Θέατρο

A wealthy woman's attempts to help her financially troubled husband go unrewarded. “I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.”

A Man for All Seasons dramatises the conflict between King Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More. It depicts the confrontation between church and state, theology and politics, absolute power and individual freedom. Throughout the play Sir Thomas More's eloquence and endurance, his purity, saintliness and tenacity in the face of ever-growing threats to his beliefs and family, earn him status as one of modern drama's greatest tragic heroes. The play was first staged in 1960 at the Globe Theatre in London and was voted New York's Best Foreign Play in 1962. In 1966 it was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Fred Zinneman starring Paul Scofield."A Man for All Seasons is a stark play, sparse in its narrative, sinewy in its writing, which confirms Mr Bolt as a genuine and solid playwright, a force in our awakening theatre." (Daily Mail)

The supernatural and the mundane, the illusory and the substantial, are all shimmeringly blended. Love is treated as tragic, poignant, absurd and farcical. 'Lord, what fools these mortals be!', jeers Robin Goodfellow; but the joke may be on him and on his master Oberon when Bottom the weaver, his head transformed into that of an ass, is embraced by the voluptuously amorous Titania.

Classe de 1ère - tronc commun Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness.

Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American community in 1950s New York. Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it's a privilege to take in his wife's cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, straight off the boat from Italy.

But, as his niece Catherine begins to fall for one of them, it's clear that it's not just, as Eddie claims, that he's too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong - and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can't face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family.This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by the author and a new foreword by actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Caligula reveals some aspects of the existential notion of 'the absurd' by portraying an emperor so mighty and so desperate in his search for freedom that he inevitably destroys gods, men and himself. The dramatic impetus of Cross Purpose, however, comes from the tension between consent to and refusal of man's absurdity; it is the tragedy of a man who returns home to his mother and sister without revealing his identity to them. By the time of The Just and The Possessed, refusal and rebellion have taken over, and in these overtly political plays (the latter based on Dostoyevsky's The Devils) Camus dramatizes action and revolt in the name of liberty. Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His play, Caligula, appeared in 1939. His first two important books, L'Etranger (The Outsider) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), were published when he returned to Paris. After the war he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation with such books as La Peste (The Plague 1947), Les Justes (The Just 1949) and La Chute (The Fall; 1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in a road accident in 1960.

This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by commentary notes and an introduction written by Paul Menzer, guiding you through the fume of fact and legend that have accompanied the play across the centuries. As well as the complete text of the play, this re-edited New Mermaids edition includes: * A detailed plot summary and annotations throughout the text* An annotated bibliography and suggestions for further reading* A comprehensive introduction exploring the historical and literary context, and performance history, including Orson Welles's 1937 role as Doctor Faustus as well as recent productions at The Globe and the RSC One of the most spectacular and popular plays of the Elizabethan stage, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, with its fantastical mix of high-minded theology and low-brow slapstick, has allured generations of readers and playgoers in the ensuing centuries.

Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by John R. Williams. Goethe's Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowledge, it became the life's work of Germany's greatest poet. Beginning with an intriguing wager between God and Satan, it charts the life of a deeply flawed individual and his struggle against the nihilism of his diabolical companion Mephistopheles. Part One presents Faust's pact with the Devil and the harrowing tragedy of his love affair with the young Gretchen. Part Two shows Faust's experience in the world of public affairs, including his encounter with Helen of Troy, the emblem of classical beauty and culture. The whole is a symbolic and panoramic commentary on the human condition and on modern European history and civilisation. This new translation of both parts of Faust preserves the poetic character of the original, its tragic pathos and hilarious comedy. In addition, John Williams has translated the Urfaust, a fascinating glimpse into the young Goethe's imagination, and a selection from the draft scenarios for the Walpurgis Night witches' sabbath - material so ribald and blasphemous that Goethe did not dare publish it.

"It is one thing to be informed by Shakespeare that life "is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing"; it is something else to encounter the idea literally presented in a novel by Samuel Beckett. But I am reasonably certain that a sensitive reader who journeys through How It Is will leave the book convinced that Beckett says more that is relevant to experience in our time than Shakespeare does in Macbeth. It should come as no surprise if a decade or so hence How It Is is appraised as a masterpiece of modern literature. This poetic novel is Beckett at his height." -- Webster Schott "A wonderful book, written in the sparest prose. . . . Beckett is one of the rare creative minds in our times." -- Alan Pryce-Jones "What is novel is the absolute sureness of design. . . built phrase by phrase into a beautifully and tightly wrought structure -- a few dozen expressions permuted with deliberate redundancy accumulate meaning even as they are emptied of it, and offer themselves as points of radiation in a strange web of utter illusion." -- Hugh Kenner

I love fire. Fire is the colour of genius. In this audacious new work, Edna O'Brien gives voice to the women who were central to the life of James Joyce.

'James Joyce had been my ultimate hero for sixty years, but to paint the canvas of his life was daunting. Therefore I decided to depict him as seen by the key figures in his life - Mother, Wife, Mistress of a fleeting moment, his patron Harriet Weaver and his beloved Daughter Lucia, of whom he said her mind was but a transparent leaf away from his.'Written to celebrate the centenary of Ulysses, Joyce's Women premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2022.