How far would you go for love? For art? What would you be willing to change? Which price might you pay?

Such are the painful questions explored by Neil Labute in The Shape of Things. A young student drifts into an ever-changing relationship with an art major while his best friends' engagement crumbles, so unleashing a drama that peels back the skin of two modern-day relationships, exposing the raw meat and gristle that lie beneath.

The world premi�re of The Shape of Things was presented at the Almeida, London, in May 2001.

A writer in a totalitarian state is interrogated about a series of gruesome short stories and their similarities to a number of child-murders that are happening in the writer's town.

'Sometimes you don't even know what you've been craving until the real thing comes along.' New York Times

'McDonagh is more than just a very clever theatrical stylist. His tricks and turns have a purpose. They are bridges over a deep pit of sympathy and sorrow, illuminated by a tragic vision of stunted and frustrated lives.' Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times

Martin McDonagh's searingly brilliant new play premiered at the National Theatre, London in November 2003.

An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool.

In Alan Bennett's classic play, staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

The History Boys premiered at the National in May 2004.

Midsummer's weekend in Edinburgh. It's raining. Bob's a failing car salesman on the fringes of the city's underworld. Helena's a high-powered divorce lawyer with a taste for other people's husbands. She's totally out of his league; he's not her type at all. They absolutely should not sleep together. Which is, of course, why they do.

Midsummer is the story of a great lost weekend of bridge-burning, car chases, wedding bust-ups, bondage miscalculations, midnight trysts and self-loathing hangovers.

A collaboration between playwright David Greig and singer-songwriter Gordon McIntyre, Midsummer opened at the Traverse Theatre in October 2008 and was revived for an international tour in the summer of 2009.

Viewed through the eyes of those on the ground, Black Watch reveals what it means to be part of the legendary Scottish regiment, what it means to be part of the war on terror, and what it means to make the journey home.

This book contains Gregory Burke's award-winning script, with production notes by the director John Tiffany and colour photographs that capture the powerful and inventive use of movement in this urgent piece of theatre.

The National Theatre of Scotland's production of Black Watch opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006, where it won a Herald Angel, a Scotsman Fringe First, the Critics' Circle Award and the South Bank Show Award for Theatre. During a world tour it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.

One wintry morning academic Prudencia Hart sets off to a conference in the Scottish Borders. Stranded there by snow, she is swept off on a dream-like journey of self discovery, complete with magical moments, devilish encounters and wittily wild music.

Inspired by the Border ballads, The National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart by David Greig has toured throughout Scotland and the world since 2011. In 2013 the Royal Court Theatre presented the London premiere of this production as part of their Theatre Local strand of site specific productions.

'You shouldn't miss this for the world . . . Rambunctiously life-affirming and touchingly beautiful.' Herald

'More vibrantly alive than any piece of theatre I've seen in Scotland for years.' Scotsman

Krapp's Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and described as 'a solo, if that is the word, for one voice and two organs: one human, one mechanical. It fills few pages. It is perhaps the most original and important play of its length ever written.' (Roy Walker)

The present volume brings together Krapp's Last Tape and Beckett's other shorter works or 'dramaticules' written for the stage. It will be complemented by a forthcoming Faber edition of dramatic works written for radio and screen.

Arranged in chronological order of composition, these shorter plays exhibit the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett's dramatic vision.

KRAPP 'Here I end this reel. Box - [Pause.] - three, spool - [Pause.] - five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years have gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back. [Staring motionless before him.]

The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio.
'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner
Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,...but the clouds..., A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

Theatre Craft is an all-encompassing, practical guide for anyone working in the theatre, from the enthusiastic amateur to the committed professional. With entries arranged alphabetically, Theatre Craft offers advice on all areas of directing, from Acting, Adaptation, and Accent to Sound Effects, Superstition, Trap Doors and Wardrobe.

Enlightening and entertaining by turns, the celebrated director John Caird shares his profound knowledge of the stage to provide an invaluable companion to anyone creating a play, musical or opera. Whatever the theatre space - the backroom of a bar, a studio theatre, or the biggest stages of the West End or Broadway - this authoritative volume is an essential reference tool for the modern theatre practitioner.

Internationally renowned theatre director John Caird has directed and adapted countless productions of plays, operas, and musicals for the Royal Shakespeare Company, London's National Theatre, in the West End, and on Broadway-from Les Mis�rables and Nicholas Nickleby to Hamlet and Peter Pan.

After opening to sometimes bewildered reviews at the National Theatre in 1978, David Hare's wildly ambitious play Plenty established itself as a landmark modern classic in its 1982 New York production, which transferred to Broadway with Kate Nelligan playing Susan Traherne.

Counterpointing the experiences of a fiercely intelligent Englishwoman flown into France as a secret agent during the Second World War with her life in the following twenty years, David Hare offers a unique view of post-war history, as well as making a powerful statement about changing values and the collapse of ideals embodied in a single life.

'The richest, certainly the most resonant experience of my theatrical year.' Clive Barnes, Sunday Times

'An explosive theatrical version of a world that was won and lost during and after World War II.' Frank Rich, New York Times

Plenty was made into a film from a screenplay by David Hare with Meryl Streep, Charles Dance and John Gielgud. Plenty returned to The Public, New York, in October 2016 with Susan Traherne played by Rachel Weisz.

'Obviously something more than a successful play, it is the practical demonstration of a patently conceived theory of dramatic form, and as such of high historical interest.' Times Literary Supplement

'Eliot has attempted here something very daring and well worth doing. He has taken the ordinary West End drawing room comedy convention - understatement, upper-class accents and all - and used it as a vehicle for utterly serious ideas.' Observer

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic style: 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later.

Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park.

Tom Stoppard's absorbing play takes us back and forth between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life - 'the attraction', as Hannah says, 'which Newton left out'.

Skylight was revived in a new production at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, in June 2014, which received the Evening Standard Revival of the Year Award.

'The writing is beautiful, supple, rhythmical, charged with the slow, sure throb of despair and enchantment... Brian Friel is the most profound and poetic of contemporary Irish dramatists.' Observer

Throughout the remote and forgotten corners of the British Isles, Frank Hardy offers the promise of redemption to the sick and the suffering. But his is an unreliable gift, a dangerous calling which brings him into conflict with his wife Grace and his manager Teddy. Their competing accounts of past events reveal the fragility of memory and the necessity of stories as a means of survival.

Brian Friel's Faith Healer was first produced at the Longacre Theatre, New York, in April 1979 and was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in June 2016.

'The night of Faith Healer is one that still blazes in recollection for me, as religious experiences of art do. And it became a sort of touchstone for me in understanding not only Mr. Friel's work with a depth I hadn't appreciated before but also for defining the elusiveness of great art and the pain of the artist who creates it.' Ben Brantley, New York Times

I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.

Promising young playwright Will Shakespeare is tormented by writer's block until he finds his muse in the form of passionate noblewoman, Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love draws many others, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet.

Based on Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's Oscar-winning screenplay, Lee Hall's stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love premiered in July 2014 at the Noel Coward Theatre, London, in a co-production by Disney and Sonia Friedman Productions.