Includes the plays The Neighbour, The Editing, Faith, Her Mother and Bartok, Shadowmouth, Glide and The Mind of the MeetingTwo highly regarded early plays, The Neighbour and The Editing Process (here presented in a revised version) present a study in contrasts: the first a battle of wills between two young men on a housing estate; the second an urbane but despairing comedy set in a publisher's offices.Faith provides a vision of military conf...

Set in the offices of a magazine publishers, Meredith Oakes' comedy of fragile values in the media will not restore your faith in human nature, but it is guaranteed to help you get on in publishing without really succeeding. First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Stephen Daldry.

Bill is sustained by his deep sense of a wider culture and an improving world. The only thing the human race needs to do is learn. When he meets a person who embodies this idea, he naturally likes them. Especially if his wife doesn't.Set at the end of the 1950s, Scenes from the Back of Beyond, explores the comfort, hopes and fragility of family life in a new Sydney suburb.Scenes from the Back of Beyond opened at the Royal Court Theatre in November 2006.

Mr Modernsky tells a story about two heavyweights of twentieth-century classical music: Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg.It traces the gradual change there has been in the way these two great rivals are perceived, looks in their music for the reasons and reflects on the nature of modernity in art and the sometimes pernicious effects of ideology. Meredith Oakes explores the tension between futuristic and historical elements in the work of these parallel artists and asks: is mod...

'Daylight people scare me...The confident ring of their footsteps...Their desire for everyone to be up and in harness...Day is always fresh and new...Exhausting...'A fifteen-year-old runaway is taken in by an older man. Both live at night: the man on his balcony, watching from afar, while the boy is drawn deeper into the city's underworld.Inspired by the photography of Nan Goldin, Shadowmouth is about people trying to connect in a landscape of disconnection, the power of de...

Foreword by Diana Damian MartinWerner Schwab’s final work, also known as a theatre-extinction comedy, is a brutal, irreverent and bizarrely comical piece about what happens when an emerging stage production is sabotaged by outsiders. Following a dispute with the cast, the director replaces all the actors with pensioners from a nearby home for the elderly. At first compliant and polite, the ‘forgotten and dispossessed’ gradually start to question the director’s auth...

Punishment without Revenge is a dark and thrilling drama, an audacious blend of unbearable tension and delicious comedy, which both terrifies and delights. Regarded as the greatest tragedy of the Spanish Golden Age and the finest play of its presiding genius, Lope de Vega, this elegant work is set in the dangerous and glamorous world of Renaissance Italy. The Duke of Ferrara has lived a wild and unconventional life.An infamous womaniser, his only son, Federico, is a bastard whom he...

A vision of military conflict as a testing-ground for English values. Nightmarish contradictions face a group of soldiers in an isolated farmhouse on the edge of battle.Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997.Cast size: 6

From the acclaimed author of the internationally bestselling Ava Lee novels, a bold and captivating new novel about a search for lost family and the cost of keeping secrets.As a boy, Jack Anderson was abandoned by his mother in a Glasgow movie theatre. Now living in the United States and facing his impending retirement, Jack and his wife Anne travel to Scotland to track down his long-lost sister. Their journey takes them from their home in a quiet Boston suburb to ...

In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century.The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins' internationally acclaimed Rites of Springand Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era--from the eve of the First...

The Witches - Will you DARE read it?

When, how and why do clothes become fashion? Fashion is more than mere clothing. It is a moment of invention, a distillation of desire, a reflection of a zeitgeist. It is also a business relying on an intricate network of manufacture, marketing and retail. Fashion is both medium and message but it does not explain itself. It requires language and images for its global mediation. It develops from the prescience of the designer and is dependent on acceptance by observers and wearers alike. W...