Playwriting category: 893 books

The Syrian desert. Third century AD. Zenobia, warrior Queen of Palmyra, moves her forces into battle with Aurelian, Emperor of Rome. Meanwhile, her son is engaged in bizarre chemical experiments with Porphyry, a philosophy student with his own secret. A story of love and adventure at the time...

Deep in the Hampshire countryside Edward Thomas, disaffected husband, exhausted father and tormented writer, scrapes a living. In 1913 he meets American poet Robert Frost and everything changes. As their friendship blossoms Edward writes, emerging from his cocoon of self-doubt into one of the most...

John Blakemore is a solitary boy who finds it impossible either to understand or adapt to the ways of the school. His adolescent earnestness put off teacher and pupil alike. And now suddenly he seems to be in danger of losing his only friend. David Hare's emotional new play, written at the...

'I want to give my country a model of perfection... Nothing less. My country needs cheering up. I'm the man to do it.' Nobody can doubt John Christie's passion nor his formidable will: his wooing of his opera singer wife has been marked by a determination befitting a man who won the Military Cross...

A detailed guide to the collaborative method developed by the acclaimed creators of The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency--destined to become a classic. A Vintage Original. By Moisés Kaufman and Barbara Pitts McAdams with Leigh Fondakowski, Andy Paris, Greg Pierotti, Kelli Simpkins, Jimmy...

The second collection of plays from eminent playwright James Graham, bringing together four of his state-of-the-nation plays. The volume includes the following plays, alongside an introduction by the author: This House (2012) explores Westminster and the 1974 hung parliament through...

When an old adversary threatens Rome, the city calls once more on her hero and defender: Coriolanus. But famine threatens the city, the citizens' hunger swells to an appetite for change, and on returning from the field Coriolanus must confront the march of realpolitik and the voice of an angry people. This...

When it was first published in 1962, Anger and After was the first comprehensive study of the dramatic movement which began in 1956 with the staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and has since brought forward such dramatists as Brendan Behan, Harold Pinter, N. F. Simpson, John Arden and Arnold...

Beyond Hamlet – the life of Ophelia unveiled.   Meet Ophelia. At the opening of this creative new play she is a feisty young girl about to embark on a relationship with young Hamlet. Based partly in the modern day, the play’s first act ends where Shakespeare’s play begins, with the death of...

David Greig: Plays 1 brings together four key plays by the playwright described by the Daily Telegraph as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation'. In Outlying Island two young Cambridge ornithologists are sent to a remote island. Together with its...

Laughing. Talking. Hours in cafes drinking coffee. Chatting about boys. Girls. Romance. Sharing a plate of chips. It was one of those friendships...I don't know how to explain...like...Love. Cabaret singer Foxie O'Hara vanished two weeks ago from Mrs Whistle's Lodge. That very same night, Foxie's...

What on earth is happening to our planet? And who knows what to do? Certainties are few: every living thing is related to every other living thing; our actions have consequences; change is continual and inevitable. The National Theatre asked four of the country's most exciting writers to investigate....

Reliance on devices like the photograph and slide will lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide. We must keep on challenging language to engage with all we suffer from in this new modern age. This epic sweep of a play takes us from a contemporary Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram...

- Do you have to hold your breath? ... Can you do that? - Yeah. Anyone can. - Not me. Can't be doing without breath. I'd hate to drown. I'm a big fan of air ... 400 miles from home, James has started a new career as a rigger - two weeks onshore, two weeks offshore - existing between two very...