Series: Modern Classics

You must get away tonight, the man had told him. David escapes from the concentration camp where he has spent his entire life and flees across Europe. He is utterly alone – who can he trust? What will await him? And all the while, how can he be sure that they won’t catch up with him... This is the remarkable...

“Come to A Raisin in the Sun as you would to any classic. It speaks to us today as it did almost half a century ago.” – Bonnie Greer In South Side Chicago, Walter Lee, a Black chauffeur, dreams of a better life and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who...

A Liverpudlian West Side Story: twin brothers are separated at birth because their mother cannot afford to keep them both. She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons, and they grow up as friends, unaware of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a bloodbath. Willy Russell is less concerned with political tub-thumping than with weaving a close-knit...

In its first two years of production in Italy, Dario Fo's notorious Accidental Death of an Anarchist was seen by over half a million people. It has since been performed all over the world, and has become a classic of twentieth-century drama. A sharp and hilarious satire on police corruption, it concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who,...

Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending. Sunday Times Educating Rita premiered at the RSC Warehouse, London, in June 1980. Voted Best Comedy of 1980, it was subsequently made into a highly successful film with Michael...

Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall. (Pause.) He won't be saying hello no more, God bless him. Not with that lump of a brain gone. Who knocked Wee Thomas over on the lonely road on the island of Inishmore, and was it an accident?...

In this chronicle of the European Thirty Years War, taking place between the years 1624 and 1636, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon to whomever she can. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part with her livelihood—the wagon. The Berlin production...

Ziegler’s thoughtful, empathetic play brings home with bitter comedy the unlovely male-domination of this world in the 1950s ... glorious." Independent London 1953. Scientists are on the verge of discovering what they call the secret of life: the DNA double helix. Providing the key is driven young physicist Rosalind Franklin. But if the double helix was the breakthrough of the...

Albee’s perversely funny sendup of a standard mid-life crisis drama … dares to suggest that even the most flawed and confused human beings deserve compassionate understanding, and the failure to proffer it is a species of bestiality far more abhorrent than the sexual kind. Variety On his 50th birthday, Martin, a world-famous architect, prepares for a recorded interview by an...

Also known as The Private Life of the Master Race, this is a sequence of twenty-four realistic sketches showing how "ordinary" life under the Nazis was subtly permeated by suspicion and anxiety. Written in exile in Denmark and first staged in 1938, it was inspired in part by Brecht's recent trip to Moscow where he had been researching tasks for...

Written in exile during the Second World War, the story of Brecht's classic play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, subverts an ancient Chinese tale—echoed in the Judgement of Solomon—in which two women claim the same child. The message of Brecht's parable is that resources should go to those who will make the best use of them. Thanks to the rascally judge,...

A Taste of Honey became a sensational theatrical success when first produced in London by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company. It was made into a highly acclaimed film in 1961. The play is about the adolescent Jo and her relationships with those around her—her irresponsible, roving mother Helen and her mum's newly acquired drunken husband, the black sailor who leaves...

The action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe. – Daily Telegraph This play, by the winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature, asks: 'On the authority of what gods' the white aliens rupture the world. It puts...

Marlene hosts a dinner party in a London restaurant to celebrate her promotion to managing director of Top Girls employment agency. Her guests are five women from the past: Isabella Bird (1831-1904) - the adventurous traveller; Lady Nijo (b1258) - the mediaeval courtesan who became a Buddhist nun and travelled on foot through Japan; Dull Gret, who as Dulle Griet...

"A piece that takes us on an extraordinary journey … The energy and the vividness of the writing never lets up." The Independent An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world...

A masterpiece of 20th century drama. - The Guardian Death and the King's Horseman centres around Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, who has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent...

This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work. The Guardian Ripped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and motherhood, in a moving elegy. Audacious with ambition, Desdemona is Toni Morrison's intimate reimagining...

An ear for reproducing everyday language has long been David Mamet's hallmark, and he has now employed it to skewer the dogmatic, puritanical streak which has become commonplace on and off the campus. With Oleanna, he continues an exploration of male-female conflicts begun with Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. Oleanna cogently demonstrates that when free thought and dialogue are...

Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler—recast by Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. Using a wide range of parody and pastiche—from Al Capone to Shakespeare's Richard III...

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. It focuses on the feud between Macheaf - an amoral criminal - and his father-in-law, a racketeer who controls...

Antigone was originally produced in Paris in 1942, when France was occupied and part of Hitler's Europe. The play depicts an authoritarian regime which mirrors the predicament of the French people of the time. Based on Sophocles' ancient Greek tragedy, Antigone, which was first performed in Athens in the 5th century BC, its theme was nevertheless topical. In Antigone's faithfulness...

“A scalpel-wielding dissection of the fetishisation of wifeliness.” - The Guardian Every couple needs a little fantasy to keep their marriage sparkling. Judy and Johnny are living the 1950s dream, but behind the gingham curtains, being a domestic goddess is not as easy as it looks. A dark comedy about sex, cake, and the quest to be the 'perfect' housewife,...

The world can and will go on without us but I have to think that we have made this world a better place. That we have left it richer, wiser than had we not chosen the way of art. The 1996 Tony Award winner for Best Play. Terrence McNally's Master Class presents the legendary opera diva, Maria Callas, as she...

Oh What a Lovely War is a theatrical chronicle of the First World War, told through the songs and documents of the period. First performed by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London in 1963, it received the acclaim of London audiences and critics. It won the Grand Prix of the Théâtre des Nations festival in...

Alice Birch’s new play is scored like a piece of music ... It is an extraordinary echoing text, full of pain and strange beauty. The three stories play out simultaneously on stage, the dialogue from one scene overlapping with the other two in a manner that borders on the choral ... Birch has provided a text that explores these ideas...

The Beauty Queen of Leenane was first presented as a Druid Theatre/Royal Court Theatre co-production in January 1996. Set in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag, her manipulative ageing mother. The mother's interference in Maureen's first...

Along with Mother Courage, the character of Galileo is one of Brecht's greatest creations, immensely live, human and complex. Unable to resist his appetite for scientific investigation, Galileo's heretical discoveries about the solar system bring him to the attention of the Inquisition. He is scared into publicly abjuring his theories but, despite his self-contempt, goes on working in private, eventually...

“As finely worked as a Swiss watch and as funny as the human condition permits ... the zigzag brilliance of the text as the clunky lines of the farce-within-a-farce rub against the sharp dialogue of reality.” The Guardian A play-within-a-play following a touring theatre company who are rehearsing and performing a comedy called Nothing On, results in a riotous double-bill...

Our Day Out by Willy Russell tells the story of Mrs Kay's 'Progress Class,' who are unleashed for a day's coach trip to Conway Castle in Wales. It is an exuberant celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up and being footloose, fourteen, and free from school. "The skill and zest of the show ...derive from its success in...

"An honest, even profound reflection on the price of fame, with some genuine sexual frisson and an undercurrent of pathos." - The Hollywood Reporter At the centre of his own universe sits matinee idol Garry Essendine: suave, hedonistic and too old, says his wife, to be having numerous affairs - his line of harmless, infatuated debutantes is largely tolerated but...

"Noel Coward's glittering gem" - The Times Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, recently divorced from one another after a five-year marriage, coincidentally arrive at the same French hotel... where they are both honeymooning with their respective new spouses. Jarred by this encounter, Elyot and Amanda realise that they are still very much horrified and fascinated by the other. Frequently performed...

In south side Chicago, Walter Lee, a black chauffeur, dreams of a better life and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who rejects the liquor business, uses some of the money to secure a proper house for the family. Mr Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighbourhood, tries to buy them...

"The political theatre of the 21st century has arrived, in some style." The Times The most infamous scandal in corporate history. The most vilified figures in the financial world. The most audacious (and destructive) display of greed history has ever seen. Charting the notorious rise and fall of the eponymous company and its founding partners, Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling,...

"Some of [Coward's] most sparkling dialogue ever... This play is about something substantial - the way past relationships come back to haunt us - but it's the gossamer-like nature of the piece, its sheer levity of spirit, that makes it such an enduring achievement" - The Telegraph When socialite and novelist Charles Condomine attends a séance hosted by eccentric medium...

Mother Courage and Her Children is widely regarded as Brecht's best work, a theatrical landmark and one of the most powerful anti-war plays in history. This unique bilingual edition allows students to compare the original German text with a translation by one of the world's leading playwrights, Tony Kushner. In this play, a chronicle of the Thirty Years War, Mother...

"Morisseau's characters are both overwhelmed and motivated by forces beyond their control, and are charged with rhythmic, intelligent language that they wield beautifully." - The New York Times Brooklyn, New York City. Nina’s estranged father, a former Black revolutionary and political prisoner, reappears to obtain a coveted piece of her late mother’s legacy. While he dreamed of changing the world,...

I can tell the difference between who I am and a side effect. The Effect is a clinical romance. Two young volunteers, Tristan and Connie, agree to take part in a clinical drug trial. Succumbing to the gravitational pull of attraction and love, however, Tristan and Connie manage to throw the trial off-course, much to the frustration of the clinicians...

“Barron paints a wholly plausible picture of teenage insecurity and ambition ... a play that wittily shows how dance can be a source of liberation without ever quelling the tremulous terrors of adolescence.” - The Guardian Somewhere in America, a revolution is coming. An army of competitive dancers is ready to take over the world, one routine at a time....

"Its fusion of passion and mischief remains striking and there is something undeniably heady about its celebration of a kind of sexual liberation that looks a lot like flippancy" - Evening Standard From 1930s bohemian Paris to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society, a tempestuous love triangle unravels between a vivacious interior designer, Gilda, playwright Leo and artist Otto—three people...

Brecht's famous parable, written in exile between 1939 and 1941, shows that in an unjust society, good can only survive by means of evil. In this story, the gods come to earth in search of enough good people to justify their existence. They find Shen Teh, a good-hearted but penniless prostitute, and make her a gift that enables her to...

Now a Netflix original series! One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." --William Kennedy,...

A Man For All Seasons dramatises the conflict between King Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More. It depicts the confrontation between church and state, theology and politics, absolute power and individual freedom. Throughout the play, Sir Thomas More's eloquence and endurance, his purity, saintliness and tenacity in the face of ever-growing threats to his beliefs and family, earn him status...