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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Jack Thorne
2nd May 1997. An historic victory. The Tories, eighteen years in
power, are defeated as New Labour sweeps into government. From the
euphoria and despair, three deeply personal stories emerge.
Tory
MP Robert prepares to attend the count. With defeat looming large, he
fears becoming a forgotten man, while his wife Marie counts the cost of
her own sacrifice to politics. Lib Dem footsoldier Ian is no hero, but
party-crasher Sarah is determined to make him one. Best mates Jake and
Will wake up with a new world order to memorise before their A-level
Politics class. Jake dreams of Number 10. Will dreams of Jake
A smouldering play about escaping the past, seizing the present and owning the future.
Cast : 4M, 2F
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-84842-080-9 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Edward Kemp
It's 1605 and the war on terror is going badly. A group of young religious fanatics has recruited a mercenary, Guy Fawkes, to strike at the heart of the English Government. But in a police state no-one can be trusted and their plot is going to be turned against the very people it was meant to save. This incendiary thriller weaves together the lives of kings and terrorists, priests and spies in a play of epic proportions, which has the sweep and scope of the very best historical drama.
Review
a big, bold, joltingly topical new play... explosive epic with echoes for today -
Daily Telegraph
Cast : 20M, 6F
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-900-1 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Eugene O’Neill
Ah! Wilderness, first staged in 1933, is often seen as a bright and sunny reverse-image of the sombre
Long Day's Journey into Night. Both are family plays set in the year just before the First World War. Both take place in a house clearly modelled on the O'Neill family home in New England. For O'Neill,
Ah! Wilderness had
''the sweet charm of a dream of lost youth'; during his lifetime it was one of his most popular plays.
Cast : 9M, 6F
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-137-1 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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David Edgar
Plucked from obscurity to be Hitler's architect and Minister of War, Albert Speer became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and the closest Hitler had to a friend. This panoramic adaptation of Gita Sereny's definitive and magisterial biography tells the epic story of a man whose devotion to Hitler blinded him to the the worst crime of the twentieth century.
Review
David Edgar's compelling new play offers a clear-sighted examination of the psychology of guilt, denial and repentance, an unsqueamish and chilling dissection of a heart of darkness
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The Mail on Sunday.
Cast : 6F, 20m - more if desired
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-485-3 | Sales rights: worldwide | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Howard Brenton
A celebration of a great English heroine,
Anne Boleyn dramatises the life and legacy of Henry VIII’s notorious second wife, who helped change the course of the nation’s history.
Traditionally seen as either the pawn of an ambitious family manoeuvred into the King’s bed or as a predator manipulating her way to power, Anne – and her ghost – are seen in a very different light in Howard Brenton’s epic play.
Rummaging through the dead Queen Elizabeth’s possessions upon coming to the throne in 1603, King James I finds alarming evidence that Anne was a religious conspirator, in love with Henry VIII but also with the most dangerous ideas of her day. She comes alive for him, a brilliant but reckless young woman confident in her sexuality, whose marriage and death transformed England for ever.
Cast : 13M, 7F (larger cast possible)
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Nick Hern Books, UK | 978-1-84842-099-1 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$27.23 ex GST
$29.95 inc GST
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Edited by David Scott Kastan & Richard Proudfoot.
Richard Brome
In the Globe Quarto series co-published with Shakespeare's Globe to mark the rediscovery of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries.
The Antipodes includes a play-within-the-play, also called 'The Antipodes', which is used as psychotherapy for Peregrine Joyless's obsession with travel books, with the aim of recalling him to his marital duties. Brome's audience is also confronted with a picture of the topsy-turviness of the 'world upside down' of London in the 1630s.
Cast : 14M, 3F (doubling required)
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-603-1 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Amanda Whittington
A poignant drama set in 1960s Britain,
Be My Baby follows the fortunes of Mary Adams, aged 19, unmarried and seven months pregnant.
Forcibly sent to a Mother and Baby Home in the north of England by a mother intent on keeping up appearances, Mary – along with the other girls in the home – has to cope with both the shame and the dawning realisation that she will have to give the baby up for adoption whether she likes it or not. Despite this – and an overbearing matron – the girls' youthful effervescence keeps breaking through, as they sing along to the girl-group songs of the period.
Review
You don't have to be young, female or unmarried to find it immensely touching
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The Times
Cast : 6F
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-887-5 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Howard Brenton
A tale of two sisters, one who has made her home in East Berlin, one who has stayed in their native London. With the downing of the Wall, Rosa returns...
Review
A bold, blackly comic and concerned play
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Independent
Cast : 2M, 3F
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-242-2 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Theodore Ward
Chicago South Side in the 1930s. Struggling to keep his dreams alive and his family together, Victor Mason is an educated black man reduced to working on building sites. His loyalty to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement clashes with his family’s pursuit of the American dream despite the twin evils of the Depression and racism.
Never seen outside America, Ward’s landmark family drama, written when the words black and playwright rarely occurred together,
Big White Fog remains as poignant for Britain today as it did when it burst upon America in 1938 as a product of the Federal Theatre Project, which also saw Orson Welles’ black
Macbeth.
This first production outside America is premiered at the Almeida, London, staged by Artistic Director Michael Attenborough. The volume includes background documentation, an essay by the author about the origins of the play and quotations from James Baldwin.
Cast : 12M, 7F
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-595-9 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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$19.95 ex GST
$21.95 inc GST
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Vassily Sigarev
A worm's eye view of post-Communist Russia as seen from the bottom of the heap.
The setting is a remote railway station in a remote part of the 'Boundless Motherland'. Stranded there are a young spiv, selling overpriced toasters to the local peasantry, and his heavily pregnant wife. They don't like the place, they don't like the people, and they don't much like each other...
Review
It moves between harsh realism and flights of dramatic poetry, between gentle humour and thuggish violence. The characterisation is rich, and the play doesn't rule out the possibility of hope and redemption
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Daily Telegraph
Cast : 3M, 4F + extras
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Nick Hern Books | 978-1-85459-730-4 | Sales rights: Australia/NZ | PB
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