Drawing together the work of 12 leading playwrights, this National Theatre Connections anthology celebrates highlights from 21 years of the Connections festival with a retrospective selection of plays.Featuring work by some of the most prolific playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries, and together in one volume, the anthology offers young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study.Each play has been specific...

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–1611, and thought to be one of the last plays that Shakespeare wrote alone. After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants—Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit. The play contains music and songs that ...

Love, ambition, betrayal, power—the eternal dramas of the human soul. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare collects every play, sonnet, and long-form poem by the greatest playwright in literary history. Experience masterpieces like Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Othello, and more, with rich language, timeless themes, and characters that have shaped storytelling for centuries. Ideal for students, performers, scholars, and lovers of great drama, this edition offers a comp...

See? All we need is... a map and...some kind of plan.This overcoat is neutral darling, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik. Just essence of Prole.In Kiev during the Russian Civil War, the Turbin household is sanctuary to a ragtag, close-knit crowd presided over by the beautiful Lena. As her brothers prepare to fight for the White Guard, friends charge in from the riotous streets amidst an atmosphere of heady chaos, quaffing vodka, keeling over, declaiming, tak...

Exactly one year ago, I stood in that crumbling pulpit in Riverside and shouted that this war would be our own violent undoing, freedom's suicide . . . Well, I'll tell you, there weren't too many Amens that Sunday. But who is a man who does not speak his mind? He is not a man, but I am a man.The night before his assassination, King retires to room 306 in the now-famous Lorraine Motel after giving an acclaimed speech to a massive church congregation. When a mysterious young...

In this clear and detailed reading guide, we’ve done all the hard work for you!Waiting for Godot is one of Samuel Beckett’s most famous plays. It shows how Vladimir and Estragon wait for a mysterious character called Godot. Nothing happens aside from the dialogue between the two protagonists, yet the implications of this very successful play are numerous.Find out everything you need to know about Waiting for Godot in just a few minutes!

I can tell the difference between who I am and a side effect.The Effect is a clinical romance. Two young volunteers, Tristan and Connie, agree to take part in a clinical drug trial. Succumbing to the gravitational pull of attraction and love, however, Tristan and Connie manage to throw the trial off-course, much to the frustration of the clinicians involved. This funny, moving and perhaps surprisingly human play explores questions of sanity, neurology and the limi...

War widow Dorothy lives in a London suburb with her 15-year-old daughter Victoria and her older bachelor brother Edwin. More and more isolated from her married friends with their successful children, Dorothy tries to cope with Victoria's increasingly hostile behaviour. But is she doing her best, as she thinks, or is she in fact responsible for what threatens to become an unendurable situation?'A exquisitely observed, profoundly quiet slice of 1950s suburba...

When that baby's born . . . your life ceases being your life. That child owns every single one of your actions. Every breath of your body. Every dream that you ever had, Mrs. Top Two Percent, those dreams are sucked out of you and poured into the soul of that child.It's hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps in this economy-Sue should know. It's harder when you've got kids, even whip-smart, talented ones like Judy. Sue has big dreams for both her basement beauty shop ...

It's forty million miles. Two and a half years, yeah? It takes a radiowave - right? Travelling at the speed of fucking light, 13 minutes, to get back from Mars. So . . . if anything goes wrong - anything at all - out there . . . they're really . . . they're on their own, you know?When Earth is the loneliest planet, where else is there to go?Paul is a specialist in cognitive behaviour, tasked with designing a twenty-year mission to Mars. Daniel is a husband and new ...

John Blakemore is a solitary boy who finds it impossible either to understand or adapt to the ways of the school. His adolescent earnestness put off teacher and pupil alike. And now suddenly he seems to be in danger of losing his only friend.David Hare's emotional new play, written at the invitation of the Rattigan estate as a response to The Browning Version, is a meditation on faith, learning and teenage friendship, played against the backdrop of a Britain still ...

You have to be tough to be kind. That's what I've learned from you, Granddad. Tough and fearless and strong. So that's what I'm going to be.Naples, 1606. Inside an unfinished church, a painting is emerging from the darkness. The Seven Acts of Mercy is Caravaggio's masterpiece - and his first painting since he killed a man and fled Rome. As the artist works, he is fueled by anger, self-loathing and his driving need to create a work that speaks of compassion in a vi...