Another Romeo and another Juliet in a strikingly different love story...

Ben Power weaves the text of Romeo and Juliet into a provocative new tale of love and sacrifice. Re-imagining Shakespeare's story, A Tender Thing is an elegiac yet ultimately hopeful account of the human capacity for love.

Shakespeare's timeless poetry provides the backdrop for this delicate and moving account of old age, memory and the demands we make of those we love. When a married couple discover that their lifetime together is drawing to a close, they realise they cannot contemplate being apart.

Review

Power's ingenious reorganisation pays off handsomely... what did Shakespeare know? - Guardian

A vanished father. A pill-popping mother. Three sisters harbouring shady little secrets. When the extended Weston family is reunited after dad disappears, the Oklahoma household explodes in a maelstrom of repressed truths and unsettling secrets.

After a sell-out run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, August: Osage County has been hailed on Broadway as the ‘best American drama of the past decade’ (USA Today). Its themes of family secrets and retribution—and its truly epic scope—had critics rushing to declare its author the new Eugene O’Neill.

Review

Sensationally entertaining… Tracy Letts' fiercely funny, turbo-charged tragicomedy is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years -  New York Times

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.

Four refugees—an Afghan, a Turkish Kurd and two Somali women—are huddled in a container lorry crossing Europe. They are joined in Milan by Mariam, pregnant and unable to pay the increasingly high sums of money demanded by the Agent. She is taken away to bargain with the (always unseen) Driver. She doesn’t return—and we leave the others still wondering whether they will ever arrive.

This intensely claustrophobic and urgently topical play was premiered at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival. Both actors and audience were incarcerated in an actual freight container for the duration of the performance.

Two towers. Ten years. Twenty plays.

Ten years after 9/11, twenty international writers respond to the defining event of our times.  Published here are their individual plays, which woven together formed the basis of  Decade , an immersive theatrical production from Headlong  theatre company.

The writers:  Samuel Adamson, Mike Bartlett, Alecky Blythe, Adam Brace, Ben Ellis, Ella Hickson, Samuel D. Hunter, John Logan, Matthew Lopez, Mona Mansour, DC Moore, Abi Morgan, Rory Mullarkey, Janine Nabers, Lynn Nottage, Harrison David Rivers, Simon Schama, Christopher Shinn, Beth Steel, Alexandra Wood.

Review

dazzling... a bold experiment in engaging with history, realised with flair -  Evening Standard

Review

There is a sly, controlled power in this writing and it is given full rein in Rufus Norris' exquisitely acted production. And now I cannot get it out of my head -  The Guardian

The five plays in this volume were chosen as the best work by new playwrights to have been staged in Britain in the late 1980s. All five writers have gone on to establish reputations in major theatres.

Inventing a New Colour by Paul Godfrey 

A war-time Exeter family takes in an evacuee from London

Prickly Heat by Simon Donald 

A surreal sensuous comedy by a young Scottish writer/performer

Leave Taking by Winsome Pinnock 

Shows the conflict between a West-Indian woman and her English-born daughters

Low Level Panic by Clare McIntyre

Looks at the effect of pornography on three young women

A Handful of Stars by Billy Roche 

Rituals of male supremacy are played out in a Southern Irish billiard room.