'Alisa, Alice' is a humanely cruel and deeply moving drama, full of passion and desire. The clash of two cultures  two worlds  is described with psychological accuracy and depth. Alisa, a young Muslim refugee scarred by the Balkan war finds shelter with Magda, a representative of the common so-called civilised but self-destructive and self-loving western world. Magda, through the sadism arising from her despair and loss of purpose, her psychological confusion, causes the suicide of Alisa. Their relationship permeated as much with love as with hatred, is decanted through the dictatorship of language into a miraculous, irrational and mysterious atmosphere. In places, the style of the play is reminiscent of Pinters comedy of menace. The realistically based dramatic events are firmly grounded in a recognisable and actual contemporaneity. Poetic ambiguity facilitates universal interpretation, and here and there extends to the magical and surreal.

Bertolt Brecht, perhaps the most important dramatist/director/theorist of the twentieth century, is still widely studied and his plays and theories remain staples in the curricula of university theatre departments, literature departments, and theatre-artist training programs throughout the world. Additionally, productions of Brecht's dramas continue to be popular. The play Brecht in L.A. focuses on Brecht's life in America, where he resided from 1941 through 1947.

This play, which contains biographical information relating to Herman Melville, is fundamentally an exploration of the ways in which these two things take place. The play admits the truth of Walter Benjamin's view of history as "time filled by the presence of the now". Parallels between past and present (e.g., racism, domestic abuse, and the plight of the visionary American artist) are clearly implied, but the play also utilizes new technologies, in particular video, in order to represent the kind of dialectical history and representation promoted by Benjamin.

A first volume of plays by a startlingly ambitious and inventive dramatist. THE BACK OF BEYOND takes, as its starting point, the route of a sequel to KING LEAR, in which the surviving Shakespearean characters set out on an odyssey through a perilous, blasted landscape, and encounter new agents of cruelty, desire and magic. Wildly humorous and fiercely shocking, the play charts a series of remorseless exposures, interrogating the idealisms and brutal repressions that have informed Anglo-Welsh relations whilst subverting Shakespearean motifs; tragically humorous poetic language and nightmarish visual imagery contribute to the sense of a land where the signposts have been smashed.
Praise for THE BACK OF BEYOND: 'This is large-scale epic drama that sets out to subvert the grand literary tradition as a group of sort-of Shakespearean characters roam around discovering imperialism in a cruel land ... I found myself intrigued by the ambition of the project, mesmerised by the richness of the language and impressed by the energy ... Aberystwyth company Lurking Truth has taken on a mammoth task with evangelical enthusiasm.' - David Adams, THE WESTERN MAIL.
A sequel to THE BACK OF BEYOND, THE BATTLE OF THE CROWS extends and concludes the stories of three characters - a maverick witch, a renegade knight, and an abuse victim made empress - in a harrowing and humorous exploration of border warfare, witchcraft, massacre, bitchery, hilarity and heartbreak. THE BATTLE OF THE CROWS is partly a dramatic speculation about desire as magic, partly a sad reckless laugh at internecine hostilities and the passionate and disastrous transformations which spring up in the face of Death itself.

This anthology contains three plays (Ceremonial Kisses, Shading the Crime, and The Maternal Cloister) that feature a protagonist who is compelled to confront his or her particular oppressors. The critique of this oppression through theatre falls on particular social institutions and differs for each character. The main institutions under scrutiny are religion and the state. The plays are very different in style and include the use of physical theatre, naturalistic explorations of human rights abuses, and symbolic structures, puppets and poetry. The plays are supported by an analysis of their processes and themes. All have reached production and the text is supplemented by photographs of these performances.