A Book Of Plays

Presents a student guide to ten plays including "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden", "Our Town," "Here We Are", "The Bear", "Sorry, Wrong Number", "Trifles", "Riders to the Sea", "Thunder on Sycamore Street", "Twelve Angry Men," and "The Glass Menagerie" and includes worksheets covering topics of plot structure, theme, setting, and conflict, as well as journals and discussion logs.

A guide to the hidden workings of plays and the trade secrets that govern their writing - by the acclaimed playwright Steve Waters. Drawing on a wide range of drama, both historical and modern, Waters takes the reader through the key elements of dramatic writing - scenes, acts, space, time, characters, language and images - to show how a play is more than the sum of its parts, with as much inner vitality as a living organism. Almost uniquely amongst accounts of playwriting, Waters' book looks at the ways in which good plays move their audiences, generating powerful emotional responses that often defy conventional analysis. The Secret Life of Plays is for playwrights at any stage of their career, and will inspire and inform drama students as well as working actors and directors. Most of all it is for anyone who has ever laughed or cried in the theatre - and wants to know why. 'Theatre is a live medium, about bodies, sweat and feeling, even if it is informed by ideas and reason. How a thing composed of words manages to carry within it the currents of energy that generate that impression of life is what I want to explore...' Steve Waters 'Steve Waters' book is like his plays: clear, elegant and stimulating throughout' David Edgar

The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years. It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates about the politics of black, mixed race and lesbian identities in 1980s Britain, and from the 1990s Winsome Pinnock's Talking in Tongues engages with the politics of feminism to explore issues of black women's identity in Britian and Jamaica. From the first decade of the twenty-first century the three plays include Roy Williams' seminal pub-drama Sing Yer Hearts Out for the Lads, exploring racism and identity against the backdrop of the World Cup; Kwame Kwei-Armah's National Theatre play of 2004, Fix Up, about black cultural history and progress in modern Britain, and finally Bola Agbage's terrific 2007 debut, Gone Too Far!, which examines questions of identity and tensions between Africans and Caribbeans living in Britain. Edited by Lynnette Goddard, this important anthology provides an essential introduction to the last forty years of British black theatre.

Long and short plays for stage, radio and television, acted between 1956 & 2009, an unperformed opera libretto, excerpts from The Lanark Storyboard and full film script of the novel Poor Things by Alasdair Gray.

Less than half the price of full-length anthologies and more economical than most value editions, The Seagull Readers are a portable and inexpensive alternative to bulky anthologies.

Beginning with Synge s Riders to the Sea, generally considered the best one-act play ever written, this volume contains some of the masterpieces of world literature in this shorter genre. Among others, plays from the pens of Chekov, Tennessee Williams and Conan Doyle are included.