Joe Orton's brilliantly inventive and staggeringly bold first play.Fred and Madge are a normal couple. Or so we think until a director and an audience member start interrupting and reworking this play within a play.Exhilaratingly subversive, the play includes the destruction of the Festival Hall, professional insulters intent on purging society with laughter and a dystopian England overgrown with marigolds. Full of biting satire and sardonic wit, it mingles astutely observe...

Entertaining Mr Sloane was first staged in 1964. Despite its success in performance, and being hailed by Sir Terence Rattigan as 'the best first play' he'd seen in 'thirty odd years', it was not until the London production of Loot in 1966 - less than a year before Joe Orton's untimely death - that theatre audiences and critics began to more fully appreciate the originality of Orton's elegant, alarming and hilarious writing. Introduced by John Lahr, the author of Orton's biography Prick up ...

A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of two young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Or...

A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of twoyoung thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for anundertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlourand have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's motherhas just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the bodyelsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, thethickened plot turns tops...

Tell him to put his trousers on. Cantering around the house with a bare bum . . . Can't leave you alone for five minutes.When lonely Kath offers the mysterious Mr Sloane a room to rent in the family home, her businessman brother Ed does not approve. After all, what will people say? But soon, he becomes equally taken with the charismatic young Sloane. Only their old Dadda remains wary, convinced that he recognises this stranger. What begins as a convenient living ar...

Published fifty years after the premiere of Entertaining Mr Sloane in 1964, and with a new introduction, this anniversary edition offers an opportunity to reappraise Joe Orton's reputation, and the status of his first major play, from a twenty-first century perspective.When it first appeared in the Swinging Sixties, Orton's satire on social and sexual hypocrisy both scandalized and delighted audiences. Its mix of sexuality and violence was explosive. Within a year, the pla...

"Joe Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature" (Sunday Telegraph)The chase is on in this breakneck comedy of licensed insanity, from the moment when Dr Prentice, a psychoanalyst interviewing a prospective secretary, instructs her to undress. The plot of What the Butler Saw contains enough twists and turns, mishaps and changes of fortune, coincidences and lunatic logic to furnish three or four conventional comedies. B...

Selected plays by the great playwright Joe Orton, plus bonus materialJoe Orton was among the towering geniuses of 1960s theatre. His life was tragically cut short in 1967, but he left behind him a handful of shocking and scabrous black comedies that will live on in the public imagination for years to come. Orton’s career was kickstarted by the BBC. John Tydeman who is widely considered to have found him when working at the BBC as an trainee. He came across an early...

'There will be three tasks, spaced throughout the school year, and they will test the champions in many different ways ... their magical prowess - their daring - their powers of deduction - and, of course, their ability to cope with danger.'The Triwizard Tournament is to be held at Hogwarts. Only wizards who are over seventeen are allowed to enter - but that doesn't stop Harry dreaming that he will win the competition. Then at Hallowe'en, when the Goblet of Fire makes its ...

Take your understanding of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling to a whole new level, anywhere you go: on a plane, on a mountain, in a canoe, under a tree. Or grab a flashlight and read Shmoop under the covers.Shmoop's award-winning learning guides are now available on your favorite eBook reader. Shmoop eBooks are like a trusted, fun, chatty, expert literature-tour-guide always by your side, no matter where you are (or how late it is at night). You'll find thought-provoki...

Take your understanding of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling to a whole new level, anywhere you go: on a plane, on a mountain, in a canoe, under a tree. Or grab a flashlight and read Shmoop under the covers.Shmoop's award-winning learning guides are now available on your favorite eBook reader. Shmoop eBooks are like a trusted, fun, chatty, expert literature-tour-guide always by your side, no matter where you are (or how late it is at night). You'll find thought-provoking cha...

Bestselling historical fiction author Molly Green is back with her most engrossing, heartfelt World War Two saga yet! Preorder The Wartime Librarian's Secret now!War rages, but the women and children of Liverpool’s Dr Barnardo’s Home cannot give up hope.LIVERPOOL, 1940When her childhood sweetheart Johnny is killed in action, Maxine Grey loses more than her husband – she loses her best friend. Desperate to make a difference ...