Neil Bartlett: 18 books

Using only Charles Dickens’ extraordinary words and a chameleon ensemble of actors, Neil Bartlett’s powerful stage versions of Dickens have gathered wide critical acclaim. This volume contains Bartlett’s versions of Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist. ‘Gets...

Although his mainstream career has recently included major work for the RSC and the National, the five new pieces collected here show just how close playwright and director Neil Bartlett has stayed to the radical queer cultural roots that first brought him to prominence in the early 1980s. Commissioned...

Collected for the first time in print, over a decade of texts from one of British theatre’s fiercest and most individual voices, documenting the extraordinary site-specific solo performances which have run parallel to Bartlett’s acclaimed work as a mainstream director. Neil Bartlett was...

It is 3 a.m. in The City, and in a dark corner of The Bar, two lovers collide in the beginnings of a passionate and violent affair. Boy: nineteen, beautiful, ready for anyone to take him home, and 'O': the Older Man, cynical, unpredictable, and at the mercy of his personal demons. Their romance...

Using only Charles Dickens’ extraordinary words and a chameleon ensemble of eight actors, Neil Bartlett's powerful stage version of this much-loved story brings its settings and characters to thrilling theatrical life. From its opening image of little Pip, alone on the windswept marshes,...

"He's a beast I tell you - a real animal" What happens when you've lived only for pleasure, and you finally run out of time? When you've broken every promise, outraged every decency and slept your way through half of Europe - where do you turn as the clock starts to tick towards midnight?...

‘Oh, but he was a squeezing, wrenching, scraping, grasping kind of a Scrooge; a clutching, covetous old sinner...’ Using only Charles Dickens' extraordinary words and a chameleon ensemble of eight actors, Neil Bartlett's A Christmas Carol is a bold theatrical reimagining of a classic Christmas...

Tell me, please - is this a dream?' The night before he leads his troops into battle, the prince of Homburg strips off his uniform and goes sleepwalking. Moonstruck, his mind races with a young man's fantasies - love, ambition and victory. But when the morning comes, a single reckless act of...

In the winter of 2036, in a shabby apartment in Port Elizabeth, two old men search for a way to say goodbye after a lifetime spent together. In the perfect summer of 1971, in a very different South Africa, their handsome younger selves search for the courage to fall in love. And poised halfway between...

‘It is a solemn thing to hear, in a darkened room, the voice of a child…’ Using Charles Dickens’ original words, a handful of tunes stolen from the vivid world of Victorian music-hall, and a chameleon ensemble of thirteen actors, Neil Bartlett’s powerful version of Oliver Twist brings...

"All I ever wanted was a man who wouldn't ask me questions" Across the foyer of a crowded theatre, a handsome young man catches sight of the most expensive prostitute in town. When they meet, a mutual obsession is ignited - one that tears both their worlds apart. Set amidst the glittering...

Believe me, no civilised man ever regrets a pleasure... As London slides from one century into the next, a young man is cursed with the uncanny ability to remain both young and beautiful while descending into a life of heartless debauchery. With its glittering dialogue, provocative imagery...

On the night of 24th March 1895, Mrs Robinson, a society palm-reader, agreed to see Oscar Wilde in her London flat. Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’, was urging him to sue the Marquis of Queensberry (Bosie’s father) for criminal libel. But Wilde’s friends, wary of Queensberry’s...

I took my tears and turned them into paintings' In the electric calm of a blue-painted room, a dying woman reassembles the images of an extraordinary life. The woman is Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. The life is one of struggle - with love, with the body, with her country, and most of all, with...