Drama History Criticism category: 905 books

Over the course of his career, British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) shifted away from elitist social satires and an atheistic outlook toward greater concern for the masses and the use of religious terms and imagery. This change in Huxley's thinking underlies the previously unpublished play Now More...

That's why we shout and scream at each other. Clears the air. A kind of truth begins to emerge. We see clearer. Pip and Meredith have had a bust-up. It was only about their opinion of a film, but it's led to more significant differences coming to light. Pip has been having an affair for the...

A couple in Washington, DC, is torn apart when a friend is accused of treason Jane and David Graham live upper-middle-class lives in mid-century Washington, DC. Jane minds the home with the help of a fulltime maid, and David works at the Treasury Department. But when the FBI visits their house...

1500 words on The Tempest's background, plot and key ideas. Get up to speed on Shakespeare, sharpish.

Produced in May 1998 in New York and starring Peter Falk, Mr. Peters' Connections takes place, in Miller's own words, in "that suspended state of consciousness when the mind is freed to roam from real memories to conjectures, from trivialities to tragic insights, from terror of death to glorying in...

Francis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social...

1600 words on Macbeth's background, plot and key ideas. Get up to speed on Shakespeare, sharpish.

When Roscoe, a 65-year-old Cervantes scholar, runs off with a young woman named Sally, he decides to stay a while in her family home. Soon he discovers that Sally’s house—once inhabited by James Dean; perched precariously over the San Fernando valley—is filled with secrets, sadness, and haunted...

In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong -- human folly, this time his own. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage...

As Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.” Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined...

This is the third volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English:...

This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a...

Brecht on Performance: Dialogues, Models, Practice Pieces presents a selection of Brecht's principle writings for actors and directors and is suitable for acting schools, directors, actors, students and teachers of Theatre Studies. Through these texts Brecht provides a general practical approach...

New edition, revised for the centenary of Brecht's birth, containing additional updated material In this classic study, John Willett sets in context not only Brecht the theatre practitioner but Brecht the writer and man of his time. Through chapters on Brecht's relationships and attitudes to...