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Plays from the United Kingdom
TheatreBooks stocks plays in English from around the world and, of course, all
plays published in Canada. We stock and sell plays from Dramatists Play Service,
Dramatic Publishing Co. and Samuel French, and the leading play publishers
in Great Britain. We carry books on all aspects of theatre production, as well
as opera and dance.
If you don't find the title or playwright you are looking for, please stop by the
store and ask, or contact us at action@theatrebooks.com,
by phone at 416.922.7175, toll-free at 1.800.361.3414 or by fax at 416.922.0739.
See also: Theatre > New &
Featured and Classic U.K. Plays
Backlist
Jonathan Moore: Three Plays
Jonathan Moore
This collection includes three of the best plays by one of Britain's most
distinctive playwrights. In Treatment, Liam is trapped between two worlds
and he has to choose between the dark allure of violence and the healing power
of love. This Other Eden is a tough play about a woman's soul told with
beauty humour and hope. And Fall From Light concerns a working-class opera
composer whose lover takes him on a Dantesque journey to the council estate where
she grew up. Softcover, 199 pp. $27.95.
The Tamer Tamed
John Fletcher
In John Fletcher's irreverent and hugely entertaining 'sequel'
to The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio marries for a second
time and is tamed by his wife Maria in a reversal of roles that
has echoes of the sex-strike in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Written
20 years after Shakespeare's original, The Tamer Tamed is
also a revealing insight into changing attitudes to women. Softcover,
100 pp. $22.95.
Got to be Happy
Simon Burt
With gutzy dialogue and a wonderful ear for dialect, Simon
Burt has written a fast-paced play about people who work together,
play together, and try to maintain the routine of everyday life.
The heat from the pub's kitchen isn't the only thing that's boiling
hot in Got to be Happy. 2M, 2W. Softcover, 78 pp. $19.95.
Loyal Women
Gary Mitchell
Brenda is under siege in her Belfast home. Daughter Jenny's
baby is crying upstairs, her mother-in-law is sleeping in the front
room and her husband is back after years away. And now the women
of the Ulster Defence Association want to hold meetings there as
well. M-2, F-7. Softcover, 104 pp. $19.95.
John Godber: Plays 3
John Godber
John Godber is one of England's most widely performed playwrights. These three
later plays provide a useful taxonomy for the extensive and wide-ranging Godber
canon; a range that includes the physical (Up 'n' Under), but also encompasses
the ritualised biographical (April in Paris) and the later, more naturalistic,
class-conflict based work (Perfect Pitch). Softcover, 281 pp. $37.95.
Peter Whelan: Plays 1
Peter Whelan
This collection contains: The Accrington Pals (M-5, F-5), The School
of Night (M-7, F-3), and The Herbal Bed (M-6, F-2). Softcover, 308
pp. $37.95.
Terry Johnson: Plays 3
Terry Johnson
Terry Johnson's work has been performed all over Great Britain,
and in the USA, Europe and Australia. He is the recipient of nine
major British theatre awards and has had nine productions running
in London's West End. This introduction to his frequently funny
and always touching oeuvre contains The London Cuckolds, Cleo,
Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, and The Graduate. Softcover,
325 pp. $37.95.
Elmina's Kitchen
Kwame Kwei-Armah
Things aren't looking so great for Deli down in Murder Mile,
Hackney. He's trying to revive the fortune of his mother's restaurant,
but where does his son disappear to on the night of the long-awaited
re-opening? And why is his friend Digger offering him protection? Elmina's
Kitchen is a thrilling portrait of a one-parent familiy struggling
to stay within the law while the neighbourhood gets turned upside-down.
Softcover, 94 pp. $22.95.
Thebans: Oedipus Jokasta Antigone
Liz Lochhead
In Thebans, Liz Lochhead, working from the great dramas
of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, re-tells in a single play
the ancient stories of the Kingdom of Thebes: of Oedipus the King,
of Jokasta his mother/wife, and of their children, the warring
brothers Polyneikes and Eteokles and the sisters Ismene and Antigone,
who dies rather than obey Oedipus's successor, King Kreon, her
uncle, and leave her brother's corpse unburied. 9M, 3W, Chorus
(flexible casting). Softcover, 88 pp. $19.95.
The People Next Door
Henry Adam
Premiered at The Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, The People
Next Door is a play about what happens when someone else's
global problem becomes your local one. Henry Adam's play is a coherent,
lively, frightening and ultimately inspiring tale of coersion,
responsibility and loyalty. 3M, 1W. Softcover, 85 pp. $19.95.
The Straits
Gregory Burke
The Straits is the tale of an extraordinary summer in the lives of four
teenagers living in Rosia Bay, Gibraltar, 1982, just as war was beginning in
the South Atlantic. Premiering at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in August
2003, The Straits displays the same confident playwriting evidenced
in Burke's first play, Gagarin Way. m:3 f:1. Softcover, 96 pp. $20.00.
US and Them
Tasmin Oglesby
Oglesby has written a modern day transatlantic comedy of manners in which old
Europe and the New World struggle to understand each other. In US and Them,
a chance meeting in a Manhattan restaurant between an English couple and a
New York couple carries the promise of friendship, but are they speaking the
same language? m:4 f:3. Softcover, 140 pp. $23.00.
Unsuitable Girls
Dolly Dhingra
Meet Chumpa Chamelli -- bored secretary at Concrete Weekly, twenty-something
girlfriend of the laddish Ashok, a woman who knows her own mind and expects
more from life. With East End mates Mandy and Sab in tow, Chumpa sets off in
a search for a better man, a better job, and an ending straight out of the
movies. Softcover, 101 pp. $25.95.
Five Kinds of Silence
Shelagh Stephenson
Billy controls his wife and two adult daughters to the extent that they can't
leave the room without asking permission. He runs his family as a personal
fiefdom, and the women are there to service him and his madness. One day his
family shoots him dead. Five Kinds of Silence shows us a distorted world
of madness, control and dispair through the eyes of dead Billy and those of
his family, struggling to understand reality outside their stifling tomb. Stephenson's
play handles the subject of brutal violence quietly, honestly and chillingly.
3M, 3W (doubling). Softcover, 31 pp. $9.99.
Dublin Carol
Conor McPherson
Dublin Carol is the latest of McPherson's rich and evocative plays to be
put to print and follows the storytelling style of The Wier. It is Christmas
Eve and John Plunkett, an undertaker in his late fifties, encounters his estranged
daughter, his young co-worker and his own shameful past. 2m, 1w. Softcover,
43 pp. $9.99.
Dark Earth
David Harrower
When Valerie and Euan's car breaks down in a remote countryside near the Antonine
Wall in Scotland, they have to find help fast. This comes in the form of a
farming family who live and breathe the history and traditions of the small
area of earth they've made their home. When the mechanic takes an unexpectedly
long time in coming, the travellers are drawn into a world of family dilemma
which is both familiar and unrecognisable at the same time. m:2 f:3. Softcover,
108 pp. $20.00.
Crossing Jerusalem and Other Plays
Julia Pascal
This collection of plays by Julia Pascal contains: Crossing Jerusalem, The
Golem, Year Zero, and St Joan. Softcover, 191 pp. $38.95.
Ancient Lights
Shelagh Stephenson
Old friends spending Christmas together in the English countryside
are forced to to examine who they have become since their youth
and what price they have paid. Stephenson has created an acute
and funny play with a light touch that cuts surprisingly deep in Ancient
Lights.
2M, 4W. Softcover, 74 pp. $9.99.
Afore Night Come
David Rudkin
The harvest is ripe in a black country pear orchard. Seasoned
hands settle to familiar tasks and the ritual education of newcomers.
But corrupted land yields a bitter crop. The weather turns, friction
mounts and pesticide begins to fall. M-11, F-2. Softcover, 112
pp. $25.95.
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