History & Criticism

The legendary 1964 Broadway run of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud is one of the most famous productions of Shakespeare's most important play. Audacious for its time in concept and execution, it placed the actors in everyday clothes within an unassuming...

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name! In a...

'The first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story.' Or was it 'The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story'?A writer in a totalitarian state is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of...

Shakespeare's absolute pre-eminence is simply unparalleled. His plays pack theatres and provide Hollywood with block-buster scripts; his works inspire mountains of scholarship and criticism every year. He has given us many of the very words we speak, and...

Adapted from a series of four lectures, originally delivered as the first of the Granada Northern Lectures Peter Brook's The Empty Space is an exploration of four aspects of theatre, 'Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate', published in Penguin Modern...

'One drink. And if you never want to see me again you never have to see me again.'A quantum physicist and a beekeeper meet. They hit it off, or perhaps they don't. They might go home together, they might not.Constellations explores love, free will, and...

Acting, direction, stagecraft, theatre architecture and design, the extraordinary evolution of dramatic literature - here is an all-embracing and richly illustrated history, global in scope and ranging from the ancient origins of the theatre in the...

Musical Theatre: A History is a new revised edition of a proven core text for college and secondary school students - and an insightful and accessible celebration of twenty-five centuries of great theatrical entertainment. As an educator with...

This volume contains Harold Pinter's first six plays, including The Birthday Party.The Birthday PartyStanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a...

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie.Childlike in his innocence but...

First published in 1938, The Theatre and Its Double is a collection of essays detailing Antonin Artaud's radical theories on drama and theatre, which he saw as being stifled by conservatism and lack of experimentation. Containing the famous manifestos of...

"The next good mood I find my father in, I'll get him quite discarded" With these chillingly offhand words, Beatrice-Joanna, the spoilt daughter of a powerful nobleman, plots to get rid of the family servant who has crossed her once too often...

'The Royal Court has been at the centre of British cultural life for the past 50 years, an engine room for new writing and constantly transforming the theatrical culture' - Stephen Daldry. For half a century the Royal Court has been at the cutting edge...

"One more dawn! One more day! One day more!"Did Les Miserables make you miserable? Or did it inspire you? When Sarah Whitfield was a teenager, her Dad frequently embarrassed her with his love of this musical above all others. So, after he was diagnosed...

Elizabeth Belfiore offers a striking new interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics by situating the work within the Aristotelian corpus and in the context of Greek culture in general. In Aristotle's Rhetoric, the Politics, and the ethical, psychological,...

The sharpest, funniest comedy about money and morals in the 17th century is still the sharpest and funniest about those things in the 21st. The full play text is accompanied by incisive commentary notes which communicate the devastating comic energy of...

Tales of the Tricycle Theatre provides an inside look at the history of the north London theatre which has achieved renown with its staging of black, Irish, verbatim and political drama. Co-published with the Society for Theatre Research, the book draws...

Actor Training expands on Alison Hodge's highly-acclaimed and best-selling Twentieth Century Actor Training. This exciting second edition radically updates the original book making it even more valuable for any student of the history and practice of...

Since the sixties, Keith Johnstone has led the work on improvisation in theatre, schools and universities. His unique ideas, set out in the classic text, Impro, have now been taken up by practitioners the world over. Impro for Storytellers builds on and...

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age.Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience's deepest desires...

Teddy, a philosophy professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his father, uncle and two brothers at his old London home, after years of estrangement. In the intense conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of their...

In 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger changed the course of English theatre.'Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is. To have done this at all would be a significant achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle...

Attempts on her Life 17 scenarios for the theatre by Martin Crimp Attempts to describe her? Attempts to destroy her? Or attempts to destroy herself? Is Anne the object of violence? Or its terrifying practitioner? Martin Crimps 17 scenarios for the...

A look at how Pamela Colman Smith's theatrical knowledge and experience came into play when she drew the iconic cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.The "secrets" in this book have been known all along, and they work in all who read Tarot on a...

This important collection of essays focuses on the place of Roman Catholicism in early modern England, bringing new perspectives to bear on whether Shakespeare himself was Catholic.In the Introduction, Richard Wilson reviews the history of the debate...

Exam Board: Edexcel Level: GCSE Grade 9-1 Subject: English Literature Suitable for the 2024 exams Everything you need to revise for your...

A vastly entertaining and unique history of the interaction between spying and showbiz, from the Elizabethan age to the Cold War and beyond.'A treasure trove of human ingenuity' The TimesWritten by two experts in their fields, Stars and Spies is the...

Musical theatre is often perceived as either a Broadway based art form, or as having separate histories in London and New York. Musical Theatre Histories: Expanding the Narrative, however, depicts the musical as neither American nor British, but both and...

How many times have you experienced a musical that was fabulous or just didn't work at all, but you had no idea how to communicate why? How do you differentiate between a flaw in the performance portrayal of a character to a structural flaw in the...

For sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve prime ministers in a weekly audience at BuckinghamPalace, a meeting like no other in British public life. It is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said.The...

Now published in the Bloomsbury Revelations series, this is a classic work on the power and importance of drama by renowned American playwright, screenwriter and essayist David Mamet. In this short but arresting series of essays, David Mamet explains...

The most controversial and newsworthy plays of British theatre are a rash of rude, vicious and provocative pieces by a brat pack of twentysomethings whose debuts startled critics and audiences with their heady mix of sex, violence and street-poetry...

Winner of 2019 British Book Design & Production Award for Scholarly, Academic & Reference Books This beautiful book charts the development of the circus as an art form around the world, from antiquity to the present day. Using over 200 circus...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780859653176Author Lindsay AndersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 470Imprint Plexus Publishing LtdPublisher Plexus Publishing Ltd

Dramaturgy is at the heart of any musical theatre score, proving that song and music combined can collectively act as drama. The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist: A Handbook for Collaboration offers techniques for approaching a musical with the...

The new revised edition of the uncensored 'Acto-biography' of the most controversial thespian of his generation. The memoirs of Nicholas Craig - theatrical eminence best known for his Trueplate in The Cuckolde of Leicester and more popularly as Gob in Oh...

This carefully constructed and thorough collection of theoretical engagements with Augusto Boal's work is the first to look 'beyond Boal' and critically assesses the Theatre of the Opressed (TO) movement in context.A Boal Companion looks at the cultural...

Written specifically for GCSE students by academics in the field, the Methuen Drama GCSE Student Editions provide in-depth explanatory material alongside the play texts frequently studied at Key Stage 4. Whether for use in the classroom or...

Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us than Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Everyone can quote at least six words from the play; often people know many more.In this riveting and thought-provoking re-examination, philosopher Simon...