Lyricist, novelist, poet and playwright Kate Tempest will make her National Theatre debut in June with Paradise , a potent and dynamic reimagining of the Greek classic Philoctetes by Sophocles. Once comrades, now enemies after Odysseus abandoned Philoctetes to suffer a terrible wound alone, Odysseus is prepared to use any means necessary to get the shell-shocked Philoctetes back to the front and win the Trojan war. Directed by Ian Rickson with Lesley Sharp leading a large ensemble all woman cast.
A social event becomes a personal challenge for two faculty members and thier wives at a small New England college as their inner fears and desires are exposed. Reprint.
'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.' This line was adopted by Jean Anouilh, to characterize the first production of "Waiting For Godot" at the Theatre de Babylone, in 1953. Anybody acquinted with Beckett's masterly black comedy would not question the recognition of this twentieth-century literature classic.
Set in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, a community stands accused of witchcraft, and in the mood of fear and recriminations that develops, men denounce their neighbours and truth is perverted by superstition.
This play tells the story of Willy Loman, an ageing salesman, who is a failure in both his business and private life. Fired by his firm, ignored by his children, his humiliation ends in suicide.
Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it's a privilege to take in his wife's cousins, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece begins to fall for one of them, it's clear that it's not just, as Eddie claims, that he's too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong, and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can't face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family.
In Joe and Kate Keller's family garden, an apple tree - a memorial to their son Larry, lost in the Second World War - has been torn down by a storm. But his loss is not the only part of the family's past they can't put behind them.
Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding-house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.
"An inspector calls", the title play in this collection, was written inside a week in 1944. Inspector Goole, investigating a girl's death, calls on the Birlings, an outwardly virtuous household.
Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, published in Penguin Classics. Set in the First World War, Journey's End concerns a group of British officers on the front line and opens in a dugout in the trenches in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed. Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic. R.C. Sherriff (1896-1975) joined the army shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, serving as a captain in the East Surrey regiment. After the war, an interest in amateur theatricals led him to try his hand at writing. Following rejection by many theatre managements, Journey's End was given a single performance by the Incorporated Stage Society, in which Lawrence Olivier took the lead role. The play's enormous success enabled Sherriff to become a full-time writer, with plays such as Badger's Green (1930), St Helena (1935), and The Long Sunset (1955); though he is also remembered as a screenplay writer, for films such as The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye Mr Chips (1933) and The Dam Busters (1955). If you enjoyed Journey's End , you might like Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That , available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Its unrelenting tension, and its regard for human decency in a vast world of human waste, are impressive and, even now, moving' Clive Barnes
