from award-winning poet Glyn Maxwell, of Robert Louis Stevenson's Gothic masterpiece. A decent man finds himself stalked and confronted by his own evil alter-ego.
Eddie and Carol were lovers once, but their lives went in different directions. Now they meet again on a park bench in a town full of memories, and find something still burns between them. Critics Circle and Offwestend Award-winning playwright and novelist Barney Norris has been heralded as 'one of our most exciting young writers' (Times), 'a rare and precious talent' (Evening Standard), 'a writer of grace and luminosity' (Stage) who is 'fast turning into the quiet voice of Britain' (British Theatre Guide).
Harry wants to leave an Inheritance for his sons. So, going against life-long political convictions, he joins the property-owning class. Then the economic crisis hits.A timely, comic and poignant exploration of how a worldwide recession impacts on the lives of ordinary people, Mike Packer's Inheritance opened at Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, in November 2010.
Lying there, drifting up into those ancient lights was exactly like looking into the past. It is looking into the past. History, I think, is just a property of light. Charlie Fairbanks was born in the dead center of the United States at the dead center of the twentieth century. Americans are going to the Moon and Charlie's sure he'll be the first one there. But as he shines his spotlight on the Moon, so too does it illuminate the darker side to his nation's history. Radio is a story about memory, love and spaceships.
'Who knows yet But from this Lady may proceed a gem To lighten all this isle' You know the story: a King who turns his country upside down to try and secure a male heir. But it's never been told this way before. A Queen fights for justice. A Lady provokes reformation. But in the absence of a son, can a Princess change the future? See the story of Henry VIII from a female perspective: this exploration of love, lineage and power by Shakespeare's Globe Writer in Residence (2022) Hannah Khalil unfolds in a new way.
Winner of the STR Theatre Book Prize 2014 The National Theatre Story is filled with artistic, financial and political battles, onstage triumphs – and the occasional disaster. This definitive account takes readers from the National Theatre's 19th-century origins, through false dawns in the early 1900s, and on to its hard-fought inauguration in 1963. At the Old Vic, Laurence Olivier was for ten years the inspirational Director of the NT Company, before Peter Hall took over and, in 1976, led the move into the National's concrete home on the South Bank. Altogether, the NT has staged more than 800 productions, premiering some of the 20th and 21st centuries' most popular and controversial plays, including Amadeus, The Romans in Britain, Closer, The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors. Certain to be essential reading for theatre lovers and students, The National Theatre Story is packed with photographs and draws on Daniel Rosenthal's unprecedented access to the National Theatre's own archives, unpublished correspondence and more than 100 new interviews with directors, playwrights and actors, including Olivier's successors as Director (Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner), and other great figures from the last 50 years of British and American drama, among them Edward Albee, Alan Bennett, Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, David Hare, Tony Kushner, Ian McKellen, Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith, Peter Shaffer, Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard.
This is an essential guide for anyone interested in the best new British stage plays to emerge in the new millennium. For students of theatre studies and theatre-goers Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today is a perfect companion to Britain's burgeoning theatre writing scene. It explores the context from which new plays have emerged and charts the way that playwrights have responded to the key concerns of the decade and helped shape our sense of who we are. In recent years British theatre has seen a renaissance in playwriting accompanied by a proliferation of writing awards and new writing groups. The book provides an in-depth exploration of the industry and of the key plays and playwrights. It opens by defining what is meant by 'new writing' and providing a study of the leading theatres, such as the Royal Court, the Traverse, the Bush, the Hampstead and the National theatres, together with the London fringe and the work of touring companies. In the second part, Sierz provides a fascinating survey of the main issues that have characterised new plays in the first decade of the new century, such as foreign policy and war overseas, economic boom and bust, divided communities and questions of identity and race. It considers too how playwrights have re-examined domestic issues of family, of love, of growing up, and the fantasies and nightmares of the mind. Against the backdrop of economic, political and social change under New Labour, Sierz shows how British theatre responded to these changes and in doing so has been and remains deeply involved in the project of rewriting the nation.
