Tennessee Williams

One of Williams' best-loved plays, this emotional rollercoaster tells the tale of the iconic Blanche DuBois and her demise by Stanley Kowalski. Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of...

A drama of decay in Southern America, this depiction of patriarchy, power and repression is one of Williams' landmark works. Big Daddy Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, and Brick, an ageing football hero who has...

Penguin Modern Classics presents Tennessee Williams' first successful play which has continued to win audiences over ever since. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain, when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape...

This revised Student Edition includes an introduction by Bess Rowen, Assistant Professor at Villanova University, US, which looks in particular at the play's treatment of rape, vulnerable people, mental institutions (especially in connection to Williams's own family), sexuality and sexual desire. A Streetcar Named Desire shows a turbulent confrontation between traditional values in the American South – an old-world graciousness...

Williams’s favourite among his plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is perhaps his most impassioned and articulate statement on human isolation, the wrenching problems of communication between people and the ways in which death defines life. NEW YORK TIMES In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a Southern family meet to celebrate 'Big Daddy' Pollitt's 65th birthday. But as...

Tennessee Williams's mordantly funny and deeply troubled meditation on the desperate dismay of ageing and the iniquities of racial bigotry. INDEPENDENT It's a wonderfully weird play, starting claustrophobic, losing intensity as it introduces the locals… then regrouping for a devastating second half… This unruly, unforgettable play takes its unpredictable course to something that makes you feel afresh our powerlessness against...

This revised Student Edition includes an introduction by Daniel Ciba, which examines the play in terms of realism or experimentalism, and considers it through the lens of Queer Identity. The introduction includes discussions of recent revivals and adaptations of the play across the world. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams' first major popular success and an autobiographical play about his mother...

The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone charts the transformation of Mrs Stone from a famous, rich American actress to a notorious, very wealthy American widow. This transition takes years, during which her youth and legendary beauty gradually slip away. In search of an escape, she flees to Rome. However, even the distractions of the Eternal City cannot halt the advance...