- Idea for a story. A beautiful young girl lives by a lake all her life. She loves this lake. She's happy and free, like that bird was once. Then a man comes along and for no reason at all ... what do you think he does? - He destroys her. A story about hope

Protasov, detached and idealistic, wants only to immerse himself in chemical experiments to perfect mankind. He's more or less oblivious to the voracious advances of the half-crazed widow Melaniya and his best friend's unrelenting pursuit of his wife, let alone the cholera epidemic and the starving mob at his gates. While Nanny fusses round, Protasov's admiring circle, variously skeptical, romantic and lovesick, spar over culture and the cosmos. Only Liza, neurotic and patronized, feels the suffering of the peasantry and senses that their own privileged world is in jeopardy. Gone? They're everywhere. Have you heard about the riots? The starvation and the flagrant disregard of authority. This disregard is building walls and barriers between us all. And they are massing. The crowds of angry people. And the hate ... the hate between us all ... kills everything. Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky's darkly comic Children of the Sun depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but likeable, as they flounder around, philosophizing, yearning, or scuttling between test tubes, blind to their impending annihilation.

For sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace - a meeting like no other in British public life - it is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses. The Audience breaks this contract of silence and imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. From Churchill to Cameron, each Prime Minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional - sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive. From young mother to grandmother these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next Prime Minister.

Rose Trelawny is the brightest star in the firmament of the Wells, the theatre company that raised her from birth. But she's prepared to give it all up for the love of her stage door suitor, aristocratic Arthur. His family are less convinced of her charms, however, and her joyful challenge to their dreary, snobby existence shocks them to their core. Trelawny of the Wells is Pinero's love letter to the theatre. Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pride and Prejudice) is one of our most exciting and visual film directors. This production is a celebration of the enchantment, the vivaciousness, the melodrama, the music and the irrepressible joy of the Victorian stage. This version, with revisions and additions by Patrick Marber, premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in February 2013.

Fleeing a world he has rejected, Robin finds solace in his music and the sanctuary of his remote family home. But as his kingdom begins to crumble around him, how far will he go to save it and at what cost?

the lives of seven teachers in the 1960's in an EFL school in Cambridge

This first collection of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's plays includes The Night Season, Shoreditch Madonna, Her Naked Skin and The Painter

Miss Jessel is dead. A new governess arrives at a remote estate in Bly to care for Miles and Flora. Wild but angelic they charm their guardian with flowers, poetry and song. But as she grows to love her two wards, figures appear in the darkness outside and the corners of the house are haunted by those that have gone before. The Governess must confront her fear and protect the children from the alarming dangers that surround them.

A family Christmas is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Uncle Bob. Who is he? Why has he come? Why does his wife stay out in the car? And what is the meaning of his long and outrageous message? All we can be sure of is that the world will never be the same again. In the Republic of Happiness is a provocative roll-call of contemporary obsessions.

Alan Bennett writes: In 2001 the Medici Quartet commissioned the composer George Fenton to write them a piece commemorating their thirtieth anniversary. George Fenton appeared in my play Forty Years On and has written music for many of my plays since, and he asked me to collaborate on the commission. Hymn was the result. First performed at the Harrogate Festival in August 2001, it's a series of memoirs with music. Besides purely instrumental passages for the quartet, many of the speeches are under-scored, incorporating some of the hymns and music I remember from my childhood and youth. The text includes both words and music. Hymn is coupled with Cocktail Sticks, an oratorio without music that revisits some of the themes and conversations of Alan Bennett's memoir A Life Like Other People's. A son talks to his dead father as his mother yearns for a different life. It's funny, tender and sad. The pinnacle of my social life is a scrutty bit of lettuce and tomato and some tinned salmon. Mind you, I read in Ideal Home that if you mix tinned salmon with this soft cheese you can make it into one of those moussy things. Shove a bit of lemon on it and it looks really classy.

"We can only do this, if we go by the book. announcing you're gay to minors is not in the book." That's in the other book. Danny's gay, a primary school teacher, and he's not afraid of anything. His colleague Jamie's straight, and thinks he should be. E V Crowe brings her distinctive voice to the story of a heroic modern man

Northern Ireland are playing Poland on the TV. Jimmy and Ian, two middle aged Belfast men are meeting tonight for the first time. They have a shared past. They need to talk. Quietly is a powerful story about violence and forgiveness.

Deep in the Hampshire countryside Edward Thomas, disaffected husband, exhausted father and tormented writer, scrapes a living. In 1913 he meets American poet Robert Frost and everything changes. As their friendship blossoms Edward writes, emerging from his cocoon of self-doubt into one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. But he makes the drastic decision to enlist, confounding his friends and family.

In the aftermath of a violent coup, an epic story of self-sacrifice and revenge plays out as a young orphan discovers the shattering truth behind his childhood. Sometimes referred to as the Chinese Hamlet, and tracing its origins to the 4th century BC, The Orphan of Zhao was the first Chinese play to be translated in the West, and was adapted by Voltaire.

'It's often said that the best of the Chekhov plays is the one you've seen most recently. Uncle Vanya doesn't have a suicide, like The Seagull, or an adulterous couple and a duel more or less indistinguishable from murder, like Three Sisters; nor does it seem to announce the end of an era, like The Cherry Orchard: all it has is a series of ludicrously bungled attempts at murder and suicide and adultery. Perhaps these failures are what makes it feel the saddest and most truthful of these great tragi-comedies, in which, possibly unique to all drama, not a single word seems redundant or out of place.' - - From the author's introduction.

A sale? Why not? Release all your wonderful treasures onto the open market and they are there for everyone to enjoy. It's a kind of emancipation, a setting them free to range the world . . . a saleroom here, an exhibition there; art, Lady Stacpoole, is a rover. People spoil things; there are so many of them and the last thing one wants is them traipsing through one's house. But with the park a jungle and a bath on the billiard table, what is one to do? Dorothy wonders if an attic sale could be a solution.

Obsessed with his own salvation, the hermit Paulo dedicates himself to ten years of prayerful penance. When his faith wavers, the ever-watchful Devil seizes the moment to convince him that he shares the fate of one Enrico, a notorious Neapolitan gangster destined for damnation. Swearing vengeance, Paulo lashes out against God and assembles a band of rival outlaws. "I'll match Enrico in mad badness. So, we're damned, both of us, are we? Then I'll be revenged on the whole world." And yet, even as their villainous crimes escalate, the possibility of redemption hovers over the two men, perhaps within reach. This fast-paced adventure story embraces bandits and beautiful women between glimpses of heaven and hell. The subversive and at times riotous exploration of faith and the transformative power of love races across the Italian landscape, relishing the unpredictability of fate, an extraordinary array of characters and their very real dilemmas. "Sinner I am - pray for me."

This second collection of work by Tom Stoppard contains his radio plays, written between 1964 and 1991. These plays reflect the full range of Stoppard's gifts as well as his craftsmanship and versatility. His work for radio complements (and sometimes prefigures) his work for the stage. Included in this volume is In the Native State, which became the stage play Indian Ink (included in Tom Stoppard Plays 5). Also in this volume are The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, 'M' is for Moon Among Other Things, If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase and The Dog It Was That Died. The collection is introduced by the author.

4th March, 1865: On the night of his second inauguration, a few weeks before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln meets the veteran black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the White House to discuss the prospect of extending the vote to black men who have served in the soon to be victorious Union armies. 4th March, 1965: In the White House, Lyndon Johnson, anxious to introduce a new Voting Rights Act, is briefed by his sinister and 'unfirable' FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, on the imminent Selma to Montgomery march, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a demonstration prompted by a state trooper's murder of the young activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, in Marion, Alabama, following a rally in support of voter registration in Perry County. In his ambitious new play, commissioned by the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis as the centrepiece of a retrospective of his plays and films, Christopher Hampton traces a line which runs from the last days of a brutal Civil War to the high-water mark of the Civil Rights movement and on, all the way to the present day; and considers the agonisingly slow healing of a wound, universal, but especially deep and painful in America: racism.

Bajazet: Roxanne the wife of the Sultan is madly in love with Bajazet. The Sultan is away but he has sent Roxanne an order to execute Bajazet
Berenice: "Let glory be our solace in our grief, And let the world acknowledge to the full Tears of an emperor, tears of a queen. Berenice's long and patient wait is over. Her lover, Titus, is now Emperor of Rome and with his succession, she can become his quee"n. But the Roman people make their disapproval known and Titus must choose between love and responsibility. Antiochus, Titus' best friend, is sent to comfort her, but reveals his own unrequited love for Berenice. In Berenice, Racine created a perfect tragedy of unfulfilled passion. In his new version, Man Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst anatomises the agony of love.

Tom Stoppard's dramatization for BBC TV of Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford will bring new readers to the novel as well as giving Stoppard's audience much that is original to his inventive version of a masterwork of modernist English literature. This is the story of Christopher Tietjens, the 'last Tory', his beautiful, disconcerting wife Sylvia, and the virginal young suffragette Valentine Wannop who completes this triangle of love among the English upper class before and during the Great War. Parade's End is a five-part drama, directed by Susanna White, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Adelaide Clemens. This edition includes bonus scenes which were not broadcast, an introductory essay by Tom Stoppard, and a selection of stills from the production as well as photographs taken on location.

If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.' Auden's famous couplet expresses the dilemma at the heart of David Hare's fascinating exploration of Oscar Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. The author speculates on two incidents in Wilde's life of which we know little, in order to present a play whose true subject is not Wilde, but love; not Bosie, but betrayal.

Love stories yet to happen, in a future filled with surprises. Who is the amorous stranger, Titus, who materialises in young Grace's bedroom? Can she believe he is who he says he is? For her parents, Franklin and Martha, does love everlasting still hold true if death is postponed indefinitely? Can lawyer Lorraine, who prides herself on her infallibility, have finally discovered the ideal partner, one who is also never wrong? Will lonely secretary Sylvia, after unhappy affairs with everyone from deep sea divers to space shuttle pilots, ever find her Mr Right?

The Two Worlds of Charlie F is a soldier's view of service, injury and recovery. Moving from the war in Afghanistan, through the dream world of morphine-induced hallucinations to the physio rooms of Headley Court, the play explores the consequences of injury, both physical and psychological, and its effects on others as the soldiers fight to win the new battle for survival at home. One of the biggest names in the West End is joining forces with the nation's leading Armed Forces charity to offer a group of wounded, injured and sick Service personnel a once in a lifetime opportunity. The Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass Trust and The Royal British Legion, working in partnership with the Ministry of Defence, have brought together 30 wounded, injured and sick Service personnel from across Britain to write, produce and perform their own play on the West End stage. The Bravo 22 Company will present two performances only of a new play based on their experiences in conflict and in recovery, entitled "The Two Worlds of Charlie F", under the artistic auspices of Trevor Nunn CBE and with the support of Ray Winstone as the company's ambassador. The aim of the project is to use a learning environment to aid the recovery of wounded, injured and sick Service personnel. The project will introduce the Service personnel involved to leading theatrical professionals and will give early Service leaders career opportunities in the theatrical industry.

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

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

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.

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

continues the run of work in which Hare has sought to describe the atmosphere of contemporary Britain. A successful entrepreneur, Victor Quinn, employs a young poet, Paul Peplow, to decorate the legend of his fast-growing Internet business. Nothing prepares either man for the outcome

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.