Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists The Romans in Britain was the play that brought calls to bring back censorship when it was first staged at the National in 1980. It conjures up "an era that is culturally as well as historically remote which is a notoriously difficult task, but Mr Brenton acheives it with great skill and effect...a very good play indeed." In The Thirteenth Night: "He sets the characters of Shakespeare to find the elements in the British character which could transform an Englishman into a Stalin, and closes in on his creation with an overall wit to match his horror" (The Times). The Genius "is teeming with memorable stage pictures, and bristling with Brenton's very best writing: flinty, impassioned, explosive" (Financial Times). In Bloody Poetry "Brenton is doing something markedly ambitious in this phantasmagoric play. He is celebrating the idea of the committed artist who seeks to stir and provoke sullen, defeated bourgeois England. At the same time, with clear-eyed honesty, he shows how difficult it is to upset the moral order" (The Guardian). Greenland is "on the one hand a cry of disillusionment with established political forms, on the other it is full of typically lively Brentonesque satire and lampoons...Brenton's message is a welcome antidote to the madness in which we all now seem to be living and a sharp blast against patriarchy as well as other attendant woes" (City Limits).

Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists Christie in Love is based on the story of John Christie, the 19th century serial killer, "like Genet, [Brenton] feels for the outcast...But he's less sentimentally involved with his criminals, clearer about his ultimate strategy to show the unreality of straight lines in a curved universe, of the roles society forces on us." (Observer). "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am to wreck society", Magificence puts the small people and their protests against the bourgeois state on stage; it was described as "A wonderful piece of theatre; annexing whole new chunks of modern life and presenting them in a style at once fruitful and magnified." (The Times) In The Churchill Play, Brenton brings Churchill back to life to view the future that he invented for England and "Brenton finds a way of making us look again at the past which has shaped the future into which he sees us drifting" (New Society). Weapons of Happiness is "a vision of revolution which is quite extraordinary in its creative ambiguity, its richness, its power to stimulate, to threaten and to inspire" (Sunday Times) while Epsom Downs "echoes Bartholomew Fair: a great public festival, held on common land and pulling in punters of every degree...a teaming, Bruegel-like composition" (The Times) The last play in this collection Sore Throats, is a witty and harsh examination of sexual proclivities from within and outside marriage: "No recent play compares for theatrical power and painful bravado." (Observer)

Commissioned specially for Shakespeare's Globe, Howard Brenton's epic new play that premeired there in July 2010.

This fascinating drama, staged to acclaim in London and New York, has in its cast of characters Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Goodwin. The play is about radicalism artistic, political and more. Taking place in Italy, it concerns the characters' various ideas about radical politics and free love. Along the way, a number of serious questions are raised, not the least of which is why fervent radicals seem so often to be done in by their reprehensible characters. At the end of the play Byron attends the cremation of Shelley on the beach at Viareggio and delivers a stunning ovation over the pyre: "Burn him. Burn us all. A great big bloody beautiful fire."

A vivid telling of the chaotic story of the partition that shaped the modern world. London, 1947. Summoned by the Prime Minister from the court where he is presiding judge, Cyril Radcliffe is given an unlikely mission. He is to travel to India, a country he has never visited, and, with limited survey information, no expert support and no knowledge of cartography, he is to draw the border which will divide the Indian sub-continent into two new Sovereign Dominions. To make matters even more challenging, he has only six weeks to complete the task. Wholly unsuited to his role, Radcliffe is unprepared for the dangerous whirlpool of political intrigue and passion into which he is plunged - untold consequences may even result from the illicit liaison between the Leader of the Congress Party and the Viceroy's wife... As he begins to break under the pressure he comes to realise that he holds in his hands the fate of millions of people. Drawing the Line premiered at the Hampstead Theatre, London in December 2013. "Powerful... a fascinating play which views colonial culpability from an unexpected and singularly revealing angle." - Independent "Brenton is a masterly storyteller... the play expertly draws you into the maelstrom." - Financial Times "Brenton knows how to make history manifest... gives a vivid picture of the pressures of the time." - Guardian "Fleet and fascinating." - WhatsOnStage "Crisp, elegant and revelatory... a fascinating story of mixed intentions and rushed folly." - The Stage Howard Brenton is a prolific playwright whose plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre, National Theatre, RSC and Shakespeare's Globe among others. Other writing work includes collaborations with David Hare and thirteen episodes of the BBC1 drama series Spooks.

First staged at London's National Theatre in 1980, having been commissioned by Peter Hall, The Romans in Britain contrasts Julius Caesar's Roman invasion of Celtic Britain with the Saxon invasion of Romano-Celtic Britain, and finally Britain's involvement in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the late twentieth century. As these scenes bleed into one another, Brenton suggests what it might have been like for these people to meet. Three Roman soldiers sexually assault a young druid priest. A lone, wounded Saxon soldier stumbles into a field, a nightmare made real. An army intelligence officer begins to lose his mind in the Irish fields. Brenton's sinewy vernaculars summon a lost history of cultural collision and oppression, of fear and sorrow. This edition features an introduction by Philip Roberts, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, and a foreword by director Sam West.

Jarry - Garcia Lorca - Satre - Camus - Beckett - Ritual theatre and Jean Genet - Fringe theatre in Britain__

Shortlisted for The TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize 2023 As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought. Siân Adiseshiah scrutinises the distinctive intervention of utopian drama through its examination alongside the utopian prose tradition – in this way, the book establishes new ways of approaching utopian aesthetics and new ways of interpreting utopian drama. This book provides fresh understandings of the generic features of utopian plays, identifies the gains of establishing a new genre, and ascertains ways in which this genre functions as political theatre. Referring to over 40 plays, of which 18 are examined in detail, Utopian Drama traces the emergence of the utopian play in the Western tradition from ancient Greek Comedy to experimental contemporary work. Works discussed in detail include plays by Aristophanes, Margaret Cavendish, George Bernard Shaw, Howard Brenton, Claire MacDonald, Cesi Davidson, and Mojisola Adebayo. As well as offering extended attention to the work of these playwrights, the book reflects on the development of utopian drama through history, notes the persistent features, tropes, and conventions of utopian plays, and considers the implications of their registration for both theatre studies and utopian studies.

Hitler Dances is striking not so much for the formal experimentation of its dramatic design as for its use of innovative theatrical procedures. Conceived as a workshop by the Traverse Theatre of Edinburgh, Hitler Dances originated as a series of exercises in which the actors confronted their experience and recollection of wartime England.