Methuen Drama, 2002

World Classics

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 42, Roles: Total (31), Female (7), Male (24), Unassigned (0)

...Armstrong’s Last Goodnight opens on the border of Scotland and England in the year 1530, where a group of officials are meeting to hammer out a peace agreement between their two countries. The final bone of contention is the continued...

Methuen Drama, 1991

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 7, Roles: Total (9), Female (1), Male (8), Unassigned (0)

...In their introduction to the play, authors Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden say of Ars Longa Vita Brevis: 'This little piece is not exactly a play, nor is it anything else in particular. If we must call it something, it might well be termed...

Methuen Drama, 1991

Contemporary Dramatists

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...'We were looking up texts for this book, and we came across a file full of fragmentary scripts (and notes for scripts) which had been a series of quickly-improvised topical plays and playlets got together in the west of Ireland and put...

Methuen Drama, 2002

World Classics

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Acts: 4, Scenes: 16, Roles: Total (20), Female (5), Male (15), Unassigned (0)

...In dramatising the creation of the Magna Carta, John Arden inhabits the minds of 13th century England with great skill and ingenuity, presenting the establishment of the founding of the charter, on which modern Britain's constitutional law...

Methuen Drama, 1994

World Classics

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Scenes: 17, Roles: Total (14), Female (8), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...Forced to move from their tramcar on a caravan site, the Sawneys, an unruly family of travellers, unwillingly arrive at their new home on a council estate. Living next door are the Jacksons, eager to establish themselves as middle class...

Methuen Drama, 1982

Student Editions

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 8, Roles: Total (15), Female (2), Male (13), Unassigned (0)

...Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is an ‘unhistorical parable’, a fabular interrogation of the ethics and consequences of war loosely set in the late 19th century. Serjeant Musgrave and three other deserters return the body...

Methuen Drama, 1991

Contemporary Dramatists

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Roles: Total (11), Female (5), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...The Business of Good Government was written for and first performed in 1960 in the village of Brent Knoll, Somerset. Telling the traditional story of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, it focuses less on the divine and miraculous, and more...

Methuen Drama, 1994

World Classics

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 11, Roles: Total (6), Female (2), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...At the Happy Haven care home, Dr Copperthwaite is working on a medical miracle: the cure for old age. But between placating the ever-complaining Mr Crape, overseeing the romantic advances of Mr Golightly to the ancient Mrs Phineus, keeping...

Methuen Drama, 1991

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 7, Roles: Total (13), Female (2), Male (11), Unassigned (0)

...The Little Gray Home in the West was a reworking of a 1972 play called The Ballygombeen Bequest which was described by the Guardian as 'a freewheeling Brechtian parable of sickness, colonialism and capitalism in Ireland...

Methuen Drama, 1991

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Roles: Total (18), Female (5), Male (13), Unassigned (0)

...After years of war, peace is to be reached between England and France, sealed by the marriage of the English prince and the French princesse. A company of actors are to be sent from England to Paris, to perform...

Methuen Drama, 1994

World Classics

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Acts: 3, Roles: Total (11), Female (3), Male (8), Unassigned (0)

...It’s London, 1956. Sigismanfred Krankiewicz is an architect, working in a reputable office in the West End. He’s also known as Krank, the disreputable owner of a boarding house and brothel which is under scrutiny from the local authorities....

Methuen Drama, 2002

World Classics

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 20, Roles: Total (37), Female (11), Male (19), Unassigned (7)

...Of The Workhouse Donkey Steve Nicholson writes: "Arden's text [is] a sprawling, Rabelaisian comedy about local town-hall corruption, [that] focuses on the downfall of 'the Napoleon of the North', Alderman Charlie Butterthwaite . . ....

Methuen Drama, 2002

World Classics

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Acts: 2, Roles: Total (13), Female (5), Male (8), Unassigned (0)

...In these two short plays, John Arden draws loosely on events from his own life to illustrate points about his politics and the world around him. Always a controversial figure, Arden was a lifelong Marxist intellectual who became deeply...

Methuen Drama, 1991

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 20, Roles: Total (36), Female (6), Male (30), Unassigned (0)

...John Vandaleur was an estate owner in County Clare in the west of Ireland. In 1831, tired of the outrages committed by some of his tenants in the throes of a violent organisation named 'The Ribbonmen', Vandaleur established a co-operative...

Methuen Drama, 1994

World Classics

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Roles: Total (10), Female (4), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...The working week has just begun at the factory, but already tensions are building in the offices of Managing Director Mr Henderson and Sally, his secretary. A strike is breaking out amongst the women in the packing department, while...