Robert Icke's thrilling and radical adaptations of some of the great texts of Western theatre have enthralled theatregoers in London, in New York and around the world. This is the first collection of his multi-award-winning work. Includes: Oresteia: Orestes' parents are at war. A family drama spanning several decades, a huge, moving, bloody saga, Aeschylus' greatest and final play asks whether justice can ever be done - and continues to resonate more than two millennia after it was written. Uncle Vanya: Chekhov's late masterpiece examines human behaviour in all of its beautiful, terrible, laughable contradiction. Mary Stuart: Schiller's political tragedy takes us behind the scenes of British history's famous rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. The Wild Duck: A new version of Ibsen's masterpiece about the nature of truth, in which a stranger intervenes to reveal the lies in the past of a family, with tragic consequences. The Doctor: Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke has written a gripping moral thriller that uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality.

Robert Icke's thrilling and radical adaptations of some of the great texts of Western theatre have enthralled theatregoers in London, in New York and around the world. This is the first collection of his multi-awardwinning work. Includes: Oresteia: Orestes' parents are at war. A family drama spanning several decades, a huge, moving, bloody saga, Aeschylus' greatest and final play asks whether justice can ever be done - and continues to resonate more than two millennia after it was written. Uncle Vanya: Chekhov's late masterpiece examines human behaviour in all of its beautiful, terrible, laughable contradiction. Mary Stuart: Schiller's political tragedy takes us behind the scenes of British history's famous rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. The Wild Duck: A new version of Ibsen's masterpiece about the nature of truth, in which a stranger intervenes to reveal the lies in the past of a family, with tragic consequences. The Doctor: Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke has written a gripping moral thriller that uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality.

First, do no harm. How do we defend the "truth" when no one agrees what it is and many have reason to undermine it? Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke's gripping moral thriller uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality. After a critically acclaimed run at London's Almeida Theatre, The Doctor transferred to the West End in September 2022. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the new production.

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick With extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity, George Orwell’s 1984 takes on new life in this edition. “Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be. Lionel Trilling said of Orwell’s masterpiece, “1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present.” Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell’s novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.

A fascinating, richly illustrated exploration of the poignant origins of Rudyard Kipling’s world-famous children’s classic From "How the Leopard Got Its Spots" to "The Elephant’s Child," Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories have delighted readers across the world for more than a century. In this original study, John Batchelor explores the artistry with which Kipling created the Just So Stories, using each tale as an entry point into the writer’s life and work—including the tragedy that shadows much of the volume, the death of his daughter Josephine. Batchelor details the playful challenges the stories made to contemporary society. In his stories Kipling played with biblical and other stories of creation and imagined fantastical tales of animals' development and man's discovery of literacy. Richly illustrated with original drawings and family photographs, this account reveals Kipling’s public and private lives—and sheds new light on a much-loved and tremendously influential classic.

"Hitchcock would approve." - The Times (UK)"A dark story of dissolving identity... Mesmeric." - ObserverConnecticut, 1969. On their way back from a party, two couples struggle home through thesnow. Not everyone arrives safely.The great detective writer Georges Simenon escaped France at the end of World War Two, and arrived in the USA to start again. With his American wife, he settled at Shadow Rock Farm in Lakeville. Years later, he wrote La Main, a psychological thriller set in a New England farmhouse. David Hare has taken this novel, and forged from it a startling new play.

A new version of The Wild Duck, Ibsen's masterpiece about the nature of truth, in which a stranger intervenes to reveal the lies in the past of a family, with tragic consequences. In Icke's version the scenery and costumes grow gradually more naturalistic as the play progresses, and the characters break off from their lines to comment on the action and on Ibsen's life. A re-assessing of The Wild Duck: verb. to duck 1. a quick lowering of the head (to avoid a blow or so as not to be seen) 2. depart quickly 3. avoid; noun. wild duck (more commonly known as mallard duck or anas platyrhynchos) - an undomesticated duck. Note: Due to its beautiful feathers, the mallard duck is one of the most popular ducks for hunters. When injured or threatened, ducks have been alleged to commit suicide, by diving to the bottom of the water, never returning to the surface. This version of The Wild Duck was produced at The Almeida Theatre, London, and a review in The Stage remarked: "Icke has a way of pinking the cheeks of canonical plays and making them breathe."

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)

The smash-hit play about international relations and the shifting balance of power between East and West.

The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity’s busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and at the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure. From peasant farmers in the first agrarian societies to the precarious existence of today’s gig workers, this surprising account of both cooperation and subordination at work throws essential light on the opportunities we face today.