Plays, playscripts

In one of our greatest contemporary plays, set in two distinct centuries, Tom Stoppard explores the nature of truth, time, sex and attraction with absorbing and tragic humour.

We can only do this, if we go by the book.

'Betrayal is a new departure and a bold one .

The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984.

4th March, 1865: On the night of his second inauguration, a few weeks before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln meets the veteran black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the White House to discuss the prospect of extending the vote to black men who have served in the soon to be victorious Union armies.

It's a dwindling band; old-fashioned and of a certain age, you can pick us out at funerals and memorial services because we can sing the hymns without the book.

The critical event in Berenice, the death of Titus's father, the Emperor Vespasian, happens a week before the play opens.

I guess that's how it was meant to be.

Obsessed with his own salvation, the hermit Paulo dedicates himself to ten years of prayerful penance.

Sex, work, pregnancy, parents, weird neighbours, cleaning the fridge and dancing: Play House tells - in thirteen fleeting scenes - the story of a young couple's attempts to set up home.

Deep in the Hampshire countryside Edward Thomas, disaffected husband, exhausted father and tormented writer, scrapes a living.

In a suburb of a mid-sized American city, Ben and Mary welcome to the neighbourhood Sharon and Kenny who have moved in to the long-empty house next door.

A tragedy of maritime decline, Bound follows the fortunes of six trawlermen from Devon as they embark on one final voyage.

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's new verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in Western drama.

One relationship.

It is 1936 and harvest time in County Donegal.

Moscow, 1938.

What on earth is happening to our planet?

Hear what I have to say about the cherry orchard, because it is mine.

It was so simple .

Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate.

Harry wants to leave an Inheritance for his sons.

The news that a government inspector is due to arrive in a small Russian town sends its bureaucrats into a panicked frenzy.

Two imprisoned young women, one African American and the other white, form a perilous bond.

1957.

The Revengers' ComediesA hugely entertaining pitch that recalls the old movies to which it frequently pays homage - Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Kind Hearts and Coronets - and expands after intermission to reveal an immensely disturbing vision of contemporary middle-class England poisoned by the rise of economic ruthlessness and the collapse of ethics.

Eigengrau / [ay-gen-gr-ow ] - noun.

I shall shortly be eighty-eight.

It's Christmas Day in Stewarton and Irene Gordon's struggling to get in the festive spirit.

Keep your guard up.

John Gabriel Borkman, wealthy, powerful, revered, sacrificed love for success and was handsomely rewarded.

My God, Russian soldiers being shot with Chinese bullets.

Alcestis is the story of a king, Admetus, who is able to escape death because his wife, Alcestis, has volunteered to die in his place.

Hedda Gabler returns, dissatisfied, from a long honeymoon.

Liubov Ranevskya, a widowed landowner returns home more or less insolvent after five years abroad.

Berlin/WallIn two contrasted readings for the stage, David Hare visits a place where a famous wall has come down; then another where a wall is going up.

Seven years have passed since the end of the Trojan War and Menelaus, King of Sparta and husband to Helen, is making his slow and painful way home.

Religion is for the benefit of the masses, not for brain-box types like you.

This second volume of plays by Alan Bennett includes his two Kafka plays, one an hilarious comedy, the other a profound and searching drama.

Late at night in a foreign land, an English army sweeps through the landscape under cover of darkness and takes the seat of power.

- he hadn't forgotten i was there - he just didn't care whether i was there or not - it would've been better him forgetting rather than not caring at allGerry and Iggy face the ends of their lives in a London hostel.

Mrs Alving is preparing for the opening of an orphanage, built in memory of her late husband.

In the summer of 1967 Greta Garbo comes to Donegal.

Small Town, Fife.

This collection of Alan Bennett's work includes his first play and West End hit, Forty Years On, as well as Getting On, Habeus Corpus, and Enjoy.

A skillful translation of the classical French tragedy about the captivity of Hector's wife after her abduction by the son of Achilles.

Wilbur is at the peak of his form in this stellar translation of an unusual Moliere play-populated with Greeks and Greco-Roman gods and flavored with the essences of vaudeville, fan-tasy, high comedy, farce, and even opera.

A brilliant translation of one of the most influential works of French theater, Phaedra is rendered into movingly expressive verse by the Pulitzer Prize-winning translator Richard Wilbur.

The School for Wives concerns an insecure man who contrives to show the world how to rig an infallible alliance by marrying the perfect bride; The Learned Ladies centers on the domestic calamities wrought by a domineering woman upon her husband, children, and household.