LITMIR.BIZ

'You said if you didn’t love them, if you weren’t happy, if you didn’t care about them, it wasn’t real.' Unnerving, entertaining, funny and dark, Wedekind’s definitive play about youth caused riots when it exploded onto the stage in 1906 and has lost none of its provocative power. Anya Reiss’ new version examines the exuberance, intensity and confusion of teenage life today. Spring Awakening asks important and pressing questions about how young people are shaped for their future by a generation that doesn’t understand them.

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A retired American steps off the plane at Prestwick, hoping to discover the land of his fathers. An old drunk man in Methil has a mystical vision at the harbour. A supermarket checkout girl in Port Glasgow approaches work with a golf club… Set specifically in the town of each performance and drawing on storytelling, live music and the Scottish folk tradition, Rantin attempts to stitch together visions of Scotland’s romantic past with its ever-changing present reality, revealing the patchwork identity of a nation. ‘…this gorgeous piece of ceilidh-theatre, where music swirls engagingly, is taut, nuanced and illuminating…’ The Herald

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“You’d like that, would you, your most private, pinkest, tenderest – small bird, small bird, small fragile – stolen from you, slammed down onto the slab, the block, poked at and paraded.” The children swing their legs on the chairs. The student delivers the presentation. The older woman stands with the gun. The young couple arrives at the house. The house is returning to nature. A movie is being made. The truth is being plundered. But the house is still lived in and the spirit to resist is strong. Adler & Gibb tells the story of a raid – on a house, a life, a reality and a legacy. The play takes Tim Crouch’s fascination with form and marries it to a thrilling story of misappropriation. Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb were conceptual artists working in New York at the end of the last century. They were described by art critic Dave Hickey as the ‘most ferociously uncompromising voice of their generation’. With Adler’s death in 2004, however, the compromise began.

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Mogadishu, 1993. Paul is a Canadian photojournalist who is about to take a picture that will win him the Pulitzer Prize. Princeton, the present day, Dan is an American writer who is struggling to finish his play about ghosts. Both men live worlds apart but a chance encounter over the airwaves sparks an extraordinary friendship that sees them journey from some of the most dangerous places on earth to the depths of the human soul. Flying from Kabul to the Canadian High Arctic, The Body of an American sees two actors jump between more than thirty roles in an exhilarating new form of documentary drama. It urgently places these two men’s battles – both public and private – against a backdrop of some of the world’s most iconic images of war.

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The Trojan legend and the character of Helen form the basis for The Bite of the Night . As with all Barker’s mythical and historical works, it is overlaid and undermined by a contemporary narrative, in this instance the search for the origin of the erotic undertaken by the redundant university teacher Dr Savage and his nihilistic student, Hogbin. Through all twelve Troys, Savage and Helen struggle with a passion both intellectual and physical, and the idea of beauty is refined to a terrifying degree. In Brutopia Barker’s controversial portrait of the humanist Thomas More is shaped around his strained relationship with his daughter Cecilia, here discovered to be the author of a counter-text to her parent’s infamous Utopia . Cecilia’s wit and cruelty mark her out as one of Barker’s least compromising and heroic young women. The Forty is a significant departure from Barker’s dramatic practice, his investment in language reduced to a few phrases which punctuate detailed scenes of conflict and solitude. Physical movement, and intense concentration on gesture show the author’s flair for visuality in a new and surprising way. The theme of sacrifice features increasingly in Barker’s theatre, and in Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward it is a mother’s refusal to apologize for an act of passion – notwithstanding the dire consequence for her own child – that is at the heart of the argument. Set in a home for terminally-ill patients, many of whom create a hilarious chorus around the protagonists, Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward shows Barker’s imagination in its most startling form.

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Jon Fosse has been called ‘the Beckett of the 21st century’ (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed ‘Waiting for Godot without the gags’. Just as Beckett’s plays – and those of all great playwrights – grew out of their time, and influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward, so do Fosse’s plays now. Fosse: Plays Six marks the culmination of this Norwegian playwright’s body of work for the stage to be published in the English language. The volume includes the plays Rambuku, Freedom, Over There, These Eyes, Girl in Yellow Raincoat, Christmas Tree Song and Sea. Rambuku: Two people. One finds it difficult to speak. The other attempts to understand. But what is Rambuku? Or who is Rambuku? Freedom: There is a sense of otherness in Fosse’s work that challenges our notions of a concept such as ‘freedom’. This play questions if freedom, as we often understand it, is perhaps a prison. Over There: A woman follows a man to his death. But do they see the same images on the way to the top of the mountain? These Eyes: A snapshot of the dreamlike state of life. The characters exist in an in-between space which becomes their reality. Girl in Yellow Raincoat: An examination of our collective weakness, and the fragility of children. It asks questions about notions surrounding fear. Christmas Tree Song: A man celebrates Christmas alone (and reflects in a somewhat ironic way) on his life as he attempts to put up a Christmas tree. Sea: A group of people gathered in a kind of limbo, on a ship, disappearing into something unknown.

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Harry Crawford and his wife Annie seem happy enough. Together they lead quiet, unexceptional lives in the suburbs of 1920s Sydney, working and raising a child. But when Josephine arrives at the door, it sets in train a series of events that will result in an astounding revelation. Based on the extraordinary true story of the ‘Man-Woman’ murder that shocked turn-of-the-century Australians, [i]The Trouble with Harry[/i] is a disorienting tale of deception and enigma which poses an essential, human question: can we ever really know what lies in the heart and mind of someone else?

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Using only Charles Dickens’ extraordinary words and a chameleon ensemble of actors, Neil Bartlett’s powerful stage versions of Dickens have gathered wide critical acclaim. This volume contains Bartlett’s versions of Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist. ‘Gets right to the frozen heart of Dickens’ classic Christmas tale…one of those rare festive offerings for which no adult will need the excuse of a child in tow…’ Guardian ‘A magical refashioning of tradition.’ Observer Between them, these adaptations have had over a hundred productions. They have been widely performed by schools, universities and community theatre groups throughout the English-speaking world and theatres that have produced them include London’s Lyric Hammersmith, the Bristol Old Vic, the Southwark Playhouse, the Glasgow Citizens, the American Repertory Theatre in Boston and the La Jolla Playhouse(USA).

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Christmas Eve, 1951. As Britain rebuilds itself after the war, John Greenwood has it all – a successful business, a beautiful house and an aristocratic wife. But as he bids farewell to the guests leaving his annual Christmas party, a gust of wind slams the front door shut, starting a chain of events that makes him doubt everything he has ever known… From the writer of one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed plays, Journey’s End , The White Carnation is a ghostly tale of one man’s chance to do things differently. This rediscovery marks the first production since its premiere, starring Sir Ralph Richardson, in 1953 and transfers to the Jermyn Street Theatre after a critically acclaimed sell-out run at the Finborough Theatre.

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“If Lee Harvey Oswald did it, he could not have done it alone. If he did not, he must be the hit of the century. If he was involvedand somehow double-crossed, alive today must be persons with the guilt of awful silence.”Dallas, Texas. 12.30pm. Friday, 22 November 1963. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. 48 hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald himself was murdered.Told through the eyes of Oswald’s wife and mother, coupled with extracts from the Warren Commission’s report, we follow the unsettled drifting life of Lee Harvey Oswald – his loveless marriage to his Russian wife, his challenging relationship with his mother and his pathological hatred of Kennedy’s life and achievements. Oswald had the means, motive and opportunity, but did he even do it? Could a man who never did anything on his own murder a President?

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