Justine and Alan need to get away from it all. And what could be better than being at one with nature, camping, on a farm in the middle of the Welsh countryside? So long as that's camping with all the luxuries, of course - real beds, wood burning stoves, an espresso machine, even a kitchen sink. But what do they need to get away from? And how about seasoned campers Bridget and Rory? And upwardly mobile Amanda and Alistair? Why do they also need to get back to basics? The three couples find themselves in adjacent tents. But when the canvas walls let out all their secrets and when it's only their children who see eye-to-eye, perhaps the rural idyll isn't so perfect after all.

n a suburb of a mid-sized American city, Ben and Mary welcome to the neighbourhood Sharon and Kenny who have moved in to the long-empty house next door. Fuelled by alcohol and backyard barbecues, their new friendship veers rapidly out of control as inhibitions are obliterated, laying bare the fragility of Ben and Mary's off-the-shelf lifestyle.

I guess that's how it was meant to be. Love can only be mutual, I agree with you Albert, and forgive me for this cruel sincerity. Love and death, loyalty and betrayal, truth and fiction, this darkly beguiling new comedy takes us through a hall of mirrors. That's it, a little story.

Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry, 1912), by Owen McCafferty, is a courtroom drama full of intrigue, bravery and human frailty. At 11.40PM on 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic, on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, struck an iceberg. At 2.20AM the following morning, the ship sank. 1,517 people died. In response to the disaster the British Government ordered an immediate inquiry and Lord Mersey was appointed Wreck Commissioner. The British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry sat from 2 May to 3 July 1912. It took testimony from 97 witnesses. Watch as a magnificent cast retell the survivors' stories - with dialogue taken word-for-word from 100-year old accounts.

1957. War widow Dorothy lives in a London suburb with her 15-year-old daughter Victoria and her older bachelor brother Edwin. More and more isolated from her married friends with their successful children, Dorothy tries to cope with Victoria's increasingly hostile behaviour. But is she doing her best, as she thinks, or is she in fact responsible for what threatens to become an unendurable situation?

Sex, work, pregnancy, parents, weird neighbours, cleaning the fridge and dancing: Play House tells - in thirteen fleeting scenes - the story of a young couple's attempts to set up home. In Definitely the Bahamas, Frank and Milly relish the visits of Michael, their charming and successful only child. But what exactly is his relationship to the young student living in their house? Martin Crimp's Definitely the Bahamas was first staged at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 1987. It was revived there with Play House, a new play, in March 2012.

Widely regarded as the man who laid the foundations of modern British theatre, Harley Granville-Barker was famed for his Shakespeare productions and wrote and produced ground breaking new plays in the early twentieth century. He lectured at Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and Harvard. Richard Nelsons new play finds him embittered and world-weary in Massachusetts in 1916, with war raging in Europe, having fallen in with a group of British expatriates endeavouring to find their way in an academic, theatre obsessed community. Internecine, intrigue, lust and betrayal permeates this witty and absorbing study of human nature, as Granville Barker gradually rediscovers his love of the Art of theatre and his faith in its centrality to a life well lived.

Ellida, claustrophobic and restless, swims in the sea every day. She loves her husband Dr Wangel but, ten years ago, promised herself to another man. On a late summer's day he comes to claim her.

Chekhov's long story My Life, upon which this play is based, was written in 1896 during the period of his maturity as a story writer. His work of this time is a powerful reflection of contemporary Russian life. The story Ward 6 for example, set in a decrepit provincial hospital, with one terrible ward for the mentally sick, is such a strong image of the Russian intellectual's dilemma, that the young Lenin was reported after reading it 'to have been seized with such a horror that he could not bear to stay in his room. He went out to find someone to talk to; but it was too late: they had all gone to bed. "I had absolutely the feeling", he told his sister the next day, "that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself"'.

For the teeming populace of Old Mack's cacophonous yard in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, it's a cheek-by-jowl existence lived out on a sweltering public stage. Snatches of calypso compete with hymn tunes, drums and street cries as neighbours drink, brawl, pass judgment, make love, look out for each other and crave a better life. But Ephraim is no dreamer and nothing, not even the seductive Rosa, is going to stop him escaping his dead-end job for a fresh start in England. Set as returning troops from the Second World War fill the town with their raucous celebrations, Errol John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl depicts a vibrant, cosmopolitan world that is as harsh as it is colourful.

This second revised edition of Harold Pinter's Plays 4 includes his most recent play, Celebration. Includes Betrayal, Monologue, One for the Road, Mountain Language, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, Precisely, The New World Order, Party Time, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes and Celebration.

A tragedy of maritime decline, Bound follows the fortunes of six trawlermen from Devon as they embark on one final voyage. Compelled by the threat of bankruptcy, the ageing fishing trawler The Violet is forced out into treacherous weather. Risking storms, friendships and relationships ashore, will the crew lose more than a way of life?

Three Plays of Adolescence: Goodnight Children Everywhere, Franny's Way and Madame Melville.

America's obsession with physical beauty is confronted headlong in this brutal and exhilarating new play. In reasons to be pretty, Greg's tight-knit social circle is thrown into turmoil when his offhanded remarks about a female coworker's pretty face (and his girlfriend's lack thereof) get back to said girlfriend. But that's just the beginning. Greg's best buddy Kent, and Kent's wife Carly also enter into the picture and the emotional equation becomes exponentially more complicated. As their relationship crumbles, their friends are pulled into the fray and all are forced to confront a sea of deceit, infidelity and betrayed trust in their journey to answer that oh-so-American question: How much is pretty worth?

The notorious Robin Hood and his band of outlaws steal from the rich, creating a fearsome reputation amongst those who dare to travel through the mighty forest of Sherwood. But they do not share their spoils with the poor and are unloved by the people, who must also pay unfair taxes to the evil Prince John as he plots to steal his brother's crown. In this time of chaos and fear, it is down to Marion to boldly protect the poor and convince Robin that he must listen to his heart if they are to save the country.

Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom. Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he's offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer as he loses himself in a macabre and disturbingly funny relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama. Killing my enemies is easy. The challenge is to change the way they think, to control their minds. And I think I controlled yours pretty well. In years to come, I'll be able to say: Bulgakov? Yeah, we even trained him. He gave up. He saw the light. We broke him, we can break anybody. It's man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins. John Hodge's blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny.

Edna O'Brien's wonderful, wild and moving novel shocked the nation on its publication in 1960. Adapted for the stage by the author, The Country Girls, the play, is a highly theatrical and free-flowing telling of this classic coming-of-age story.

A mother, a wife, and fifty, Hilary once protested at Greenham. Now her protests tend to focus on persuading her teenage daughter to go out fully clothed. A frank and funny family drama questioning parental anxieties and life after fifty.

This fourth collection of Alan Ayckbourn's plays includes The Revengers' Comedies, Things We Do for Love, and House & Garden.

Lawyer whose public and private lives are disintegrating

This fifth collection of Alan Ayckbourn's plays includes Snake in the Grass, If I Were You, Life and Beth, My Wonderful Day and Life of Riley.

1962: A public school on the South Downs. John Blakemore is a solitary boy who finds it impossible either to understand or adapt to the ways of the school. His adolescent earnestness puts off teacher and pupil alike. And now suddenly he seems to be in danger of losing his only friend.

the play tells the story of Prudencia Hart, a collector of folk songs, an academic who has devoted her life to the study of folk material. She comes to the village fair in search of songs for her thesis 'Paradigms of Emotional Contact in The Performance and Text of Traditional Folk Song in Scotland 1572 - 1798'. After the fair she finds herself at a "lock-in" with the locals where songs are sung and stories told. That's when she hears of the existence of the lost song, the song beyond song& the original song& the uncollected song. She sets off on a journey into the night to find it.

Beatriz and her sister Rosa are happily preparing for Rosa's wedding. Their world is turned upside down when the groom arrives, pitchfork rabble in tow, ready to occupy their farm. A little girl stumbles into their world, lost and looking for her father. In a moment of determination Beatriz takes the girl to find him - and so begins an unimaginable journey. Beatriz and her charge, in their need to survive, witness more than anyone ever should.

Morna works as a cleaner for well-off families in Edinburgh. She spends her time drinking mostly, attempting affairs and trying to work out the mind of her 20 year old son with whom she shares her Dalry flat. Athol, her elder brother by 2 years, lives in Houston, near Glasgow airport with his wife Evelyn. The owner of a floor tiling company, with two grown up children, he's proud of his hard-won achievements since moving West years before. Like any brother and sister they have fond and not-so fond memories of their upbringing, differing views on their parents and definite opinions about each other. Especially so in their case since Morna and Athol haven't spoken to each other in fourteen years&. . .When Morna's son Joshua travels west to make contact with Athol he sets off, for all of them, a remarkable and life-changing series of events.

Becky's pregnant and frustrated. But her husband is more interested in the baby manual than her new underwear so she turns to the porn stash under the bed. As the summer heats up, a brief encounter sends her speeding downhill towards reckless abandon. A provocative and darkly comic look at fantasy and romance.

Ranyevskaya returns more or less bankrupt after ten years abroad. Luxuriating in her fading moneyed world and regardless of the increasingly hostile forces outside, she and her brother snub the lucrative scheme of Lopakhin, a peasant turned entrepreneur, to save the family estate. In so doing, they put up their lives to auction and seal the fate of the beloved orchard. Set at the very start of the twentieth century, The Cherry Orchard captures a poignant moment in Russia's history as the country rolls inexorably towards 1917

In a dark space you can't measure, a once visceral father lies on his deathbed, looking over his life, his youth, loves, lusts and betrayals of his wife. At the same time, in another bedroom, somewhere in the same space, the man's two sons intellectually, clinically and conspiratorially speak of their relationship with their father. Side-stepping their estrangement from him, they rationalize their love-hate relationship with him and defend the distance they are incapable of closing, even when their mother calls them home. In contrast to these closed sons, is the man's daughter, the baby sister, who refuses the dourness and bridges the space between the light and dark, youth and age, and death and life.

Set on a stormy night in a forest, the play tells the story of a semi-estranged brother and sister who meet to clear out a family cabin. Bobby thinks hes simply lending his sister a hand with clearing out her cottage in the forest. But its a dark and stormy night and his sister has a secret.

Sophie and Calliope have never been to school. Their mum ran away from home when she was seventeen to join the New Age movement and the girls have been raised in Goa, San Francisco and Morroco at a series of ashrams, communes and impromptu raves. Then one day Sophie gets ill and the family has to return to Birmingham. Sophie and Calliope are introduced to a strange new world where meditation and tree-hugging are replaced with Maths homework and television. Theyre also introduced to Daphne: the grandmother that the girls have never met. And its against this bewildering new backdrop  the normality shes always longed for  that Sophie must come to terms with her own mortality.

Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein's bewildered creature is cast out into a hostile universe by his horror-struck maker. Meeting with cruelty wherever he goes, the friendless Creature, increasingly desperate and vengeful, determines to track down his creator and strike a terrifying deal. Urgent concerns of scientific responsibility, parental neglect, cognitive development and the nature of good and evil are embedded within this thrilling and deeply disturbing classic gothic tale.

Being a teacher means weekends. It means thirteen weeks holiday. It means a secure job in uncertain times. But Zoe doesnt want to have to rescue her students. She doesnt want to be called a slag. She doesnt want to sleep with the Head of Science. And she doesnt want to teach a group of kids how to do life. Because thats something Zoes not sure she knows how to do herself. Examining what happens when a young teacher goes off the rails in a failing school.

On Boxing Day the previous nights fracas is passed off as a drunken romp. But was it?

A girls' boarding school in the 1990s is no Malory Towers. Whilst Mimi learns her lines for John Proctor in the Christmas play, Janey desperately clings on to her best friend status. E V Crowe's Royal Court debut play is an intricate and anarchic view of what really goes on when ten year olds are away from home.

Harry's had some bad news from the doctor and he's worried. Worried that, because of his life-long political convictions, he hasn't got anything to leave to his sons and grandchildren. So, by joining the property owning democracy, Harry thinks he's helping everyone out. Then the economic downturn gets in the way.

John Gabriel Borkman, wealthy, powerful, revered, sacrificed love for success and was handsomely rewarded. Now, disgraced and destitute after financial scandal and a jail sentence, he paces out each day alone, planning his comeback. Downstairs, his wife, Gunhild, lives a parallel existence, plotting for their son to restore the familys reputation. But with the arrival of Gunhilds twin sister Ella, the woman whose love Borkman gave away, the claustrophobic stasis is shattered once and for all.

Its Christmas Day in Stewarton and Irene Gordons struggling to get in the festive spirit. Her 18 year-old daughter Normas just had a baby, her ex-husband Gordons just had a stroke and her eldest Barrys having a break down. Even the Dr Who Christmas special is disappointing. If this was a wonderful life she would receive some angelic intervention - instead she gets Rab McGuire and an escaped chicken that wont be stuffed.

"If you haven't met someone by the time you graduate, you're going to marry some idiot from your work. It's that simple. Do you know how they get animals to breed in captivity? They put them in the same cage." Office romances are tricky. One moment you're colleagues, then a quick grope after Friday night drinks and suddenly you're in a relationship. When Tom and Amy get together after an office social, they find themselves living in each other's pockets. But it's not their lack of chemistry that's the problem: it's that neither of them can quite get over their childhood sweethearts. A brand new comedy about love, loss and laminating machines.

Four young men and a battling lassie are training in a Glasgow gym. They want to be champions and win fistfuls of money. They want to be like Calzaghe and land 950 punches out of 1000. Beautiful Burnout tells a bruising and lyrical tale of aspirations and counterpunches, delivered in a visceral, hearts-in-your-mouth production about one of the most controversial sports of our time.

Joy is a married woman, a GP, and struggling to remain interested in sex. Her husband Alan, however, thinks of little else. And their teenage son Tim is ready to burst.

My God, Russian soldiers being shot with Chinese bullets. Sometimes the world is so beautiful. 1981. As the Soviet army burns its way through Afghanistan and toward the critical Pakistani border, CIA operative Jim Warnock is sent to try and halt its bloody progress. Joining forces with a larger than life Afghan warlord and the Pakistani and British secret services, Jim spearheads the covert struggle. But in the face of mutual suspicion as the brutal chaos escalates, clear political action becomes impossible.

If So, Then Yes is a play charting a day in the life of Simpson's comic protagonist, octogenarian writer Geoffrey Wythenshaw, who sits down to dictate his autobiography from the comfort of a retirement home for the upper crust. Unfortunately, he finds himself constantly interrupted by his fellow residents, their visiting relatives, and the attending staff. Some seek a share of his wisdom, while others feel compelled to lend a hand in passing the time

A hopeful young man, a teacher in love, a pregnant woman, A fearful policeman, a boy on a mission, a pianist in the rain. A wounded man, a grandmother. . .And Vincent. Nine lives fractured by the events of one tragic day. David Watson's thrilling new play tells the story of Vincent, a man estranged from his family and adrift in London. Reunited temporarily with his lost love, he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Vincent's life changes forever, his destiny begins to affect a cast of characters across the country, from a remote house in County Down to the South Bank at sunset. A miniature epic about love, passion and violence in contemporary Britain. With a radical staging, and merging film and live action, Pieces of Vincent receives its world premiere in a bold new production directed by Clare Lizzimore.

Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W H Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station. Alan Bennett's new play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion's spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.

comedy of manners centres on highly principled man who cannot bring himself to temper the truth with tact

On 15 September 2008, capitalism came to a grinding halt. As sub-prime mortgages and toxic securities continued to dominate the headlines, this spring the National Theatre asked David Hare to write an urgent and immediate work to be staged this autumn that sought to find out what had happened, and why. Meeting with many of the key players from the financial world, David Hare has created The Power of Yes, which is not so much a play as a jaw-dropping account of how, as the banks went bust, capitalism was replaced by a socialism that bailed out the rich alone.

Greta Garbo came to Donegal, and she did. The year is 1967 - nothing is ever the same after. Ireland is on the verge of violent change, two couples are on the verge of ending, a woman tries to save her family, a girl tries to save her future. Above it all but in the midst of things, determining what happens next, is the loveliest and loneliest of all women, the great Garbo. But when the gods arrive, they can cause havoc, not least to themselves, as the divine Greta learns.

About an imagined meeting between Victorian English novelist Charles Dickens and danish fairytale writer hans Christian Andersen.

An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool.. Staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

In the course of four monologues the story unfolds of the travelling healer Frank who has gone all over Wales and Scotland with his wife Grace, and his manager Teddy. In their respective monologues, Frank, Grace and Teddy tell their differing versions of the healer's performance and of a terrible event that slowly comes into focus.

The vision of one man's desire to restore peace in a country ravaged by war. Set in the 11th century at the height of the fight for succession of the Scottish throne

A young man has an affair with a married woman. He is terrified her husband will challenge him to a duel and kill him. At a party, he flirts with a girl who believes she is truly loved. Life seems full of joy. The doorbell rings. The husband enters the room. The power of sexual longing, the cruelty of tradition, the vulnerability of those in love.

Ian McElhinney, the most weighty of local thesps, is Iggy, short for Ignatius, and one of McCafferty's favourite first names. He'll never return to the Belfast he was forced to leave when his homosexuality was revealed in a boy's boxing club. Dour, in beanie and scuffed jacket, he's survived the decades, just, by downing pints, punching those who query him and burning, literally, his boats when that fails to wipe away the day he kissed ginger John so many years ago.
- Ian Hill, British Theatre Guide

While McGuinness retains the Norwegian fjord setting, the Anglo-Irish inflection of his dialogue brings the tension between morality, integrity and religion closer to home. Robert Bowman's production for Bristol Old Vic is a mix of the compelling and the overcooked, sometimes tending towards melodrama but at its best burning with a suppressed, white-hot rage. Sian Thomas is Mrs Alving, the widow of a captain whose secret life of debauchery poisoned the family's outwardly respectable domesticity. Buttoned up to the throat in a tight, dark gown, Thomas vibrates with hskation and fear, disgusted by her own collusion in maintaining a lie, but desperate to keep her son, Oswald, free from the taint she dreads may be passed down from father to son. Anger boils all around her. The pale, sweaty, syphilitic Oswald seems diseased with a toxic hatred for his inadequate parents, worsened by his initial inability to comprehend entirely his own feelings. When he begs Mrs Alving to perform a mercy killing should his suffering become too acute, his greatest horror is that his illness should reduce him to a baby, once again putting him wholly under the control of a mother who, for all her smothering, guilt-ridden devotion, has failed him. There's another problematic parent-child relationship, between the lame, drunkard carpenter Engstrand and his supposed daughter, Mrs Alving's maid Regine. Regine regards Engstrand as a kind of devil, and his mined foot in its clumsy built-up shoe as a cloven hoof; his plans for her future are devious and morally dubious. Yet he suggests a father who genuinely seeks contentment, albeit of a warped kind, with his cruelly contemptuous child. The tears that fill his eyes when the ambitious Regine rejects him are moving but also richly ironic: she is not, in fact, his daughter, but the illegitimate offspring of dead Alving.
Sam Marlowe, The Times

A woman's husband is captivated by a young woman and secretly starts giving away his wife's clothes in exchange for elocution lesson.
- British Theatre Guide

Two sets of housemates, all with very different beliefs, are thrown together by circumstances as their beliefs are put to the test.

In Kiev during the Russian civil war, the Turbin household is sanctuary to a ragtag, close-knit crowd presided over by the beautiful Lena. As her brothers prepare to fight for the White Guard, friends charge in from the riotous streets amidst an atmosphere of heady chaos, quaffing vodka, keeling over, declaiming, taking baths, playing guitar, falling in love. But the new regime is poised and in its brutal triumph lies destruction for the Turbins and their world.

Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of the State of Israel, was a Jewish émigré from Russian who, while Professor of Chemistry at Manchester University, made a significant contribution to the British military effort during the First World War by developing a way of producing acetone. He was also an ardent Zionist lobbying the British government's support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. This play begins in December 1914 when it was already becoming clear that if the war should topple the Turkish Empire, with the participant allies haggling for control in the Middle East, it would provide an opportunity for territorial changes. Weizmann (Jonathan Tafler) has already secured a meeting in Whitehall and he is in the office of Herbert Samuel (Richard Clothier) about to outline his proposals. It ends with the opening of the Jewish University in Jerusalem in 1925, completion of the first stage of Weizmann's Zionist dream. It takes us into the centre of government, with ministers around a table in Number 10 under both the Asquith and Lloyd George administrations . We are given the heart of the discussions on support for a Jewish state that led to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. This, the British 'promise', was a key element in the creation of today's problems in the Middle East.
- Howard Loxton, British Theatre Guide

A clever game of passion and manipulation, seduction and destruction.

Playwright's tremulous marriage to an actress is reflected in his life and work. The opening scene shows cuckolded husband Max remorsefully deconstructing the alibi of his wife, Charlotte, as she tries to sustain the fiction of having been in Geneva. In scene two, we see Charlotte bedded in with her new paramour, playwright Peter. But when Max breezes in for Sunday brunch with wife Annie, the construct is revealed: Max and Charlotte were playing characters in a drama written by Peter. But then Peter falls for Annie and things begin to get very Stoppardian indeed.