Methuen Drama imprint: 1030 books

I kept telling myself I wanted something more out of my life, something brighter. I had all these ideas in my head. Thing is, I had to go down so low just to try to lift my life up a little bit higher. Simon Stephens's exciting new adaptation of the twentieth-century classic Kasimir and Karoline...

'A Trivial Comedy for Serious People': its subtitle is the best summary of a play that is the theatrical equivalent of a butterfly. The verbal brilliance of its highly self-conscious characters hides deep anxieties about social and personal identity: Jack Worthing, found as a baby in a handbag at...

Both Sheridan and Goldsmith lamented the popularity of sentimental comedy in the later eighteenth century and wrote their witty and satirical plays (though never lascivious in the manner of Restoration comedies) to counteract the sentimental mode. The Rivals (1775) was a qualified success: the suave...

Enduringly popular less for its plots than for its verbal brilliance and wit, The School for Scandal (1777) was the most frequently performed play of its time. Sir Peter Teazle has made the perennial mistake of elderly bachelors in English comedy and married a much younger wife in the hope that she...

The Critic was Sheridan's response to a very specific political and theatrical situation. In the summer of 1779, a Franco-Spanish invasion seemed imminent and patriotic fervour superseded party divisions and personal animosities. The Critic satirises the panic of the summer in the form of the comically...

Performed as a one-woman show, Victim follows the power struggle between prison guard Tracey and criminal Siobhan as they come face-to-face with a notorious inmate. As they both muse on their lives outside the prison walls, we come to learn of their anxieties and their hardships as they confront the...

Theatre has a funny way of getting to the heart of who we are now and – particularly in the case of Connections – who we are going to be. Drawing together the work of nine leading playwrights, National Theatre Connections 2018 features work by some of the most exciting contemporary playwrights....

Would you mind if I asked you a troubling question? Jay is the Oscar-winning actor taking the lead in a new play that connects with his Irish roots. Leigh is the ambitious director who will do anything to get noticed. Ruth is the Northern Irish playwright whose voice must be heard. The...

Twenty-five year-old east Belfast man Stevie meets forty-nine year-old Glaswegian widow Martha while recovering from a painful breakup with his ex-girlfriend. Stevie and Martha are immediately attracted to each other. Although their relationship is based entirely upon sexual attraction, they find...

if I was gold almighty himself, and destroyed this first attempt at life. what would my second version be? . . . a dead end of endless possibility. A pedlar boy wakes up in a field somewhere in London, surrounded by the remnants of the night before*.* With no memory of how he has come to be...

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be so lauded for his prose and plays. Since relocating to France in 1987, in a voluntary exile from China, he has assembled a body of dramatic work that has best been understood neither as expressly Chinese...

Martyn Wallace awoke in his boarding house and held his aching head. His room was brown and dirty and bare. He called it Reading Gaol. Amidst the filth and fury of Dublin 1904, the theatrical event of the century is about to explode! Fading stars, rebels, whores and romantics irreverently expose...

'I wasn't throwing up. I was dying. I was very ill . . . And do you know what? In the middle of all that . . . malaise, I remember thinking "This is what it's like to be married." But I'd do it again' An elderly couple sit in a dark room in their house, doing the crossword, taking...

Two plays exploring the pain of living and the difficulty of dying by a sensational new writer Juniper's Whitening "Tell me this - is it true that if you make someone die, and they come out the other side, it doesn't matter? I'm sure something clung to Lazarus. Something must've...