A girl is locked in a room. A boy brings another boy flowers. A girl has tied herself to a railing. A boy doesn't know who he is. A girl worries about impending catastrophe. A woman jumps in front of a train. A boy's heart falls out his chest. A butterfly has a broken wing.Laura Lomas's play Chaos is a symphony of dislocated and interconnected scenes. A series of characters search for meaning in a complicated and unstable world. Bouncing through physics, the cosmos, love a...

Three hard-hitting, distinctive monologues for young female actors, from one of the country's most exciting young playwrights.Bird is a cutting-edge monologue that throws light on the experience of a teenager in contemporary Britain.It's four in the morning and Leah is waiting for her boyfriend to call. Over the course of a single night she tells us what it's like to be fourteen, fearless and full of love. But everything isn't what it seems, and as the sun comes up...

A tense relationship drama which examines how the effects of one moment can ripple through a galaxy of lives.An ordinary summer's day. Liam is about to make a decision he will spend a lifetime regretting. One day. One mistake. Seven futures sent spiralling.From service stations to sea fronts, Blister explores the limits of forgiveness and the tragic permanence of trauma.Laura Lomas's play Blister was first performed at Royal Welsh College of Music ...

National Theatre Connections is an annual festival which brings new plays for young people to schools and youth theatres across the UK and Ireland. Commissioning exciting work from leading playwrights, the festival exposes actors aged 13-19 to the world of professional theatre-making, giving them full control of a theatrical production - from costume and set design to stage management and marketing campaigns. NT Connections have published over 150 original plays and regula...

Clean Break is a British theatre company set up in 1979 by two women in prison. It exists to tell the stories of women with experience of the criminal justice system and to transform women's lives through theatre.Over 40 years, Clean Break has commissioned some of the most progressive and brilliant women writers to write ground-breaking plays, alongside developing the writing skills of the women they work with in its London studios and in prisons. This is a collection of monologues...

In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas uncovers how late nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient critique of U.S. imperialism, one that prefigures many of the concerns about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity animating American studies today. During the 1880s and early 1890s, the Cuban journalist, poet, and revolutionary José Martí and other Latino migrants living in New York City translated North American literary and cultural texts into Spanish. Loma...

The essays in this collection reflect two of Martí’s key observations during his time in the United States: first, how did he, an exile living in New York, view and read his North American neighbors from a sociocultural, political and literary perspective? Second, how did his perception of the modern nation impact his own concepts of race, capital punishment, poetics, and nation building for Cuba? The overarching endeavor of this project is to view and read Martí with the same critical or ...

'We are here to make sense of it all.'From the everyday to the astonishing, and the ordinary to the miraculous, the Roman poet Ovid's stories of epic impossibilities explore the power of transformation, the resilience of humans, and the wonder of life.The myths of Metamorphoses have inspired generations of writers, including Shakespeare. Over two thousand years later, they are reimagined for our world by three leading British playwrights, and feature anarc...

Five characters share a common thread: Joanne. But it's not about her. It's about Stella, whose tomorrow is as far away as winter from summer. It's the way Grace finds her song on the footpath between two cars. It's about Alice's MBA wasted on plugging holes, Kath's patients crawling alongside her after the night shift and it's Becky caught in the crosshairs of what's best and what's right for her students.But what about her? What about Joanne?In Joanne, five of th...

The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature emphasizes the importance of understanding Latina/o literature not simply as a US ethnic phenomenon but more broadly as an important element of a trans-American literary imagination. Engaging with the dynamics of migration, linguistic and cultural translation, and the uneven distribution of resources across the Americas that characterize Latina/o literature, the essays in this History provide a critical overview of key texts, authors, t...