This compassionate play is the story of Alan Turing, mathematician and father of computer science. Turing broke the code in two ways: he cracked the German Enigma code during World War II (for which he was decorated by Churchill) and also shattered the English code of sexual discretion with his homosexuality (for which he was arrested on a charge of gross indecency). Whitemore's play, shifting back and forth in time, seeks to find a connection between the two events. When first performed in the 1980s, Breaking the Code was critically acclaimed in the UK before a Broadway transfer won it a raft of awards & nominations including 3 Tony Awards, and 2 Drama Desk awards.
Are Africans being exploited as guinea pigs' to test new drugs for multi-national pharmaceutical companies? Why is HIV/AIDS treatment too expensive for countries where the virus is most rife? Is it okay to sacrifice lives to protect the integrity of medical studies? Bad Blood Blues is a powerfully intense new play that leads us deep into a personal and sexual moral maze while confronting the ethics of HIV/AIDS drug trials in Africa.
Includes the plays The Forest, Artistes and Admirers, Wolves and Sheep and Sin and SorrowFour of Ostrovsky’s finest plays. The best known of these, The Forest (1871), has two young lovers in thrall to their tyrannical elders, who are prevented from marrying until a pair of strolling actors come to their rescue. In Artistes and Admirers (1881), a comedy of theatre life, a dedicated young actress renounces both love and fortune in order to pursue her sacred calling. In the comedy Wolves and Sheep (1875) Ostrovsky returns to a favourite theme, the double-dealing and hypocrisy of the Russian landowning classes, while the melodrama Sin and Sorrow (1863) explores the tragic consequences of a bored provincial wife’s brief affair.
Worlds Apart is a devastating play about political asylum, even more relevant today than when it was written ten years ago. In Crusade a bus-load of very different individuals are stranded in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and its not long before the tensions overflow. This Other Eden examines a mismatched string quartet, riven by social and political differences, as it gradually falls apart.
The stormy love affair between the legendary dancer Nijinsky and his mentor Diaghilev is the best known scandal in the history of ballet. Set in a mental asylum, as Nijinsky hears of the death of the great impresario and fears for his own life. With and introduction by Nicholas Dromgoole.
Poetry has always played its part in David Pownall's life as an author. During his distinguished career as a playwright and novelist, two collections of verse have been published, plus contributions to literary magazines and anthologies. Poems is his selection of the best from new and previously published work.
Includes the plays Beef, The Viewing, My Father’s House and Black StarBeef, a winner of the John Whiting Award, has so far only been published in radio form. In The Viewing a family buy a house which is haunted by God, while My Father’s House, commissioned by Birmingham Rep, looks at British politics through the eyes of Joseph Chamberlain and family. Black Star centres around the black American actor Ira Aldridge, touring in Shakespeare in Poland in 1865.
Dawn, Coronation Day 1953. The artist Francis Bacon works on his portrait of Pope Innocent X, inspired by Velazquez' masterpiece and his own deep absorption in human carnality. The chaotic studio is populated by characters possessing the power of change, who come to life in a satirical interplay of art, history, sex and politics.
Includes the plays Gaunt, Lile Jimmy Williamson, Buck Ruxton and A Tale of Two Town HallsWritten between 1972 and 1976, a time of high hopes for the rebirth of a national network of regional theatres, these four plays were major building blocks in successfully creating an audience for the new Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster.Gaunt and Lile Jimmy Williamson focuses on the myth and reality of power surrounding two local legends; Buck Ruxton is an imperial tragedy of 1936, a notorious double murder by a successful Indian doctor driven mad by the scandal of his Scottish wife’s infidelity. A Tale of Two Town Halls is a political satire, a comedy cartoon on the IMF crisis in the mid-Seventies.
Nora loves her husband above everything. But when she risks her reputation in order to save him, the consequences force her to examine her devotion, and she finds herself struggling for her own life. Henrik Ibsen's ground-breaking play created a huge sensation at its premiere in 1879 and is as fresh and pertinent as ever, with an unfading capacity to shock.