Methuen Drama, 1989

Contemporary Dramatists

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Roles: Total (8), Female (3), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...Barnes’ People is a series of wonderfully varied monologues from deeply imagined individuals. Whether their stories are historical, fantastic or familiar, they are always intimate and human. ‘Confessions of a Primary...

Methuen Drama, 1993

Contemporary Dramatists

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

...Peter Barnes mockingly dramatises the distinctly unheroic expedition of Christopher Columbus, which changed the face of the globe, though not entirely in the way he was expecting. Columbus’s famous venture begins...

Methuen Drama, 1996

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 20, Roles: Total (25), Female (5), Male (20), Unassigned (0)

...Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie is a riotous, Rabelaisian stew of a comedy concerning the demonic Charlie who is always trying to jump, with both feet, into his left trouser leg. While making a television programme about...

Methuen Drama, 1999

Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 29, Roles: Total (34), Female (6), Male (28), Unassigned (0)

...Dreaming is an unhinged and fervid play, a comic-historical epic set in the bloody aftermath of the Wars of the Roses. Captain John Mallory leads a band of renegades across the field of the Battle of Tewkesbury, where...

Methuen Drama, 1996

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 7, Roles: Total (14), Female (2), Male (12), Unassigned (0)

...As the play opens, Tobit has just finished digging a grave in the middle of the night. It is illegal to bury Jewish corpses in the city of Nineveh, and so he must bury them in secret, in the meantime concealing bodies in the wardrobe until...

Methuen Drama, 2001

Modern Plays

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 27, Roles: Total (17), Female (4), Male (13), Unassigned (0)

...Commissioned by the RSC, Jubilee is a mischievous comedy on the cynical foundation of the Shakespeare industry. In 1769, the famous actor David Garrick is approached by greedy Stratfordian burghers and talked into staging...

Methuen Drama, 1989

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 1, Scenes: 2, Roles: Total (20), Female (3), Male (17), Unassigned (0)

...Laughter! is a two act play that dramatises the screaming cruelty of Ivan the Terrible – the sixteenth century Russian Tsar – and the anaesthetized bureaucracy which administrated the Nazi concentration camps in the twentieth century...

Methuen Drama, 1989

Contemporary Dramatists

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Roles: Total (7), Female (1), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...In Leonardo’s Last Supper, Peter Barnes explores a theatrical mode in which everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous. A family of undertakers in a medieval charnel house prepare to bury Leonardo da Vinci; disposing...

Methuen Drama, 1993

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 3, Roles: Total (8), Female (1), Male (7), Unassigned (0)

...Nobody Here But Us Chickens is a trio of entertaining and challenging comedies about people with mental or physical disabilities, emphasising their individuality without patronization. The eponymous first part introduces...

Methuen Drama, 1989

Contemporary Dramatists

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

...In Noonday Demons, Peter Barnes explores a theatrical mode in which everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous. St Eusebius is in devotional exile in the desert, alone apart from a tower of his own excrement, enduring extreme...

Methuen Drama, 1993

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (41), Female (7), Male (30), Unassigned (4)

...Red Noses is a black comedy about the black death, a vibrant and slapstick hymn to the power of laughter and the human spirit. There’s no cure for the plague, and Auxerre in France, 1348, is populated by the dying. Marcel...

Methuen Drama, 1996

Contemporary Dramatists

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Scenes: 4, Roles: Total (4), Female (1), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...Revolutionary Witness is a series of four direct and intelligent monologues about the French Revolution, excavating the individual voices from the historical tide. ‘The Patriot’ is spoken by a man selling souvenirs...

Methuen Drama, 1990

Modern Plays

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 25, Roles: Total (24), Female (6), Male (18), Unassigned (0)

...Sunsets and Glories is set in late thirteenth-century Italy, where power struggles between Church and State inspire such characters as the spineless Charles II, paid killer Montefelto and 'madwoman' Maifreda...

Methuen Drama, 1989

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 30, Roles: Total (35), Female (9), Male (26), Unassigned (0)

...The Bewitched is an astounding carousel of the grotesque and the lyrical, the baroque and the intimate, the horrific and the comic; Barnes’s vast play tells the story of Spain’s ill-fated King Carlos II in a luminous and visceral style...

Methuen Drama, 1989

Contemporary Dramatists

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 29, Roles: Total (23), Female (5), Male (18), Unassigned (0)

...The Ruling Class is a witty, double-edged and idiosyncratic satire in which a man diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia inherits a peerage. After the 13th Earl of Gurney’s morbid nightly indulgence turns into an accidental...

Methuen Drama, 1993

Contemporary Dramatists

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...The Spirit of Man is made up of three short comic satires about man’s faith across the ages, the momentous subject deftly balanced between humour and solemnity. In three parts spanning thirteenth century France, Commonwealth England...