Includes the plays The Neighbour, The Editing, Faith, Her Mother and Bartok, Shadowmouth, Glide and The Mind of the MeetingTwo highly regarded early plays, The Neighbour and The Editing Process (here presented in a revised version) present a study in contrasts: the first a battle of wills between two young men on a housing estate; the second an urbane but despairing comedy set in a publisher's offices.Faith provides a vision of military conf...

Set in the offices of a magazine publishers, Meredith Oakes' comedy of fragile values in the media will not restore your faith in human nature, but it is guaranteed to help you get on in publishing without really succeeding. First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Stephen Daldry.

Bill is sustained by his deep sense of a wider culture and an improving world. The only thing the human race needs to do is learn. When he meets a person who embodies this idea, he naturally likes them. Especially if his wife doesn't.Set at the end of the 1950s, Scenes from the Back of Beyond, explores the comfort, hopes and fragility of family life in a new Sydney suburb.Scenes from the Back of Beyond opened at the Royal Court Theatre in November 2006.

Mr Modernsky tells a story about two heavyweights of twentieth-century classical music: Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg.It traces the gradual change there has been in the way these two great rivals are perceived, looks in their music for the reasons and reflects on the nature of modernity in art and the sometimes pernicious effects of ideology. Meredith Oakes explores the tension between futuristic and historical elements in the work of these parallel artists and asks: is mod...

'Daylight people scare me...The confident ring of their footsteps...Their desire for everyone to be up and in harness...Day is always fresh and new...Exhausting...'A fifteen-year-old runaway is taken in by an older man. Both live at night: the man on his balcony, watching from afar, while the boy is drawn deeper into the city's underworld.Inspired by the photography of Nan Goldin, Shadowmouth is about people trying to connect in a landscape of disconnection, the power of de...

Punishment without Revenge is a dark and thrilling drama, an audacious blend of unbearable tension and delicious comedy, which both terrifies and delights. Regarded as the greatest tragedy of the Spanish Golden Age and the finest play of its presiding genius, Lope de Vega, this elegant work is set in the dangerous and glamorous world of Renaissance Italy. The Duke of Ferrara has lived a wild and unconventional life.An infamous womaniser, his only son, Federico, is a bastard whom he...

Foreword by Diana Damian MartinWerner Schwab’s final work, also known as a theatre-extinction comedy, is a brutal, irreverent and bizarrely comical piece about what happens when an emerging stage production is sabotaged by outsiders. Following a dispute with the cast, the director replaces all the actors with pensioners from a nearby home for the elderly. At first compliant and polite, the ‘forgotten and dispossessed’ gradually start to question the director’s auth...

A vision of military conflict as a testing-ground for English values. Nightmarish contradictions face a group of soldiers in an isolated farmhouse on the edge of battle.Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997.Cast size: 6

A beautiful and moving tale of self-discovery, The Farmer’s Wife deals with the truth about relationships that the Cinderella stories never tell us.She got the fairytale ending – but that was just the beginning…When Rebecca Saunders married her party boy Charlie Lewis and they settled down on her beloved farm, she thought the hard work was over. Ten years and two kids later, the idyllic future she imagined seems like a distant fantasy.Her life is a never-ending cycle...

Metropolitan newspaper writer Zack Walker has a knack for stumbling onto deadly stories. But it’s one that his good friend Trixie Snelling doesn’t want told that’s about to unleash a storm of trouble. As a professional dominatrix in the suburbs, Trixie has her share of secrets, but Zack has no idea what she’s really hiding when a local newspaperman threatens to do an exposé on her…not until Zack finds a dead body strapped to the bondage cross in her basement dungeon.Now Zack is imp...

A classic Agatha Christie short story, available individually for the first time as an ebook.Joyce Lempiere tells the Tuesday Night Club of an incident that occurred five years ago when she was vacationing at a small inn on the Cornish coast. She was painting a picture of the front of the inn, including details of wet bathing suits drying on the balcony of Denis and Margery Dacre, when she realised she had included blood stains on the pavement. A few days later Margery is found hav...

Now in trade paperback: “The definitive guide to musical enjoyment” (Forum).In this fascinating analysis of how to listen to both contemporary and classical music analytically, eminent American composer Aaron Copland offers provocative suggestions that will bring readers a deeper appreciation of the most viscerally rewarding of all art forms.