'Stags and Hens takes place in the Gents and Ladies loos of a tacky Liverpool club, where Dave and Linda have decided, unbeknownst to each other, to hold their stag and hen parties . . . a bleakly funny and perceptive study of working-class misogyny, puritanism and waste' Guardian 'Combines comedy with acrid truth in the style Willy Russell has made unmistakably his own ... and hits off brilliantly the herd instinct driving both sexes onward and bedward' Daily Telegraph 'Firmly in the centre of the playwright's best achievements: lively, coarse, well-organised, truthful and very funny' Financial Times

Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is 'simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending.' Sunday Times Educating Rita premiered at the RSC Warehouse, London, in June 1980. Voted Best Comedy of 1980, it was subsequently made into a highly successful film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters.

Written specifically for GCSE students by academics in the field, the Methuen Drama GCSE Student Editions provide in-depth explanatory material alongside the play texts frequently studied at Key Stage 4. Whether for use in the classroom or independent study, these editions offer a fully comprehensive and lightly glossed play text with accompanying notes specifically directed towards readers of this age, which unravel essential topics and challenge all students to delve further into literary analysis. A well established modern classic, Willy Russell's Blood Brothers tells the story of Mickey and Eddie, twins separated at birth who grow up to lead very opposite lives, but which constantly and inevitably intersect. In addition to some on-page explanatory notes and the play text, this edition contains sub-headed analyses of themes, characters, context and dramatic devices, as well as background information on the playwright. The Methuen Drama GCSE Student Editions never lose sight of their readership, and offer students the confidence to engage with the material, explore their own interpretations, and improve their understanding of the works.

A Liverpudlian West Side Story, Blood Brothers is the story of twin brothers separated at birth because their mother cannot afford to keep them both. One of them is given away to wealthy Mrs Lyons and they grow up as friends in ignorance of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a blood-bath. Blood Brothers was first performed at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1983 and subsequently transferred to the Lyric Theatre, London. It was revived in the West End in 1988 for a long-running production and opened on Broadway in 1993.

Set in 1916, three young women from the Scottish Women's Hospital are sent to the Russian front to support the war effort. Ailsa is working class and determined to make an impression on her superiors, Millicent is a self-confessed hedonist and Lily is searching for her lost husband. Unprepared for what they witness, each must find a way of coping as they fight to survive an experience that will change them forever. Poetic, visionary and startlingly written, Abigail Docherty's historical play is based on actual diaries of young Scottish nurses who experienced the Great War. Often darkly funny and raw in its emotions, Sea and Land and Sky is a gripping and sensual tale of youth, war, memory - and the power of love. Sea and Land and Sky is boldly inventive, blackly comic, and starkly savage.

Filumena is Eduardo de Filippo's best-known work and arguably his finest comedy, drenched in Neapolitan atmosphere and full of entanglements at once romantic and cynical. Set in the balmy heat of late 1940s Naples, Filumena Marturano lies on her deathbed waiting to marry Domenico Soriano, the man who has kept her as his mistress for twenty-five years. But no sooner has the priest completed the ceremony, than Filumena makes a miraculous recovery. As he reels in shock, Domenico discovers that this brilliant, iron-willed woman has a few more surprises for him. With masterful ambiguity, de Filippo depicts his characters with subtlety and balance: is Filumena a simple, illiterate woman who wants to create respectability for her children, or a ferine, opportunistic prostitute? And will Domenico, the selfish aged gigolo, learn to repent and accept his responsibility to his past and his family? Eduardo de Filippo was one of Italy's leading popular dramatists, a fearless social critic, a supreme man of the theatre, and a humane and compassionate writer. Exploring themes of motherhood, age and respectability, Filumena portrays de Filippo's trademark moral optimism and affection for his characters which underscores the drama's humour. This new translation by Tanya Ronder is contemporary, fluent and accessible, and tackles de Filippo's comedy with deftness and verve.

The first collection of plays of one of Scotland's best-known contemporary dramatists EUROPE is set in a railway station at an unnamed border town where old and new Europeans weave a tale of love, loss and longing. "Fierce, compassionate, mightily ambitious drama...there is the sharp, analytic intelligence, the crackling inventiveness of a real writer buzzing about this gripping play" Scotsman THE ARCHITECT charts the rise and fall of Leo Black, once an idealistic and idolised designer, whose magnificent visions are now crumbling, along with his family, in the light of grubby reality. "Provides convincing evidence of David Greig's confident transition from a dramatist of promise to one of stature" Independent. Lyrical, soulful and darkly funny, THE COSMONAUT'S LAST MESSAGE weaves together the stories of a fraught Scottish couple whose TV is on the blink, a Norwegian UN peace negotiator, a young prostitute, a French UFO researcher, a pregnant police woman and two forgotten Cosmonauts who sadly orbit the planet."The most important playwright to have emerged north of the border in years" Scotsman