A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of twoyoung thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for anundertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlourand have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's motherhas just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the bodyelsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, thethickened plot turns tops...

Entertaining Mr Sloane was first staged in 1964. Despite its success in performance, and being hailed by Sir Terence Rattigan as 'the best first play' he'd seen in 'thirty odd years', it was not until the London production of Loot in 1966 - less than a year before Joe Orton's untimely death - that theatre audiences and critics began to more fully appreciate the originality of Orton's elegant, alarming and hilarious writing. Introduced by John Lahr, the author of Orton's biography Prick up ...

Published fifty years after the premiere of Entertaining Mr Sloane in 1964, and with a new introduction, this anniversary edition offers an opportunity to reappraise Joe Orton's reputation, and the status of his first major play, from a twenty-first century perspective.When it first appeared in the Swinging Sixties, Orton's satire on social and sexual hypocrisy both scandalized and delighted audiences. Its mix of sexuality and violence was explosive. Within a year, the pla...

Selected plays by the great playwright Joe Orton, plus bonus materialJoe Orton was among the towering geniuses of 1960s theatre. His life was tragically cut short in 1967, but he left behind him a handful of shocking and scabrous black comedies that will live on in the public imagination for years to come. Orton’s career was kickstarted by the BBC. John Tydeman who is widely considered to have found him when working at the BBC as an trainee. He came across an early...

A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of two young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Or...

Tell him to put his trousers on. Cantering around the house with a bare bum . . . Can't leave you alone for five minutes.When lonely Kath offers the mysterious Mr Sloane a room to rent in the family home, her businessman brother Ed does not approve. After all, what will people say? But soon, he becomes equally taken with the charismatic young Sloane. Only their old Dadda remains wary, convinced that he recognises this stranger. What begins as a convenient living ar...

I suppose I'm a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad but irresistibly funny' Joe Orton. This volume contains everything that Orton wrote for the theatre, radio and television from his first play in 1964, The Ruffian on the Stair, up to his violent death in 1967 at the age of 34. It includes his major successes: Entertaining Mr Sloane, which 'made more blood boil that any other British play in the last ten years' (The Times); Loot, 'a Freudian nightmare', which sports with su...

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Joe Haldeman has penned several best-selling novels, including The Forever War (C1146). After receiving a message from deep space, astronomer Aurora "Rory" Bell anticipates extraterrestrial visitors on New Year's Eve. But with Earth teetering on the edge of another world war, Rory soon begins to wonder if the message was a hoax. And when the message is leaked to the public, a media frenzy ensues. "A large-scale story [that] provides food for thought as...

Joe Orton's brilliantly inventive and staggeringly bold first play.Fred and Madge are a normal couple. Or so we think until a director and an audience member start interrupting and reworking this play within a play.Exhilaratingly subversive, the play includes the destruction of the Festival Hall, professional insulters intent on purging society with laughter and a dystopian England overgrown with marigolds. Full of biting satire and sardonic wit, it mingles astutely observe...

"Joe Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature" (Sunday Telegraph)The chase is on in this breakneck comedy of licensed insanity, from the moment when Dr Prentice, a psychoanalyst interviewing a prospective secretary, instructs her to undress. The plot of What the Butler Saw contains enough twists and turns, mishaps and changes of fortune, coincidences and lunatic logic to furnish three or four conventional comedies. B...

From the acclaimed author of Marsbound comes a mind-bending sci-fi adventure that will have you questioning the very fabric of time itselfStruggling grad school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when he inadvertently creates a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose in taking a time-machine trip himself—or so he thinks.

Captain Ean Tephe is a man of faith, whose allegiance to his lord and to his ship is uncontested. The Bishopry Militant knows this—and so, when it needs a ship and crew to undertake a secret, sacred mission to a hidden land, Tephe is the captain to whom the task is given.Tephe knows from the start that his mission will be a test of his skill as a leader of men and as a devout follower of his god. It’s what he doesn’t know that matters: to what ends his faith and his ship will ultim...