Methuen Drama, 2011

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 3, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...Liz is a troubled woman, who read a violent story in a newspaper and can't get it out of her head. This obsession drives away her partner Richard; or maybe he left because she was pregnant with Dan. Years later, when Dan...

Methuen Drama, 1997

Modern Plays

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Scenes: 6, Roles: Total (5), Female (3), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...At The Inland Sea is a strange, searing, dream-like play, showing a child coming face to face with humanity, and all its horror and neglect. As a boy prepares for the first day of his exams, fussed over by his mother, he...

Methuen Drama, 1987

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 6, Roles: Total (12), Female (5), Male (7), Unassigned (0)

...Bingo, subtitled Scenes of Money and Death, uses the last days of a brooding and unheroic William Shakespeare to accuse art and capitalism of vile inhumanity. Historical evidence suggests that not long before his death...

Methuen Drama, 1978

Contemporary Dramatists

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Roles: Total (3), Female (0), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...Black Mass is a concise and crucial satire set in a church in Vereeniging, South Africa. As he takes communion, the Prime Minister practises his justification for forcibly moving on a group of black people who have gathered to protest. Bond...

Methuen Drama, 2006

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 5, Roles: Total (10), Female (2), Male (8), Unassigned (0)

...Born is a tragic epic for the twenty-first century. In it Edward Bond examines violence and terror in a dehumanised world in the terse and broken language of extreme deprivation. Peter and Donna and a baby have moved...

Methuen Drama, 2012

Modern Plays

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Scenes: 6, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...Chair is the third play in Edward Bond's The Chair Plays trilogy. In it, Alice is looking after Billy, a young man she took in to her home – illegally – when he was a baby. One day, when she witnesses a soldier escorting...

Methuen Drama, 2003

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 5, Roles: Total (10), Female (4), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...Coffee centres around the death of a child and asks disturbing questions about the history of the twentieth century, through an examination of what constitutes acceptable behaviour towards children in our time. The play...

Methuen Drama, 2016

Modern Plays

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Scenes: 7, Roles: Total (17), Female (3), Male (14), Unassigned (0)

...The war is raging, Dea, a heroine, has committed a terrible act and has been exiled. When she meets someone from her past, she is forcefully confronted by the broken society that drove her to commit her crimes. Edward Bond takes from...

Methuen Drama, 2003

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 7, Roles: Total (6), Female (2), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...Derek is a short farce with the significance of social commentary, telling a story of waste and exploitation. The aristocratic Biff is the proud possessor of an Eton education, a Sandhurst polishing, and a mental age...

Methuen Drama, 1977

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 21, Roles: Total (15), Female (3), Male (12), Unassigned (0)

...At the beginning of the savage and satirical Early Morning, Bond asserts that, ‘The events of this play are true.’ The events of the play are starkly at odds with history as we know it: they show a world in which Queen Victoria...

Methuen Drama, 1997

Modern Plays

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

...Eleven Vests is a cold and powerful examination of the mechanisms of authority and violence. One person, known as Student, is involved in two events: one at school, and one later as a soldier in the army. He is first...

Methuen Drama, 2006

Contemporary Dramatists

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Roles: Total (2), Female (0), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...A dark night in a neglected city suburb. An unnamed man breaks into a flat, scrambling for something to steal. As he rifles through the flat, he finds that there is nothing worth stealing, that vandalism proves unsatisying...

Methuen Drama, 2012

Modern Plays

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Scenes: 3, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...A woman sitting alone hears a constant knocking at the door, but no one is there. Her husband returns and tells her of an extraordinary meeting with an old woman found roaming in a ruined part of the city. Then a stranger comes to the door,...

Methuen Drama, 1996

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (67), Female (23), Male (44), Unassigned (0)

...Human Cannon is a narrative of class struggle, set in a small village consumed by the fight against Fascism in Spain, a play which swells from resentment against the privileged landowners to blazing revolution...

Methuen Drama, 1996

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 9, Roles: Total (6), Female (0), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...In the Company of Men makes a vivid and coruscating attack on the values encapsulated by boardroom power games, as power skirmishes turn to violence. The play opens with Leonard demanding a position on the board of his adoptive father...

Methuen Drama, 2011

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 11, Roles: Total (16), Female (4), Male (12), Unassigned (0)

...After war and poverty have brought the world to wrack and ruin, one woman decides that the greatest mercy she can show her child is to leave it to die alone. Regretting her decision she sets out to find him – a lifelong...

Methuen Drama, 1996

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (19), Female (9), Male (10), Unassigned (0)

...Jackets sets out a resonant and poetic counterpoint between two scenes of martyrdom, a powerful dyadic commentary on the politics of sacrifice. Part One is set in eighteenth-century Japan and Part Two is set in modern Europe. The head...

Methuen Drama, 1983

Student Editions

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 18, Roles: Total (53), Female (5), Male (48), Unassigned (0)

...Edward Bond recasts the story of King Lear into a fundamentally political epic, which reveals the violence endemic in all unjust societies. He exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this false morality as a source...

Methuen Drama, 1978

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 1, Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (10), Female (1), Male (9), Unassigned (0)

...A comic and elegant parable of morality and politics, Bond uses the takeover of feudal Japan by Western imperialists to explore the structures of colonialism and religious control. In the introductory scene of Narrow Road...

Methuen Drama, 2003

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 18, Roles: Total (15), Female (5), Male (10), Unassigned (0)

...Edward Bond's Olly’s Prison is a hard and painful vision of a selfish and disconnected society from which is it impossible to escape. An ordinary city flat. Evening. A man, Mike, tries to talk to his daughter, tries to get...