With a new foreword by Stewart Pringle, Playwright and Dramaturg of the National Theatre of Great Britain.Winner of the 1997 Theatre Book PrizePeggy Ramsay was the most admired British play agent of the twentieth century. With a matchless ability to visualise a play just by reading it on the page, she set up in business in 1953, and over the years nurtured and developed the most dazzling client list which included Eugene Ionesco, Joe Orton, Robert Bolt, David Mercer, John M...

With a new foreword by Stewart Pringle, Playwright and Dramaturg of the National Theatre of Great Britain.Winner of the 1997 Theatre Book PrizePeggy Ramsay was the most admired British play agent of the twentieth century. With a matchless ability to visualise a play just by reading it on the page, she set up in business in 1953, and over the years nurtured and developed the most dazzling client list which included Eugene Ionesco, Joe Orton, Robert Bolt, David Mercer, John M...

‘Oh, it’s a funny sensation, having money in your pocket, I can tell you… Money warms you. If you knew how warm and safe I feel. Like a new creature in a new skin.’In a production commissioned by the Finborough Theatre, a unique opportunity to see a classic of Yiddish theatre for the first time in the UK – Treasure by David Pinski. Tille is the poor gravedigger’s daughter, with nothing in the world except a head full of dreams. Things look set to stay that way, until the day her br...

Peggy Ramsay (1908-1991) was the foremost play agent of her time. Her list of clients shows her to have been at the centre of British playwriting for several generations from the late 1950s on.To her remarkable array of clients, her letter writing was notorious, marked by searing candour, both a wondrous motivation and an unforgiving scrutiny to be feared.'Peggy judged by the most exalted standards and lashed her writers when they failed to meet them. Her force of personali...

The plays of María Martínez Sierra were popular in Spain, South America and in translation on Broadway and London's West End in the first half of the 20th century but they were thought to be written by her husband, the celebrated director and playwright Gregorio Martínez Sierra. After his death, the authorship of his work was revealed to be that of María, making her one of the most important playwrights of her time.This edited collection features three plays by María Martínez Sierr...

I Saw Democracy Murdered is the memoir of Sam Russell (1915–2010), a communist journalist and a British volunteer with the anti-fascist Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.The book covers his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, his time as a journalist at The Daily Worker and The Morning Star newspapers, and his later disillusionment with Stalinism. In his capacity as a journalist, Russell travelled extensively and was frequently a front-row ...

Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘the Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners.Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and other representations in the sixteenth century, through to the emergence of black and A...

Granville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre.Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published ...

This is the inside story of the Royal Shakespeare Company - a running historical critique of a major national institution and its location within British culture, as related by a writer who is uniquely placed to tell the tale. It describes what happened to a radical theatrical vision and explores British society's inability to sustain that vision. Spanning four decades and four artistic directors, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company is a multi-layered chronicle that traces the company's h...

An alternative autobiography of the well-loved actor and man of the theatre, winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.In My Life in Pieces Simon Callow retraces his life through the multifarious performers, writers, productions and events which have left their indelible mark on him.The story begins with Peter Pan – his first ever visit to the theatre – before transporting us to southern Africa and South London, where Callow spent much of h...

Every bookshop has a storyWe're not talking about rooms that are just full of books.We're talking about bookshops in barns, disused factories, converted churches and underground car parks. Bookshops on boats, on buses, and in old run-down train stations. Fold-out bookshops, undercover bookshops, this-is-the-best-place-I've-ever-been-to-bookshops.Meet Sarah and her Book Barge sailing across the sea to France; meet Sebastien, in Mongolia, who sells bo...