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In this gripping short play, David Mamet combines mercurial intelligence with genuinely Hitchcockian menace. The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing—the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers. On a night in 1959 a boy is waiting to go on a camping trip with his father. His mother wants him to go to sleep. A family friend is trying to entertain them—or perhaps distract them. Because in the dark corners of this domestic scene, there are rustlings that none of the players want to hear. And out of things as innocuous as a shattered teapot and a ripped blanket, Mamet re-creates a child terrifying discovery that the grownups are speaking in code, and that that code may never be breakable.

In David Mamet’s two-character play, a male college instructor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a terrifyingly short time become the participants in a modern reprise of the Inquisition. Innocuous remarks suddenly turn damning. Socratic dialogue gives way to heated assault. And the relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into a fiendishly accurate X ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship and abuse.

From the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross, here is a collection of thirty-two one-act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done.

In 'Audition Speeches for Young Actors 16+', Jean Marlow has selected a variety of speeches for the 16-18 year old age group. Extracts are taken from a range of plays and there is advice from directors, casting directors, actors and teachers.

This is the only book that offers a comprehensive collection of contemporary stage monologues for a complete range of roles. An invaluable tool for actors looking for new audition material or for anyone interested in theater.

A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coastal town, Under Milk Wood is "lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality" (The New Statesman and Nation).

The action of this play takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag - an Irish speaking community in County Donegal. The 'scholars' are a cross-section of the local community, from a semi-literate young farmer to and elderly polygot autodidact who reads and quotes Homer in the orginal. In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, engaged on behalf of the Britsh Army and Government in making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes ofr cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and transliterated - or translated - into English, in examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group of people, Irish and English, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the unexperctedly far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative and harmless. While remaining faithful to the personalities and relationshiops of those people at that time he makes a richly suggestive statement about Irish - and English - history.

‘It is a solemn thing to hear, in a darkened room, the voice of a child…’ Using Charles Dickens’ original words, a handful of tunes stolen from the vivid world of Victorian music-hall, and a chameleon ensemble of thirteen actors, Neil Bartlett’s powerful version of Oliver Twist brings the dark underbelly of nineteenth-century London back to bold theatrical life. The unforgettable characters – Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sikes, and the Artful Dodger – inhabit a world filled with images of danger and fear, innocence and hope; a world seen through the eyes of an astonished child. This version was first performed at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2004.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French existentialist, displays his mastery of drama in NO EXIT, an unforgettable portrayal of hell. The play is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for all eternity. It is the source of Sartre's especially famous and often misinterpreted quotation "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people", a reference to Sartre's ideas about the Look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object in the world of another consciousness.

Jo, the teenage heroine who lives in a filthy tenement bedsitter, is deserted by her nagging peroxided mother, who is unaware that her daughter is pregnant by a black sailor. Jo's greatest fear is that her illegitimate baby might be mentally deficient like her own father. To soothe, clean and cook for her is Geof, an effeminate art student, with whom she makes a temporary home. Bruised by insensitivity and rejection, the boy and girl find a very real comfort in each other.

Set in the early Thatcher years, Top Girls is a seminal play of the modern theatre, revealing a world of women's experience at a pivotal moment in British history. Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations, Top Girls was hailed as 'the best British play ever from a woman dramatist' by The Guardian.

A fresco similar to The Lamentation by Giotto that will revolutionize Western Art if proved to pre-date the master's work is unearthed in an abandoned church in Eastern Europe. The discovery causes a dramatic struggle as representatives from the worlds of art history, religion, and politics stake their claims for the ultimate prize. The unexpected arrival of twelve refugees sets events spiraling toward an explosive climax. This powerful play by the Tony Award winning adaptor of Nicholas Nickleby and author of numerous plays won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of 1995.