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Bakkhai (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)
by EuripidesRegarded by many as Euripides' masterpiece, Bakkhai is a powerful examination of religious ecstasy and the resistance to it. A call for moderation, it rejects the temptation of pure reason as well as pure sensuality, and is a staple of Greek tragedy, representing in structure and thematics an exemplary model of the classic tragic elements. Disguised as a young holy man, the god Bacchus arrives in Greece from Asia proclaiming his godhood and preaching his orgiastic religion. He expects to be embraced in Thebes, but the Theban king, Pentheus, forbids his people to worship him and tries to have him arrested. Enraged, Bacchus drives Pentheus mad and leads him to the mountains, where Pentheus' own mother, Agave, and the women of Thebes tear him to pieces in a Bacchic frenzy. Gibbons, a prize-winning poet, and Segal, a renowned classicist, offer a skilled new translation of this central text of Greek tragedy.
Bakhtin and Theatre: Dialogues with Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Grotowski
by Dick MccawWhat did Bakhtin think about the theatre? That it was outdated? That is ‘stopped being a serious genre’ after Shakespeare? Could a thinker to whose work ideas of theatricality, visuality, and embodied activity were so central really have nothing to say about theatrical practice? Bakhtin and Theatre is the first book to explore the relation between Bakhtin’s ideas and the theatre practice of his time. In that time, Stanislavsky co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and continued to develop his ideas about theatre until his death in 1938. Stanislavsky’s pupil Meyerhold embraced the Russian Revolution and created some stunningly revolutionary productions in the 1920s, breaking with the realism of his former teacher. Less than twenty years after Stanislavsky’s death and Meyerhold’s assassination, a young student called Grotowski was studying in Moscow, soon to break the mould with his Poor Theatre. All three directors challenged the prevailing notion of theatre, drawing on, disagreeing with and challenging each other’s ideas. Bakhtin’s early writings about action, character and authorship provide a revealing framework for understanding this dialogue between these three masters of Twentieth Century theatre.
Bakhtin and Theatre: Dialogues with Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Grotowski
by Dick MccawWhat did Bakhtin think about the theatre? That it was outdated? That is ‘stopped being a serious genre’ after Shakespeare? Could a thinker to whose work ideas of theatricality, visuality, and embodied activity were so central really have nothing to say about theatrical practice? Bakhtin and Theatre is the first book to explore the relation between Bakhtin’s ideas and the theatre practice of his time. In that time, Stanislavsky co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and continued to develop his ideas about theatre until his death in 1938. Stanislavsky’s pupil Meyerhold embraced the Russian Revolution and created some stunningly revolutionary productions in the 1920s, breaking with the realism of his former teacher. Less than twenty years after Stanislavsky’s death and Meyerhold’s assassination, a young student called Grotowski was studying in Moscow, soon to break the mould with his Poor Theatre. All three directors challenged the prevailing notion of theatre, drawing on, disagreeing with and challenging each other’s ideas. Bakhtin’s early writings about action, character and authorship provide a revealing framework for understanding this dialogue between these three masters of Twentieth Century theatre.
Baghdaddy (Modern Plays)
by Jasmine Naziha JonesCongratulations! Your pain is commercially viable.It's 1991 and the Gulf War rages three thousand, three hundred and twenty miles away. Darlee is 8 years old, crying behind the wheelie bookcase in Miss Stratford's classroom. She's just realised she's Iraqi. Or half. Maybe both. She saw it on the news last night after Neighbours and fish fingers. Heard the fear slipping through the receiver, saw it oozing from Dad's eyeballs and into the living room as he tried to phone home.What she can't process now, she'll be haunted by later; the spirits hounding her will make sure of that…Baghdaddy is a playfully devastating coming-of-age story, told through clowning and memory to explore the complexities of cultural identity, generational trauma and a father-daughter relationship amidst global conflict.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre in November 2022.
Baghdaddy (Modern Plays)
by Jasmine Naziha JonesCongratulations! Your pain is commercially viable.It's 1991 and the Gulf War rages three thousand, three hundred and twenty miles away. Darlee is 8 years old, crying behind the wheelie bookcase in Miss Stratford's classroom. She's just realised she's Iraqi. Or half. Maybe both. She saw it on the news last night after Neighbours and fish fingers. Heard the fear slipping through the receiver, saw it oozing from Dad's eyeballs and into the living room as he tried to phone home.What she can't process now, she'll be haunted by later; the spirits hounding her will make sure of that…Baghdaddy is a playfully devastating coming-of-age story, told through clowning and memory to explore the complexities of cultural identity, generational trauma and a father-daughter relationship amidst global conflict.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre in November 2022.
Baghdad Wedding (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Hassan AbdulrazzakIn Iraq, a wedding is not a wedding unless shots get fired. It's like in England where a wedding is not a wedding unless someone pukes or tries to fuck one of the bridesmaids. That's the way it goes.'From cosmopolitan London to the chaos of war-ravaged Baghdad, this is the comic tale of three friends, torn between two worlds, and a wedding that goes horribly wrong.Baghdad Wedding premiered at the Soho Theatre in June 2007.
Baghdad Boogie (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Roy SmilesBaghdad Boogie is set some time during the Iraq Crisis. A long term Canadian captive (Doug) finds himself in the same filth stained room as an oil executive American (Sean). As they face a long period of incarceration together the subject of war and imperialism is raised as Doug begins to unravel at the seams; a caustic comic two hander that examines the reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the effects of being held hostage with the constant fear of execution.
Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performance across Borders in South Asia (Forms of Drama)
by Adnan Hossain Claire Pamment Jeff RoyThis is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs, dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular contexts, but also moves across borders. For students of theatre and performance, anthropology, religion, gender and cultural studies, this book illuminates an important form of performance, considering its changing status and uncertain futures.The book draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the hijrascape. This vital study analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial practices, extending ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans performance.
Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performance across Borders in South Asia (Forms of Drama)
by Adnan Hossain Claire Pamment Jeff RoyThis is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs, dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular contexts, but also moves across borders. For students of theatre and performance, anthropology, religion, gender and cultural studies, this book illuminates an important form of performance, considering its changing status and uncertain futures.The book draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the hijrascape. This vital study analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial practices, extending ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans performance.
The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics From The Greeks To Game Of Thrones
by Daniel Mendelsohn‘Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.’ Sebastian Barry
Bad Blood Blues (Oberon Modern Plays Ser.)
by Paul SirettAre Africans being exploited as guinea pigs' to test new drugs for multi-national pharmaceutical companies? Why is HIV/AIDS treatment too expensive for countries where the virus is most rife? Is it okay to sacrifice lives to protect the integrity of medical studies? Bad Blood Blues is a powerfully intense new play that leads us deep into a personal and sexual moral maze while confronting the ethics of HIV/AIDS drug trials in Africa.
Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker
by Thomas Vinciguerra Wolcott Gibbs"Maybe he doesn't like anything, but he can do everything," New Yorker editor Harold Ross once said of the magazine's brilliantly sardonic theater critic, Wolcott Gibbs. And, for over thirty years at the magazine, Gibbs did do just about everything. He turned out fiction and nonfiction, profiles and parodies, filled columns in "Talk of the Town" and "Notes and Comment," covered books, movies, nightlife and, of course, the theater. A friend of the Algonquin Round Table, Gibbs was renowned for his wit. (Perhaps his most enduring line is from a profile of Henry Luce, parodying Time magazine's house style: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.")While, in his day, Gibbs was equal in stature to E.B. White and James Thurber, today, he is little read. In Backward Ran Sentences, journalist Tom Vinciguerra introduces Gibbs and gathers a generous sampling of his finest work across an impressive range of genres, bringing a brilliant, multitalented writer of incomparable wit to a new age of readers.
Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, Volume 2
by George Bernard ShawBack to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) is a 1921 series of five plays and a preface by George Bernard Shaw. The five plays are:In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden); The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day; The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170; Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000; As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920 The plays were published with a preface titled The Infidel Half Century, and first performed in 1922 by the New York Theatre Guild at the Garrick Theatre.
Bacchai (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Colin TeevanDionysos, the God of wine and theatre has returned to his native land to take revenge on the puritanical Pentheus who refuses to recognise him of his rites. Remorselessly, savagely and with black humour, the God drives Pentheus and all the city to their shocking fate. Limelight after decades of anonymity. This version was specially commissioned by the National Theatre for a production in May 2002, directed by Sir Peter Hall and scored by Sir Harrison Birtwhistle.
The Bacchae and Other Plays: Bacchae And Other Plays (Penguin Classics Series)
by EuripidesThrough their sheer range, daring innovation, flawed but eloquent characters and intriguing plots, the plays of Euripides have shocked and stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. Phoenician Women portrays the rival sons of King Oedipus and their mother's doomed attempts at reconciliation, while Orestes shows a son ravaged with guilt after the vengeful murder of his mother. In the Bacchae, a king mistreats a newcomer to his land, little knowing that he is the god Dionysus disguised as a mortal, while in Iphigenia at Aulis, the Greek leaders take the horrific decision to sacrifice a princess to gain favour from the gods in their mission to Troy. Finally, the Rhesus depicts a world of espionage between the warring Greek and Trojan camps.
Bacchae (Plays For Performance Ser.)
by Euripides Robin RobertsonDionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, has come to Thebes, and the women are streaming out of the city to worship him on the mountain, drinking and dancing in wild frenzy. The king, Pentheus, denouces this so-called 'god' as a charlatan. But no mortal can deny a god and no man can ever stand against Dionysus.This stunning translation, by the award-winning poet Robin Robertson, reinvigorated Euripides' devastating take of a god's revenge for contemporary readers, bringing the ancient verse to fervid, brutal life.
Bacchae (Oberon Classics)
by Mike PoultonWhen a new god - the god of the life force, the god of sensuality, wine and the dance, the god that other religions fear - arrives in a buttoned-down world, he finds a leader who no longer believes in a power higher than himself, who will do whatever it takes to preserve the status quo. But this society is a ticking time bomb, revolution is in the air and the people are desperate for change. The women of Thebes are ready to explode and destroy everyone and everything that gets in their way in Mike Poulton's all-new version of this dark and liberating play
Babylon Heights
by Dean Cavanagh Irvine WelshIf you put four dwarfs in one room with enough opium and alcohol, it's bound to end in tears...In 1935 MGM studios embarked on a movie adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The production called for the casting of many dwarfs to play the Munchkins of the mythical Land of Oz and the studio began recruiting 'small persons' from all over the world. During production, rumours spread around Hollywood of wild Munchkin sex orgies, drunken behavior and general dwarf debauchery. More sinisterly, a Munchkin is said to have committed suicide by hanging himself on the set during filming - what appears to be a small human body is clearly visible hanging from a tree in the Tin Man scene. It is a claim that has passed into Hollywood legend. Set in a hotel room in Culver City, California, Babylon Heights is Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh's scabrous and hilarious imagining of what could, very possibly, have led to that dwarf suicide. Babylon Heights premiered at the Exit Theatre, San Francisco, in June 2006.
Baby Reindeer (Modern Plays)
by Richard GaddI looked at her, wanting her to laugh. Wanting her to share in the joke. But she didn't. She just stared. I knew then, in that moment – that she had taken it literally...Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Richard Gadd has a chilling story to tell about obsession, delusion and the terrifying ramifications of a fleeting mistake.This powerful and engaging monologue play portrays a man brought to the edge by the actions of a chance encounter which takes a toll on all aspects of his life. In doing so it asks important questions about victims, the justice system and how one decision has the ability to change your life.
Baby Reindeer (Modern Plays)
by Richard GaddI looked at her, wanting her to laugh. Wanting her to share in the joke. But she didn't. She just stared. I knew then, in that moment – that she had taken it literally...Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Richard Gadd has a chilling story to tell about obsession, delusion and the terrifying ramifications of a fleeting mistake.This powerful and engaging monologue play portrays a man brought to the edge by the actions of a chance encounter which takes a toll on all aspects of his life. In doing so it asks important questions about victims, the justice system and how one decision has the ability to change your life.
Babies (Modern Plays)
by Jonathan HarveyWinner of the George Devine Award in 1993, Babies premiered at the Royal Court theatre, London in September 1994Liverpudlian Joe Casey is twenty-four, gay and a form tutor at a south-east London comprehensive. Joe's life is spliced between the drug-using excesses of his lover Woodie and the advances of his female pupils (and their mothers). A warm and funny comedy by the author of the 1993 hit Beautiful Thing.
Babies: Beautiful Thing; Babies; Boom Bang-a-bang; Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club (Modern Plays)
by Jonathan HarveyWinner of the George Devine Award in 1993, Babies premiered at the Royal Court theatre, London in September 1994Liverpudlian Joe Casey is twenty-four, gay and a form tutor at a south-east London comprehensive. Joe's life is spliced between the drug-using excesses of his lover Woodie and the advances of his female pupils (and their mothers). A warm and funny comedy by the author of the 1993 hit Beautiful Thing.
B for Baby (Modern Plays)
by Carmel Winters'It was like we were two children - two innocent children just... playing' Mrs C wants a baby not a Christmas tree. B wants a real hairdresser's scissors and a wife. D wants a snow globe and 'a big head of dirty auld curls'. All of them want their own place in the world. And if they can't find it, they'll create one of their own. The play follows B and D in the care home where they are residents, and where Mrs C is a carer, on their special - 'very fecking special' - journey towards happiness. B for Baby is a tender, sharp-witted new play set in a residential care home for people with severe learning disabilities. Treating this taboo subject with humanity and humour, the piece's acuity and generously compassionate portraits result in a moving, if at times uncomfortable, drama. Poignantly exploring forbidden topics, B for Baby invites the reader or audience to rediscover the power and joy of make-believe. The play was first presented by the Abbey Theatre on the Peacock Stage, September 2010.
B for Baby (Modern Plays)
by Carmel Winters'It was like we were two children - two innocent children just... playing' Mrs C wants a baby not a Christmas tree. B wants a real hairdresser's scissors and a wife. D wants a snow globe and 'a big head of dirty auld curls'. All of them want their own place in the world. And if they can't find it, they'll create one of their own. The play follows B and D in the care home where they are residents, and where Mrs C is a carer, on their special - 'very fecking special' - journey towards happiness. B for Baby is a tender, sharp-witted new play set in a residential care home for people with severe learning disabilities. Treating this taboo subject with humanity and humour, the piece's acuity and generously compassionate portraits result in a moving, if at times uncomfortable, drama. Poignantly exploring forbidden topics, B for Baby invites the reader or audience to rediscover the power and joy of make-believe. The play was first presented by the Abbey Theatre on the Peacock Stage, September 2010.
B (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Guillermo Calderón William Gregory“But don’t say that word.” “What word?” “The word that starts with B.” Alejandra and Marcela are planting bombs in the middle of the night. They don’t want violence. They just want to be heard. Prison’s not much of a threat when most of your friends are inside. But José Miguel is from another generation, and he’s committed to change by any means possible. ‘We used to kill kings. We use to kill millionaires. And now all we do is make threats on the Internet. That’s why I’m offering you the chance to start a war.’ Acclaimed Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón makes his Royal Court debut with the world premiere of his play B, exploring what revolution and violence mean to two different generations. B was first developed on an attachment with the Royal Court International Department, and premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on 28 September 2017, in a production directed by Sam Pritchard.