TCG Books

A small asteroid has hit the capital city. Thousands have been displaced. And in a town far away, a young man called Vin is finding it hard to talk. The only person who seems to notice is Rach, who resolves to find out what's troubling him and help him find his voice again.

But when Rach's family take in an articulate and charismatic survivor of the asteroid incident, Vin's silence is no longer her first priority. How does it feel when the suffering of others seems more legitimate than our own?

James Fritz's Lava is a timely play about grief and the power of expression, rocking with raw emotion and sharp humour. It premiered at Nottingham Playhouse in 2018, in a co-production with Fifth Word who commissioned the play. It was revived on tour in 2022, including a run at Soho Theatre, London.

A trilogy of landmark plays commemorating seven years of warfare in Ireland, from the 1916 Easter Rising to the Civil War which began in 1922.

Wild Sky is a story of interlocking lives: of the politicised Josie Dunne, and of Tom Farrell, who is driven only by his love for her. As the Rising plays out, there are unforeseen consequences for everyone involved...

Embargo focuses on a pivotal moment during the Irish War of Independence in 1920, when dockers and railmen refused to transport armed troops or handle any weapons arriving from Britain.

Outrage follows two sisters, Alice and Nell, who play key roles in organising civic resistance and the propaganda war. Like everyone else in Ireland, they become deeply conflicted as the country spins toward a devastating Civil War.

Each of the three plays was first performed a century after the event which it depicts, and they were commissioned and performed by companies including Fishamble: The New Play Company, Meath County Council Arts Office, Dublin Port Company and Iarnród Éireann.

Together, they challenge the historical narrative, mixing true-life testimonies with powerful drama to create a theatrical hurricane of empathy, action and truth.

It's Year 10's first day back at school. Mark is new and too scared to make friends. Darren is out of control and too scary to make friends. The two of them need each other – but neither would ever admit it.

Worlds apart, but more similar than they realise, the pair form a complex and manipulative relationship. And before they know it, they're embarking on a dangerous experiment that will alter the course of their lives.

Sophie Swithinbank's play Bacon is an unflinching and unexpectedly humorous look at masculinity, sexuality and power, through the dizzying lens of youth.

First developed on the Soho Theatre Writers' Lab, it won the Tony Craze Award in 2018, and was first produced at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2022, directed by Matthew Iliffe.

2024. As America goes to the polls, democracy itself is on the brink. Who takes the White House – and at what cost?

Mike Bartlett's viciously funny and foreboding The 47th is a dazzling glimpse into the underbelly of the greatest political show on earth: the US presidential race.

It was first produced at The Old Vic, London, in March 2022 by The Old Vic, Sonia Friedman Productions and Annapurna Theatre, directed by Rupert Goold, and featuring Bertie Carvel as Donald J. Trump, Tamara Tunie as Kamala Harris, and Lydia Wilson as Ivanka Trump.

bull-jean & dem/dey back collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth’s southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.

First published by RedBone Press in 1998, the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories chronicles the course of lovve returning in the Life-times of bull-dog-jean. Set in the rural 1920s south, the bull-jean stories is an act of griot-anthropology, remembering the ancestor we never knew but always knew we needed—the raucous, sweet-talking, heart-aching wo’mn-lovvn-wo’mn bull-dog-jean and the fierce and beautiful community that surrounds her.

Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns in bull-jean/we wake. Grieving the loss of their elders, seeking healing, the Narrator calls forward bull-jean. Through a series of dreams, porch prayers, and visitations from cussing conjurers, Black Mermaids, children that fly, and shape-shifting ole folk, bull-jean and dem guide the Narrator towards a realization of the sustaining power of love, memory, community, ritual, and spiritual binding.

Seventeen-year-old Asha is an emphatic rebel, unafraid of pointing out the hypocrisy around her but less sure how to actually dismantle it. Her younger sister, Bettina, wide-eyed and naïve, is just trying to get through the school day without getting her pocket money nicked.

Between essays, homework and bus journeys home the two sisters meet outside the school gates each afternoon, smarting at the injustice of the world around them.

Bouncing with wit, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s mesmerizing play Two Billion Beats is an insightful, moving and tremendously funny coming-of-age story about the unfairness of growing up in a world where you don't make the rules.

It premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in February 2022.

An earlier version of the play was performed as part of the Orange Tree's Inside/Outside season, livestreamed in 2021.

Two young people and their dæmons, with everything at stake, find themselves at the center of a terrifying manhunt. In their care is a tiny child called Lyra Belacqua, and in that child lies the fate of the future.

As the waters rise around them, powerful adversaries conspire for mastery of Dust: salvation to some, the source of infinite corruption to others.

Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage is set twelve years before the epic His Dark Materials trilogy. Bryony Lavery's stage adaptation was first performed at the Bridge Theatre, London, in December 2021, directed by Nicholas Hytner, whose groundbreaking production of His Dark Materials was a critical and commercial success at the National Theatre.

A teenage girl has something growing inside her. She doesn't know what it is, but she knows it's not a baby. It expands. It has claws. Eventually it takes over the entirety of her body.

No one must know about it. She has to keep its presence, its possession of her, concealed. She pulls away from her friends. She refuses to speak, in case "The IT" is heard. But she can't contain it forever. Sooner or later something's got to give...

Presented in the style of a direct-address documentary, Vivienne Franzmann's The IT is a darkly comic state-of-the-nation play exploring adolescent mental health and the rage within.

Written specifically for young people, the play formed part of the 2021 National Theatre Connections Festivals and was premiered by youth theatres across the UK. It offers opportunities for a large, flexible cast of any size and mix of genders.

Emergency rooms, scans, tests, blood work, and more blood work . . . Robert’s had a wide range of concerning symptoms checked. Multiple times. And yet he still has no answers as to why everything hurts. So he wonders, is he Tennessee Williams or Dorothy Zbornak? Could all of it be in his head?

Everybody Just C@lm the F#ck Down is a multi-layered story of anxiety in which Robert explores the shifting planes of middle age, mortality, grief, and creativity while learning how to embrace a lack of control.

Your partner's died, could things have been different?

Caryl Churchill's short play What If If Only premiered in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in September 2021, directed by James Macdonald.

This edition also includes the resonant and surreal short piece, Air.

Winston Smith is in prison, found guilty of Thoughtcrimes against Big Brother. As part of his reconstruction, he must re-enact key moments from his past life, with the help of other thought criminals, so that everyone can learn from his mistakes. Including his biggest mistake of all: falling in love with Julia.

George Orwell's classic dystopia 1984 is a still-resonant vision of the tolls of living under totalitarianism. Constructed almost entirely from dialogue taken from the original novel, this bold and powerful dramatization restores the blazing heart of Orwell's work: a doomed love story, with the lovers at its center.

This pre-eminently stageable version, adapted with an eye on economy by Nick Hern for a cast of five or more, is ideal for any school, youth group or amateur company looking to bring Orwell's chilling vision to life on stage.

Peter is putting on a show. He’s a bit stressed. In the show, he will read from a manuscript. It’s a large manuscript, but don’t worry, he’s only going to read the parts about him, and there aren’t many. It’s a memoir written by someone who abandoned him twice—once as a baby and once when he was a young man of thirteen. This person has figured prominently in Peter’s life for over fifty years now, but judging by the memoir, he has not figured so much in theirs. So perhaps it’s going to be a very short show? Again, don’t worry, Peter has other skills which he will share. And if Peter can keep his cool, and if the people who work at the theatre can help him set everything up, and if the audience can just give him a little bit of their time and their attention and their silence, maybe he can tell everyone something about who we really are and who we are to others and who we might be to ourselves when we’re alone. And maybe that can make it all a little bit easier.

Three generations of a family argue over current events, finances, and culture, with everyone looking to blame someone else for society’s ills in this satirical examination of how judgment can both divide and unite people.

Elizabeth, the matriarch, has invited her children and grandchildren over for dinner. Instead of a nice family meal, it quickly slides into the adults arguing in the dining room and the kids fighting in the living room. Rapid-fire dialogue fuses and overlaps, but no one listens to each other. A blistering take on the family drama, Public Enemy asks, who’s really responsible for all our suffering?

On the set of a new film about Victorian artist J.M.W. Turner, young actress Lou is haunted by an unresolved history. Meanwhile, in 1840, Londoners Lucy and Thomas try to come to terms with the meaning of freedom.

Moving between London past and present, Winsome Pinnock's astonishing play retells British history through the prism of the slave trade. Fusing fact with fiction, and the powerfully personal with the fiercely political, Rockets and Blue Lights asks who owns our past – and who has the right to tell its stories?

Winner of the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, the play opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2020, directed by Miranda Cromwell. It transferred to the National Theatre, London, in 2021.

A dinner party during the Second World War unites celebrated writers Agatha Christie, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas – with a mysterious guest.

With copious booze flowing, acid-tongued barbs flying, and the threat of global conflict looming, the guests – and the world around them – are close to boiling point. Everyone has a confession. Someone has a secret.

Set in the French Alps in 1940, Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars is an enthralling, entertaining and ultimately moving portrait of seven exceptional women – and a thrilling fiction based on truth.

It was workshopped Off-Off-Broadway, first performed in 2015, and received an acclaimed digital premiere in 2020, featuring Linda Bassett, Sarah Solemani, Juliet Stevenson and Sophie Thompson. It provides glorious opportunities for an all-female cast to play some of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.

Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada is a collection of plays and interviews by, for, and about Disabled theatre artists that invites readers into the magical worlds of Disability arts culture.

The book features four plays as well as interviews with artists Justin Manyfingers and Niall McNeill. In Smudge by Alex Bulmer, a woman details her journey toward Blindness, mourning what she loses and discovering what her other senses provide. Access Me by Boys in Chairs Collective is a celebration of sex and Disability, providing an all-access safe space to spin around. Antarctica by Syrus Marcus Ware imagines a world where racialized people have survived multiple catastrophes and must begin terraforming a new colony. And in Deafy by Chris Dodd, a Deaf public speaker takes the audience on an unexpected journey of discovering what it really means to belong.

It's the end of the world. The last night on Earth. An asteroid is heading straight for us and there's nothing we can do about it.

Except for maybe host a pub quiz – which is exactly what landlady Kathy and her quizmaster Rav are doing. But, with time ticking, some unexpected guests explode on the scene – Bobby wants to settle old scores, and Fran wants one last shot at love.

The Last Quiz Night on Earth is an innovative comedy-drama featuring a fully interactive pub quiz for the audience to participate in, complete with real teams, real questions and real swapping each other's answers for marking. It was premiered by Box of Tricks in 2020 on a UK tour, taking in a host of theatres, community venues and pubs.

Ideal for performance by amateurs – either in theatres or more unconventional spaces (such as theatre bars and local pubs) – this play offers rich opportunities for audience participation. Quizzing compulsory, alcohol optional.

Nora is the perfect wife and mother. She is dutiful, beautiful and everything is always in its right place. But when a secret from her past comes back to haunt her, her life rapidly unravels. Over the course of three days, Nora must fight to protect herself and her family or risk losing everything.

Henrik Ibsen's brutal portrayal of womanhood caused outrage when it was first performed in 1879. This bold new version by Stef Smith reframes the drama in three different time periods. The fight for women's suffrage, the Swinging Sixties and the modern day intertwine in this urgent, poetic play that asks how far have we really come in the past hundred years?

Nora: A Doll's House was first produced by the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, in 2019, at Tramway, Glasgow. A new production opened at the Young Vic, London, in February 2020.

It was a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to celebrate women who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre.

Nam, a procrastination-prone Vietnamese Canadian university student, sets out with the vague ambition to write a musical about his diaspora as embodied by food, particularly the world-famous noodle soup pho. What follows is pure meta musical, genre-bending through thousands of years of history, featuring rapping ancient kings, communist spies, dancing sharks and refugees, and awkward first dates in suburbia. However, Nam eventually finds himself caught between his different characters as each argues what pho (the food and the show) truly represents, and he struggles to find an answer that will satisfy everyone—in the end, isn’t this just a bunch of silly soup songs?

The eighth title in TCG’s Classic Russian Drama series.

Nikolai Ivanov, approaching middle-age, has lost all passion for life. No longer in love with his wife, riddled with debt, and in danger of losing his estate, Ivanov finds himself trapped in a stasis he cannot shake—dragging all of those in his orbit down with him. While his family and friends rally around him trying to help, Ivanov only seems to sink further into the darkness that threatens to consume him. A new translation of Chekhov’s character study of a man undone by his own spiritual malaise.

A new year of high school is full of excitement and potential—but three teens didn’t expect it to bring such a dark change to their lives. After spending a summer reinventing herself in Paris, Emma is ready for her new life to start, while her best friend Lily is eager for them to reconnect. Lily throws a last-minute party fuelled by alcohol and Instagram, which leads to a long-awaited encounter between Emma and Lily’s older brother Chris. But the next day Emma feels that something went terribly wrong. When a doctor’s appointment and a visit from police confirm that there was a sexual assault at the party, and the whole school turns against Emma, the three friends grapple with what actually happened between Emma and Chris. This smart and intense play about the complexities of relationships and community opens up a much-needed conversation about the nature of consent.

Welcome to “The New Now,” a time in which written language has been forbidden and forgotten. Those who desire to have their love letters written and read must make a dangerous journey to the secret and illegal camp of She, the Keeper of the Lost Hand. Aided by the mysterious showman Me, She recounts how her past led her to be one of the last people able to read and write in cursive. The tandem tale of Zako Budaydos and His Dancing Bear illuminates the time of “The Before,” when the carnival performer had to rely on wit, love, and a secret coded language in order to survive.

NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE DISCUSSION OF HER LATEST MUSIC-THEATRE WORK  

This expanded edition of Conversations with Meredith Monk offers a fascinating portrait of the internationally renowned composer, performer, director, and filmmaker, from her early years to the present.  

The five long conversations that comprise the volume part of PAJ’s “Performance Ideas” series generate invaluable insights into artistic process, the human voice, interrelationships of time, space, and music, and the complexity of artistic legacies. 

What is a “contemporary” work? How does an artwork retain its integrity of form over time? In these deeply engaging conversations, Monk speaks in great detail on her creation of music-theatre works, operas, and films, reflecting on the large-cast theatrical works and the more recent poetically distilled, abstract pieces.  

In her preface to the new edition, Bonnie Marranca writes: “Now, against the background of life in extremis, it is evident that Monk had already acknowledged both the always unknown future and the resilience of human beings.”

An Israeli violinist. Living in her trendy canal-side Amsterdam apartment. Nine months pregnant.

One day a mysterious unpaid gas bill from 1944 arrives. It awakens unsettling feelings of collective identity, foreignness and alienation. Stories of a devastating past are compellingly reconstructed to try and make sense of the present.

First seen at the Haifa Theater, Israel, in 2018, Amsterdam received its UK premiere, in this English translation by Eran Edry, at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 2019, directed by Matthew Xia, in a co-production between the Orange Tree, Actors Touring Company and Theatre Royal Plymouth.

The average person will speak 123,205,750 words in a lifetime. But what if there were a limit? Oliver and Bernadette are about to find out.

Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons is a tender and funny rom-com about what we say, how we say it, and what happens when we can't say anything any more.

This special edition of Sam Steiner's hilarious and provocative play – featuring a revised text, plus an introduction by the author – was published alongside a major revival in 2023 performed at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End, as well as at Manchester Opera House and Theatre Royal Brighton. It was directed by Josie Rourke and starred Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner.

The play was first performed at Warwick Arts Centre in 2015, and won three Judges' Awards at the National Student Drama Festival before appearing at Latitude Festival, Camden People's Theatre in London, and several runs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it was a hit with both audiences and critics. It has since been performed around the world, is widely studied and has been translated into multiple languages.

When the young and naive D'Artagnan sets out on his quest to become a King's musketeer, he immediately encounters the dangerous femme fatale, Milady de Winter. After discovering that the musketeers have been disbanded, he makes it his mission to get them reinstated. But will his feud with Milady thwart him? And who the heck is she?

This riotous adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel by John Nicholson (Hound of the Baskervilles, Peepolykus) was originally performed by physical-comedy theatre company Le Navet Bete on a UK tour in 2019, with four actors playing over thirty characters. It was co-produced by Le Navet Bete and Exeter Northcott Theatre.

The Three Musketeers will suit any theatre company or drama group looking for a funny, high-energy adaptation of a universally loved story, which is suitable for audiences of all ages. Swashbuckling and rollicking adventure guaranteed – convincing French accents, not so much.

Nell and Oscar meet on a beach in Dorset. It's 1595… or maybe 1610. Oscar has returned from university and Nell is doing fuck-all. They will meet here, again and again, on this beach for the next four hundred years. Stuff will change. As it does with time. They will try to keep up.

The play premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, produced by FullRogue in association with Pleasance Futures and Bristol Old Vic Ferment, and directed by Julia Head. It subsequently transferred to the Bristol Old Vic, and toured the UK in 2020.

Ann and Mary Ann are married. They are both neuroscientists and they both witnessed deeply traumatic events when they were young. Now, in the carefully ordered worlds of their marriage and laboratory—which is linked like the two lobes of the brain—Ann and Mary Ann care for, protect, and reflect one another. But when Ann begins to study Fran, a tile artist who is unable to recognize her husband after he commits an unthinkably violent act, Ann and Mary Ann must reckon with what it really means to see and be present to another person. Ann, Fran, Mary Ann is a deeply reflective, reflecting, refracting play about trauma, God, patterns, and the way they live in our bodies, our minds, and acts of love.

Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work. Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves with lithe and associative grace through histories personal, political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.

Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive, multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh Silverman, “continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for.”

A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.

The Blunt Playwright won’t tell you everything there is to know about playwriting. It won’t even try. What it will do is examine process, structure, dialogue, and character; provide classic and contemporary scenes to study; outline clever exercises to strengthen writing skills; and so much more. Highly regarded and used in schools everywhere, this updated edition cements its place as one of the best resources for playwrights.

From organizing the structure of a script to developing characters’ voices, from employing visual effects on stage to writing comedy, or from self-promotion to getting produced and published, this guide has something for everyone, no matter the stage of their career.

It's 1972. An era of possibility and polyester and pubic hair. While Ziggy Stardust is on Top of the Pops, Penny is writing an essay on Lady Chatterley's Lover, Christine is watching Deep Throat and Brian is confused.

Devised by The Wardrobe Ensemble, 1972: The Future of Sex incorporates the company's trademark theatricality, irreverent humour and ensemble ingenuity to tell the story of three couples having sex for the first time – and a country on the brink of a sexual awakening.

Commissioned by Shoreditch Town Hall, the play was first seen there in 2014, before a UK tour in 2015, including performances at Bristol Old Vic and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was revived at the Bristol Old Vic in 2019.

After spending ten years in international Directors Lab programs—first in New York and Chicago, then co-founding Directors Lab North in Toronto—Evan Tsitsias has amassed an extensive amount of advice, examples, and notes that prove essential reading for theatre creators and artists across disciplines. Combined with masterclasses and interviews with
established, emerging, and mid-career directors, this manual is an artistic, logistic, and pedagogical exploration into the mechanics of theatre creation through the perspective of a director. With so much useful material, readers become honorary “labbies,” ready to leave their own mark on the theatrical landscape.

A mysterious accident. A dead husband. People are talking. Secrets are resurfacing from the depths. Is the past ever truly dead?

Nancy Harris's play The Beacon is premiered by Druid in 2019, previewing at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway in September before opening at the Gate Theatre Dublin in October as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2019.

Adapted by Meadhbh McHugh, in collaboration with its director Annabelle Comyn, the play premiered at the Everyman, Cork, in June 2018, before transferring to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It was produced by Landmark Productions and the Everyman, in association with the Abbey Theatre.

The piece was premiered by Damsel Productions at The Bunker, London, in May 2018.

Solo show Brute tells the true story of a rather twisted schoolgirl. Poppy’s just started at an all-girls state school in a provincial English town, where there are rules with no logic, sadistic jokes that aren’t actually funny, and the most sinister games played out of boredom.

Brute won the 2015 IdeasTap Underbelly Award, had a sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and transferred to Soho Theatre with Damsel Productions in 2016.

Bruce Norris's new play Downstate zeroes in on the limits of our compassion and what happens when society deems anyone beyond forgiveness.

“BEST PLAY OF THE YEAR” — New York Times, New Yorker, TIME, Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek, BuzzFeed, Forbes, New York Magazine, NPR, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune 

Finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama 

When she was fifteen years old, Heidi Schreck started traveling the country, taking part in constitutional debates to earn money for her college tuition. 

Decades later, in What the Constitution Means to Me, she traces the effect that the Constitution has had on four generations of women in her family, deftly examining how the United States’ founding principles are inextricably linked with our personal lives. 

Writing a good play is only a small part of making it as a successful playwright; understanding the business side of building a career is just as crucial. Yet most advice for budding writers focuses only on the craft of playwriting, ignoring the practicalities of the industry – which makes it harder for those without connections or know-how to get their work on stage.

Being a Playwright sets out, transparently and honestly, all the factors besides writing that playwrights need to know about to succeed. It includes advice on:

• How to get a script noticed
• Which programming and commissioning opportunities to pursue
• How to approach agents, companies and collaborators

Drawing on Papatango's decade-long experience of discovering and launching successful new writers – who have gone on to win prizes such as BAFTA, OffWestEnd, Royal National Theatre Foundation and Alfred Fagon Awards – this straightforward and accessible book discusses the opportunities and pitfalls of life as a playwright.

Whether you're an aspiring writer wondering how to break into the industry, or a working playwright looking to land bigger commissions, this is your insider road map to navigating the world of professional theatre.

“The most pioneering theatre director of the twentieth century.” —Independent on Peter Brook

“Achieves a magnificent balance of stillness, relaxation, and narrative tension; compelling us to pause, to breathe, and to reflect, but also moving the story towards its end with the inevitability and energy of a natural force, harnessed by an absolute master.” —Scotsman

“Elliptical and surprisingly witty…There is a delicious lightness at play, however profound the play’s contemplations.” —Herald

“During one hour and fifteen minutes, the Earth stops spinning at its maddening speed, to allow Brook to whisper in our ear one of his beautiful universal stories.” —Les Echoes

“The work of an artist for whom the human heart has no secrets and who knows the revealing and consoling force of theatre.” —Le Figaroscope

Somewhere in the world, a man sits alone outside a prison. Who is he, and why is he there? Is it a choice, or a punishment? With The Prisoner, the internationally renowned theatre director Peter Brook and his long-time collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne ask provocative and profound questions about justice, guilt, redemption—and what it means to be free.

The Prisoner opened at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris, in March 2018, before an international tour which included performances at the Edinburgh International Festival, the National Theatre of Great Britain, and Theatre for a New Audience in New York.

But when a mysterious young woman turns up on Marie's doorstep and disrupts their girls' night out, the devastating revelations which ensue will shatter dreams and threaten their friendship irrevocably.

It was first performed by 7:84 Scottish People's Theatre at Cumbernauld Theatre in 1990 and on tour. The play announced Rona Munro as one of the best playwrights of her generation, winning her the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for 1990-91.

This new edition was published alongside the revival at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, in June 2018.

Ella Hickson's play The Writer premiered in April 2018 at the Almeida Theatre, London, in a production directed by Blanche McIntyre.

“Spectacular…This new Vanya has a conversational smoothness that removes the cobwebs sticking to those other translations that never let you forget that the play was written in 1897… One of the most exquisite renderings of Uncle Vanya I’ve encountered.” —Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

“Quietly arresting… A canny and colloquial world-premiere translation… A beautifully rewarding exploration of stunted lives still bending toward the meager sunlight, like wildflowers sprouting from a cracked sidewalk.” —James Hebert, San Diego Union-Tribune

As the sixth play in the TCG Classic Russian Drama Series, Richard Nelson and preeminent translators of Russian literature, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, continue their collaboration with Chekhov’s most intimate play.

Other titles in this series include:

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

The Inspector by Nikolai Gogol

Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites and Don Quixote by Mikhail Bulgakov

A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

“Dazzling and ruthless…One of the most exquisitely and systematically arranged ambushes of an unsuspecting audience in years…A glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times

Grandma’s birthday approaches. Beverly is organizing the perfect dinner, but everything seems doomed from the start: the silverware is all wrong, the carrots need chopping and the radio is on the fritz. What at first appears to be a family comedy takes a sharp, sly turn into a startling examination of deep-seated paradigms about race in America.

“The most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.” —Jesse Green, New York Times

Armed with medicines, feeding tubes, and various medical equipment, Mary Jane is a single mother and indefatigable force when it comes to caring for her young, sick child. A moving play about the stalwart endurance of a devoted mother, Mary Jane demonstrates the prevailing strength of the human will when fueled by unconditional love.

Also included are tips on performing the speeches from current and former NYT members, plus advice on preparing for auditions.

When young Ben visits from next door he is simply looking for friendship; but what happens next challenges everyone's idea of neighborliness.

This Page to Stage guide, written by the playwright, who also directed the first production at RADA, along with her assistant director Lois Jeary, is packed with contextual information, scene-by-scene and character breakdowns, and personal insights into the world of the play and the real lives that inspired it.

An invaluable resource for those studying and staging the play, it takes you through the entire production process, considering each of the elements in turn, from sound and music to design and rehearsals. You'll also find notes from the original rehearsal process, extracts from working diaries, and interviews with key members of the creative team. Throughout, there are hints and tips on staging, and helpful games and exercises to bring the play to life on the stage and in the classroom.

It's 1979, rubbish is on the streets of Bristol, and it's tricky being Fiz. She's thirteen, she's got no money, her sister's pregnant and her mum thinks she's a waste of space...

Rick remembers what it's like to be a teenager. So he thinks it won't take much to get a bunch of kids to help him build a playground out of junk.

He's wrong. It takes everything he's got. But when it's finished, it's going to be something. It's going to be everything...

The King of the Iceni has died and his widow Boudica has tried to claim her rightful throne. For her insolence in defying Rome, the queen has been flogged, her daughters have been raped, and they have been banished from their homeland. But now, Queen Boudica has returned. And this time she has an army.

She will have revenge. She will have blood. She will make Rome quake in fear.

Boudica premieres at Shakespeare's Globe, London, in September 2017.

Césaire’s Tempest, in translation by Richard Miller, is a sprightly and song-filled enchantment. The luminous intelligence of Mr. Césaire’s meditation on the absurdities of colonialism shines through the antics of the bewildered characters.—New York Times

Césaire’s rich and insightful adaptation of The Tempest draws on contemporary Caribbean society, the African-American experience and African mythology to raise questions about colonialism, racism and their lasting effects.

“Priceless and peerless…a thrilling work of theatricality.” —Wayman Wong, San Francisco Examiner

For over three decades, Stephen Sondheim has been the foremost composer and lyricist writing regularly for Broadway. His substantial body of work now stands as one of the most sustained achievements of the American stage.

Pacific Overtures, originally produced in 1976, combines an unsurpassed mastery of the American musical with such arts as Kabuki theatre, haiku, dance, and masks to recount Commander Matthew Perry’s 1835 opening of Japan and its consequences right up to the present.

This new edition of Pacific Overtures incorporates substantial revisions made by the authors for the successful 1984 revival.

"Most plays you watch, but every so often there comes along one you experience. Tina Howe's delightful and moving Pride's Crossing is definitely one you experience and savour... a play I think you will remember forever." —New York Post

In Pride's Crossing, Tina Howe has created a remarkable heroine for the nineties: Mabel Tidings Bigelow, who at the age of 26 set the world record for swimming the English Channel. We first meet her at the age of 90 as she looks back on her life during much of the twentieth century. Structured like memory, the play's scenes criss-cross between her youth growing up in Pride's Crossing and the events in between which shaped her life.

A revealing collection of words, memories, and pictures—an autobiographical scrapbook—by an outstanding contemporary playwright.

In this remarkable memoir, Adrienne Kennedy charts her life from growing up in Cleveland in the 1930s and '40s in a middle-class Black family through marriage, motherhood, and her eventual move to New York City in the '50s. Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman, as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.