Perfectly preserving the tone and mood of the novel whilst condensing it into two acts, David Malouf, with the gift for language already evident from his novels and poetry, presents afresh the timeless story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, one of the most enduring literary classics of all time. The love between Jane and Mr Rochester, and the mystery of the woman behind the locked door, are here set to music in the opera composed by Michael Berkeley.

"The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who came of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term intelligentsia was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of politics, love, loss, and betrayal. In The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard presents an inspired examination of the struggle between romantic anarchy, utopian idealism, and practical reformation in this chronicle of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in a struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors."--Publisher's description.

If the politicians cannot save Russia, then we businessmen must. We have not just the responsibility but the duty to become Russian heroes. 1991. The Fall of the Soviet Union. With the dawning of a new Russia, there are winners and losers, and today's patriot can fast become tomorrow's traitor. As a new generation of oligarchs fights to seize control, we follow billionaire businessman Boris Berezovsky - the 'kingmaker' behind Vladimir Putin - from the president's inner circle to public enemy number one, in this unflinching story of ambition and the dangers of loyalty and love. Peter Morgan's Patriots opened at the Almeida Theatre, London, in July 2022 - back cover.

New York Dram Critc's Circle Award for Best Foreign Play Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy London Critics' Circle Award for Best Play Time Out Award for Best West End Play The award-winning play of love and betrayal that was the inspiration for Mike Nichols' acclaimed film of the same name and starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Own. In Closer , Patrick Marber has created a brilliant exploration into the brutal anatomy of modern romance, where a quartet of strangers meet, fall in love, and become caught up in a web of sexual desire and betrayal. Closer is being hailed as one of the best new plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."

'Nothing in this book was written with greater love, and for myself I love nothing printed here better than this play' Arthur Miller. The one-act play A Memory of Two Mondays (1955) is one of Miller's most overtly autobiographical works. It chronicles the playwright at the age of eighteen during the early 1930s when he briefly worked at an auto parts warehouse in New York to save enough money to attend college. More than just autobiographical, the play captures the sociopolitical climate of the Great Depression. It resonates with and brings to the surface the cultural concerns and anxieties of the period. The setting, characters, theme, style, structure and language all exemplify the social and economic tensions of the country at its lowest ebb, when it needed a sense of hope, endurance, and solidarity. At the same time, the play speaks to the 1950s, when the country was being torn apart by McCarthyism. A Memory of Two Mondays responded to a culture caught in the grip of a Communist hysteria that turned people against each other. This scholarly edition is perfect for students. It features an extensive commentary on the context, themes, structure, style, language and characters, a survey of the play in production and questions for further study. Methuen Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires featuring extensive notes, commentary, further reading and questions for students.

"Hilary, a young psychology researcher at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question. She and other researchers at the institute are grappling with what science calls the 'hard problem'--if there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? What Hilary discovers puts her fundamentally at odds with her colleagues, who include her first mentor and onetime lover, Spike; her boss, Leo; and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one."--Back cover.

Stella Adler was one of the most influential acting teachers of all time, a legendary force of nature whose generations of students include Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Anthony Quinn, Diana Ross, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, and Mark Ruffalo. This long-awaited companion to her book on the master European playwrights brings to life America’s most revered playwrights, whom she knew, loved, and worked with. Brilliantly edited by Barry Paris, Adler’s lectures on the giants of twentieth-century theater feature her indispensable insights into such classic plays as “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “The Skin of Our Teeth,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “The Glass Menagerie,” and “Death of a Salesman,” while shedding new light on such lesser known gems as Tennessee Williams’s “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion” and Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall.” Illuminating, revelatory, inspiring—this is Stella Adler at her electrifying best.

"It is 1936 and A.E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene." "On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder Housman confronts his younger self, and the memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson - the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings. As if a dream, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman's imagination, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and passion displaced into poetry and the study of classical texts. The author of A Shropshire Lad lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, and died old and venerated - but whose passion was truly the fatal one?" --Book Jacket.

A new edition of the classic drama portraying gay life in New York in the 1970s and 80s--winner of the Tony Award for Best Play, now back on Broadway in a revival hailed by The New York Times as "irresistibly compelling." What begins as a chance encounter in a New York nightclub leads drag performer Arnold Beckoff on a hilarious yet touching pursuit of love, happiness, and a life he can be proud of. From a failed affair with a reluctant lover to a committed relationship with the promise of a stable family, Arnold's struggle for acceptance meets its greatest resistance when he faces off against the person whose approval is most important to him: his mother. This edition contains for the first time ever both the original scripts for the three one-act plays (The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!) as they were performed in the 1970s, as well as the revised script for the 2017 revival that condensed all three into Torch Song. It also includes a never-before-published introduction by Harvey Fierstein, as well as photographs from both the original production and the revival starring Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl and directed by Moisés Kaufman.

The sequel to the phenomenal national bestseller and enduring classic Love Story. Can the love of your life appear twice in a lifetime? Oliver Barrett IV found his soulmate in Jenny Cavilleri. Their love was magical and exhilarating...and though heartbreakingly brief, it was a love to last a lifetime. Two years have passed since Jenny was taken from him, and Oliver believes he will never love again. Then one day, Marcie--beautiful and mysterious--enters his world and suddenly the future holds new promise. From the running track in New York's Central Park to the hushed executive suites of a mightly department store empire, from a snowy Massachusetts Christmas to a shattering moment of turth in exotic Hong Kong--the story of Oliver Barrett IV is a story of passion and principle, of a young man's journey out of sadness, into love.

Many Loves, which ran for nearly a year (1959) in repertory at New York's famous Living Theatre, explores four varieties of human attachment, while A Dream of Love, first produced in 1949, is a penetrating and poetic treatment of infidelity and marriage. Tituba's Children, written three years before Arthur Miller's Crucible, is a dramatic study of witch-hunting - the Salem trials of 1692 and McCarthyism in the 1950's. The First President was first published in 1936. It is preceded by a long introduction on the theory of opera, the role of music, and the problems of realizing a historic figure on the stage. The Cure (1960) reminds us that Dr. Williams was for forty-two years a practicing physician. Its theme, developed in a very unusual situation, is the relationship between nurse and patient.

Jeffrey, a gay actor/waiter, has sworn off sex after too many bouts with his partners about what is "safe" and what is not. In gay New York, though, sex is not something you can avoid. Whether catering a ditzy socialite's "Hoe-down for AIDS" or cruising at a funeral; at the gym or in the back rooms of an anonymous sex club; at the annual Gay Pride Parade, or in the libidinous hands of a father-confessor, Jeffrey finds the pursuit of love and just plain old physical gratification to be the number-one preoccupation of his times—and the source of plenty of hilarity. Suddenly, just after he's reconciled himself to celibacy, Jeffrey's flamboyant friends introduce him to the man of his dreams, who also happens to be HIV-positive. What follows is an audacious and moving romantic comedy with a difference—one in which the quest for love and really fabulous clothes meet, and where unflagging humor prevails even when tragedy might be just around the corner.

Absolutely one of the most hilarious movies ever made, this classic farce featuring the outrageous genius of the Marx Brothers is a chance to see some of their best bits woven together seamlessly in a story of high society, matchmaking, and chaos. In order to bring two young lovers together, brothers Groucho, Chico, and Harpo must sabotage an opera performance even as they try to pass themselves off as stuffed shirts. Featuring the classic sequence where Groucho piles as many people as possible into a ship's stateroom, A Night at the Opera is a deliciously zany romp worth watching again and again. --Robert Lane

A romantic triangle involving survivors of the Holocaust, set in New York City in the 50s. It was serialized in the Yiddish newspaper, Forward, under the title Lost Souls.

Amid the cactus wilds some two hudred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want—and how far the are willing to go to get it.The Deer Park is the story of two interlacing love affairs. Sergius O'Shaugnessy is a young ex-Air Force pilot whose good looks and air of indifference launch him into the orbit of the radiant actress Lulu Meyers. Charles Eitel is a brilliant director wounded by accusations of communism—and whose liaison with the volatile Elena Esposito may supply the coup de grace to his career. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire.

Donald Margulies offers up a vivid new adaptation of Sholom Asch's 1906 Yiddish melodrama, reset on the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the century. The original English language edition first appeared on Broadway in 1923, but was closed down and the cast arrested for its portrayal of a lesbian love affair on stage. "Teasing out the pesky questions of spirit, love, family and commerce at the heart of Asch's play, Margulies has achieved crossover success, making "God of Vengeance "a profoundly American play."-Alisa Solomon, "Village Voice " Sholom Asch was a noted Yiddish novelist and playwright. Donald Margulies is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Dinner with Friends." His other work includes "Collected Stories "and "Sight Unseen."

The graduating seniors of a Seven Sisters college, trying to decide whether to pattern themselves after Katharine Hepburn or Emily Dickinson. Two young women besieged by the demands of mothers, lovers, and careers--not to mention a highly persistent telephone answering machine--as they struggle to have it all. A brilliant feminist art historian trying to keep her bearings and her sense of humor on the elevator ride from the radical sixties to the heartless eighties. Wendy Wasserstein's characters are so funny, so many-sided, and so "real" that we seem to know them from their Scene One entrances, though the places they go are invariably surprising. And these three plays--"Uncommon Women and Others," "Isn't It Romantic," and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Heidi" "Chronicles"--Manage to engage us heart, mind, and soul on such a deep and lasting level that they are already recognized as classics of the modern theater.

In these three short plays, middle-aged Bobby Gould returns to the old neighborhood in a series of encounters with his past that, however briefly, open windows to his present. In The Disappearance of the Jews (also included in Mamet's Three Jewish Plays), Bobby and an old buddy fantasize about finding themselves in a nostalgic shtetl paradise, while revealing how lost they are in their own families. In Jolly, Bobby's sister, from the comfort of her kitchen, unscrolls a list of childhood grievances that is at once painful and hilarious. And the old girlfriend in Deeny, faced with a man she once loved, finds herself obsessively free-associating on gardening, sex, and subatomic particles.

A dinner party in an ornate mansion on the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan provides the scene for this witty and incisive play. Set in two eras--the early 1900s and our own Gilded Age--the characters move effortlessly from one period to the other. The host, a contemporary master of high-risk arbitrage, steps in and out of character as a robber baron of an earlier time. His guests of today include a Hollywood director, a not-so-cutting-edge sculptor, an online lingerie designer, an aggressive publicist, and an aging historian. Their counterparts from the past are the great man's rebellious son, a grand dame of New York society, the architect who built the mansion originally, and the maids and servants who maintain it. In this dance of rich storytelling and social commentary, it becomes strikingly clear that while old money has become new, little else has changed over the years. Children still rebel against their controlling parents, women still hope for love, and greed, snobbery, and angst persist.

Johann Sebastian Bach, irascible and turbulent, writes music of sensuous delight and deep religious fervour. He's touchy, he's fabulously rude, he has impossibly high standards (he stabs a bassoonist for playing badly), and he's constantly in trouble with his patrons. Music is the family business - but the burden of their father's genius weighs heavily on his sons. Wilhelm is brilliant but self-destructive. Tense, industrious Carl is more successful than his father, but knows he is less talented. As the years pass, their rivalry provokes furious arguments about love, God and above all music. What is it for - to give pleasure, like a cup of coffee in the sun, or to reveal the divine order that gives life its meaning? Beautiful, profound and funny, Nina Raine's play Bach & Sons is a gripping family drama and an anthem to the art that draws us together and sings of our common humanity. It premiered at the Bridge Theatre, London, in June 2021, directed by Nicholas Hytner, with Simon Russell Beale playing J. S. Bach.