Nick Hern Books: 842 books

A young writer challenges the status quo but discovers that creative gain comes at a personal cost. She wants to change the shape of the world. But a new way of thinking needs a new story. Ella Hickson's new play, The Writer, is a searing exploration of power and patriarchy. It is premiered...

'Retired people are like nuclear power stations. They like to live by the sea.' Two ageing nuclear scientists in an isolated cottage on the coast, as the world around them crumbles. Then an old friend arrives with a frightening request. Lucy Kirkwood's play The Children premiered at...

Drama Classics series The world's great plays at a great little price. Each pocket-sized volume contains: a full introduction an author biography notes on historical and theatrical context a plot synopsis key dates a further reading list a glossary of unusual words and phrases...

In the late 1600s, in a convent in Mexico, a gifted and progressive writer finds herself at the centre of a deadly battle of ideas. Celebrated by the Court but silenced by the Church, she is betrayed by the very people she thought she could trust. Inspired by the extraordinary life of Sor Juana...

Mike Bartlett's controversial 'future history play' explores the people beneath the crowns, the unwritten rules of our democracy, and the conscience of Britain's most famous family. Queen Elizabeth II is dead. After a lifetime of waiting, her son ascends the throne. A future of power. But how...

‘I sit on the loo and think about all the people I can have sex with now. I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it.’ The Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s debut play is an outrageously...

A landmark play about sexual politics in colonial Africa and modern-day Britain, in which all our assumptions about sex and gender are stunningly exploded. First staged by Joint Stock and premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979, it has since been staged all over the world. Set...

A penetrating play about belonging, family and the limitations of communication. Winner of Best New Play, at the Off-West End Theatre Awards. Billy's family, like every other, is a club, with its own private language, jokes and rules. You can be as rude as you like, as possessive as you like,...

A stunningly ambitious work from one of the UK's most influential playwrights. Someone sneezes. Someone can't get a signal. Someone shares a secret. Someone won't answer the door. Someone put an elephant on the stairs. Someone's not ready to talk. Someone is her brother's mother. Someone hates...

A comic, contemporary vision of life in England's green and pleasant land. Winner of the Evening Standard Award for Best Play, and the Critics Circle and Whatsonstage.com Awards for Best New Play. On St George's Day, the morning of the local country fair, Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, local waster...

A moving, comical and eye-opening story of four young women fighting for education and self-determination against the larger backdrop of women's suffrage. Girton College, Cambridge, the first college in Britain to admit women. The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade...

Based on the award-winning memoir by Timothy Conigrave, and adapted for the stage by acclaimed playwright Tommy Murphy, Holding the Man tells a remarkable true-life love story that speaks across generations, sexualities and cultures. The course of teenage love rarely runs smooth, but it is...

A brilliant and unsettling play from one of the UK's leading dramatists. Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000. At the opening of the play, a young girl is questioning her aunt about having seen her uncle hitting people with an iron bar; by the end, several years later, the whole world...

Ibsen's classic tragic masterpiece, in a new version by Richard Eyre. Helene Alving has spent her life suspended in an emotional void after the death of her cruel but outwardly charming husband. She is determined to escape the ghosts of her past by telling her son, Oswald, the truth about his...