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Here are eight of Pulitzer prizewinning Sam Shepard's most stunning plays. This brilliant American dramatist creates what the New Yorker dubbed "Shepard Country" - a landscape of the imagination, a unique theatrical experience that captures our culture and consciousness, our fears and fantasies.

Scottie Templeton's a charming, irresponsible fellow. A sometime Broadway press agent and former scriptwriter, he's everyone's friend, nobody's hero and a great womanizer who's managed to live over fifty years without taking anything seriously including love, marriage and fatherhood. Life's been one continuous gag. But at fifty one, he finds the script's been rewritten as a tragedy: he is fatally ill. His son Jud, alienated by years of neglect, comes to visit. Scottie's one concern is to make friends with his son, for everyone else adores Scottie including his ex wife, his friend and boss, and his doctor, and after a bitter, revealing confrontation, father and son are reconciled. And it is Jud who gets Scottie to agree to be rehospitalized for treatment and then organizes a giant tribute to his father in a theatre.

Like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape presents us with a protagonist who can only connect with others through the lens of a camera. Graham is an enigmatic young man who returns to Baton Rouge from a long road trip, mildly irritating his old lawyer friend John and wholly intriguing John's housebound wife Ann. John is conducting a sneaky and entirely sexual affair with Ann's sister Cynthia. For her part, Ann has lost interest in sex, yet Graham's obscurely charming eccentricity stirs something inside her - until she learns that he is functionally impotent and can manage arousal only with the help of a video camera and a loose-lipped female. Nevertheless, it's the dragging into the open of Graham's dirty little secret that causes all of these characters to confront their own veiled deceits and hypocrisies.

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sit Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic style: 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later.

The central character of the play is a rich bourgeois named Orgon, who in middle age has become a bigot and prude. The title character, a wily opportunist and swindler, affects sanctity and gains complete ascendancy over Orgon, who not only attempts to turn over his fortune but offers his daughter in marriage to his "spiritual" guide. It is only when Orgon witnesses Tartuffe's attempt to seduce his wife that he comes to his senses.

The dream-like setting is a walled community, from which the characters ceaselessly try to escape, without success. Only Don Quixote, who calls himself "an unashamed victim of romantic folly," has access to the outside, and finally Kilroy goes with him. Kilroy is a central figure, an ex-boxer, always the Patsy, the fall guy, who asks so little and always gets short-changed, but he never quits hoping. The other principal story is a romance between the aging, hunting Camille, and the fading Casanova, who yearns now only for tenderness and pathos as well as scenes of cataclysmic violence. The near escape of Kilroy, the battle to ride the escape plane, are hair-raising, as is the wild fiesta to crown "the tired old peacock, Casanova."

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Eugene O Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half-century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

Taken from the highly acclaimed Oxford Ibsen, this collection of Ibsen's plays includes A Doll's House, Ghost, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder.

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Krapp, "a wearish old man", who seems to have recorded every aspect of his life and is quite obviously somewhat detached from reality, submerges himself entirely in his past.

Demonstrates what constitutes a good performance, what actors want from a director, what directors do wrong, script analysis and preparation, how actors work, and shares insights into the director/actor relationship