Osment's trilogy of 'Devon Plays' draw on his background growing up on a farm in North Devon and were produced in the mid-1990s by Cambridge Theatre Company (Method and Madness). The Dearly Beloved (1993): 'Local boy made good comes back to visit his mother in a small West Country town where his presence brings home to his friends who stayed put the various ways in which their lives have failed ... you can't but be reminded of Chekhov at times.' Independent What I Did in the Holidays (1995): 'Osment's wonderfully dense and detailed study of fraught life in rurally non-swinging Britain. The play charts a painfully funny path through the casual everyday cruelties inflicted by the thoughtless young and selfish old. Osment's play is a delight.' Evening Standard Flesh and Blood (1996): 'Brilliant at evoking the nostalgia of Devon country life in a strange, recidivist family ... and in the elision between outdoor lust and indoor stuffiness.' Observer

1988. THATCHER'S BRITAIN. Seventeen-year-old Luke runs away to London – away from homophobic playground slurs, headlines that scream 'Don't Teach Our Children To Be Gay' and a family who wouldn't understand him – to Uncle Martin, who he once saw with his arms around another man at a march. In the capital, Mark is sacked because of fears about colleagues working with 'someone like him'. His boyfriend, Selwyn, faces being beaten up both by the police and at home by his own stepbrother. Meanwhile, Debbie battles with her son, who doesn't want to live with her and her girlfriend. And retired piano teacher Miss Rosenblum – who once found refuge in this country from a terror that swept away half her family in 1930s Vienna – has seen this sort of hatred and fear before. Soon, these individual stories – of first loves and old flames, alliances and abandonment, missed opportunities and new chances – intertwine to paint a vivid picture of Eighties Britain. This Island's Mine was originally performed by Gay Sweatshop in 1988. Now, three decades after the introduction of Section 28 banning positive representations of homosexuality, Philip Osment's passionate and lyrical play, of outsiders, exiles and refugees, is all too resonant.

This first volume in the Coward Collection contains four plays written within a two year period when Coward and the century were still in their 20s. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer. Hay Fever, a comedy of bad manners, concerns a weekend with friends of the Bliss family, who have all been invited independently for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead. The Vortex was a controversial drama in its time, introducing drug-addiction onto the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned. Fallen Angels, which is written for two star actresses was described as 'degenerate', 'vile', 'obscene', 'shocking' - the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women. Easy Virtue is an elegant, laconic tribute to a lost world of drawing-room dramas, no other writer went more directly to the jugular of that moralistic, tight-lipped but fundamentally hypocritical 20s society. "He is simply a phenomenon, and one that is unlikely to occur ever again in theatre history" Terence Rattigan

In the years just after World War II, theater provided an important critique of British society’s engagement with gender and sexual politics. Sex on Stage examines how British playwrights, actors, and directors brought women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues to the cutting edge of drama after World War II. Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their sociopolitical context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one of reactionary statements and industry-wide anxiety.

This is the first study to place Jewish refugee movements from Nazism into a wider framework of global forced migration from the late nineteenth through to the twenty first century.

Tempests After Shakespeare shows how the 'rewriting' of Shakespeare's play serves as an interpretative grid through which to read three movements - postcoloniality, postpatriarchy, and postmodernism - via the Tempest characters of Caliban, Miranda/Sycorax and Prospero, as they vie for the ownership of meaning at the end of the twentieth century. Covering texts in three languages, from four continents and in the last four decades, this study imaginatively explores the collapse of empire and the emergence of independent nation-states; the advent of feminism and other sexual liberation movements that challenged patriarchy; and the varied critiques of representation that make up the 'postmodern condition'.

Bondagers, a story of women workers on the great Borders farms in the last century, is a play about land and the misuse of land. The Straw Chair opened the 25th anniversary season of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.

Shakespeare's plays have been adapted or rewritten in various, often surprising, ways since the seventeenth century. This groundbreaking anthology brings together twelve theatrical adaptations of Shakespeares work from around the world and across the centuries. The plays include The Woman's Prize or the Tamer Tamed John Fletcher The History of King Lear Nahum Tate King Stephen: A Fragment of a Tragedy John Keats The Public (El P(blico) Federico Garcia Lorca The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui Bertolt Brecht uMabatha Welcome Msomi Measure for Measure Charles Marowitz Hamletmachine Heiner Müller Lears Daughters The Womens Theatre Group & Elaine Feinstein Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief Paula Vogel This Islands Mine Philip Osment Harlem Duet Djanet Sears Each play is introduced by a concise, informative introduction with suggestions for further reading. The collection is prefaced by a detailed General Introduction, which offers an invaluable examination of issues related to

Contemporary theatre is one of the best ways for ethno-cultural minorities to express themselves, whether they be of indigenous origin or immigrants. It is often used to denounce social injustice and discrimination and, more generally, it helps to air questions debated in the wider community. It may also express itself thanks to the staging of collective memory, for it constitutes a privileged space for the exploration of the trauma of the past (colonial, for example), as well as providing a means of effecting the reconfiguration of a new identity, or of articulating an uneasiness about that identity. Should minority theatre increase its visibility in relation to the mainstream, or, on the contrary, remain on the margins and assert its specificity? This question is at the centre of French-Canadian experience, for example, but also applies to other postcolonial societies, in Europe and elsewhere. In order to maintain its cultural authenticity, should this type of theatre distinguish itself from a multiculturalism that runs the risk of political and social recuperation? If it is unable to resist the model proposed by globalization and widespread cultural dissemination, will it lose its legitimacy? Can, and should there be, a form of popular art at the service of the community? The term “minority” raises questions that will be examined by the articles collected in this volume. What is the definition of a minority? Does this term refer to experimental and avant-garde art forms as well as to ethno-cultural drama? Contemporary theatre is characterized by an aesthetics of hybridity—in what measure is this the case for theatre outside the mainstream? The exploration of this kind of theatre necessitates an examination of the very concept of theatre per se. Since the development of the electronic media as the privileged vector of culture, has not the theatrical genre itself become a minority art form? These are some of the pressing questions that this volume will try to address, thanks to a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary approach that aims to reveal the rich diversity of the field under study.

This book takes the reader through the translation and performance processes of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to establish a model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama.