In 1986, Peter Gill, the then director of the National Theatre Studio, sent a group of young actors to interview their seniors about speaking on stage. The transcripts provide fascinating insights into the theatre of the past, but they also show how little has changed: the actor’s primary tools are still the body and voice. Actors interviewed include Harry Andrews, Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Robert Stephens and Margaret Tyzack, with notes from John Gielgud. Peter Gill provides an introduction.

A playwright whose work is appreciated on a global scale, Athol Fugard’s plays have done more to document and provide a cultural commentary on Apartheid-era South Africa than any other writer in the last century. Using mostly migrant workers and township dwellers, and staging guerrilla-raid productions in black areas, Fugard frequently came into conflict with the government, forcing him to take his work overseas. Consequently, powerful plays such as The Blood Knot, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, and Master Harold... and the boys came to broadcast the inequities of the Apartheid-era to the world. Fugard’s work retains an insistent influence, and is studied and performed the world over.
   
Alan Shelley’s study is an accessible but profound analysis of the man, his work and its influence, the social injustices that drive him, and the lives of those who people his remarkable plays.

Published to mark her 70th birthday – the fourth volume of the collected plays of one of the best playwrights alive.

After the music-theatre piece, Hotel, from 1997, Churchill charted a course in This is a Chair, Blue Heart (both also premiered in 1997) and Far Away (2000) towards an increasingly extreme and unsettling mix of surrealism and a passionate engagement with big issues. A Number (2002) and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) are less surreal but more overtly political, dealing respectively with cloning and with the Anglo-US axis. The volume ends with her version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play made for the National Theatre in 2005. Churchill, who rarely writes about her work and will not give interviews, has contributed a specially written introduction.

Classic Voice is a unique resource that provides practical information, ideas and plans for dealing with the vocal demands of classical text in workshop contexts.

The book focuses on how students and actors can be prepared to working for classical text, including warming up their voices, setting reading projects to familiarise them with period language and content, coaching them on how to best approach the text aloud and focusing them on the particular demands of period voice, which may include accent preparation. Classic Voice discusses how to structure appropriate warm ups, an area that has been explored only in a limited fashion in other publications and certainly not from the point of view of the teacher.

Various parts deal with the specific demands of vocal style in Greek Tragedy, Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, and with the Restoration Stage, as well as with the classical elements in some contemporary texts. Each section includes an initial overview, samples of text and a series of workshop plans.

Two disconnected teenage lads on a Scottish beach, one rootless girl. An arresting new voice in playwriting.

On the rain-lashed coast of Scotland, teenage brothers Callum and Gussie have just left their mother’s funeral. On the beach, they see something floating in the sea. But surely it can’t be what it looks like. The lads are desperate to discover what lies under the waves. When they encounter the runaway Harriet, their search is thrown into chaos and brother is pitted against brother.

Young Scottish writer Ali Taylor’s first play, Cotton Wool is a gripping and darkly comic tale of young lives on the edge. It premieres at Theatre503 in Battersea, South London, in April 2008, having been staged in German in Dresden in 2007.

‘Don’t embellish. Don’t exaggerate. Tell the truth. Stick to it.’

18 year old Private Cheryl James from Llangollen was one of four young soldiers who died from gunshot wounds at Deepcut Barracks between 1995 and 2002.

Cheryl’s parents wanted answers from the people responsible for their daughter’s care. But how do you begin to grieve when no-one seems to have a proper explanation? What would give you the determination to continue asking awkward, demanding questions?

Taken from original source material and powerful first hand testimonies, Deep Cut is a bold and compelling account of one family’s journey through a time they thought they’d never experience, to places they hoped they’d never be.

A pulsatingly energetic adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

An exhilarating plunge into a darkly male universe, Delirium depicts the struggle to survive in a world losing its moral and ethical boundaries. It dramatises the way that the actions of the fundamentalist threaten to overthrow the established order, heralding an era where ‘everything is permitted’.

Enda Walsh’s Delirium re-interprets Dostoevsky’s classic and compelling tale of family rivalries for today’s audiences.
Always concerned in his own work with people living extreme lives, governed by ungovernable passions and obsessions, Enda Walsh is the ideal choice to wrestle Dostoevsky onto the stage.

Drawing on the themes of cruelty, imperialism and betrayal, Hideki Noda and Colin Teevan's new play, The Diver, ingeniously links the ancient Japanese Tales of Genji with a Noh theatre play and a contemporary murder.

Following the huge success of The Bee, Irish playwright Colin Teevan rejoins legendary Japanese director Hideki Noda for a new physical and inventive collaboration.

Ugly is no ordinary duck – in fact he might not even be a duck at all. An embarrassment to his brothers and sisters, Ugly eats snails, speaks funny and looks even funnier. Fed up with being the butt of all the pond jokes, he strikes out on his own…

Set on Hampstead Heath, Philip Osment's modern re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Ugly Duckling is a wild adventure for anyone who wants to stand out from the crowd.

A sparkling new translation by popular Scottish poet of Molière’s famous comedy of sexual manners.

Arnolphe, middle-aged man-about-town, has deliberately kept his young ward, Agnes, innocent of the ways of the world. Now she is 18, he intends to marry her, but hasn’t told her yet. She meanwhile has fallen for young Horace, newly in town. There ensues a cat-and-mouse game with each of the lovers innocently revealing their secret plans to Arnolphe, who systematically thwarts them while pretending to be Horace’s ally and keeping Agnes under ever closer guard. Eventually Horace’s father arrives in town intending to marry him off to a friend’s daughter, who has been brought up by a guardian. Arnolphe heartily endorses this scheme as a way of removing Horace from the scene, only to discover that the intended bride is Agnes herself.

Much-loved poet and playwright Liz Lochhead has rendered Molière’s 17th-century romp into sparkling – and often naughty – Scots-inflected rhyming couplets for the premiere production by Glasgow-based Theatre Babel, dubbed ‘the great style house of the Scottish stage’ (Mail on Sunday).