'The setting is a schoolroom near Manchester where an evening class of budding comics congregate for a final briefing from their tutor before facing an agent's man from London.
Mr Stoppard's BBC television debut was sheer delight.' - Richard Last, Daily Telegraph'Plays which enhance civilization itself, which is what this does, are not seen once and laid away.' - Bernard Lev
John Osborne's 'Look Back in Anger' changed the course of English theatre. It presents post-war youth as it really was and expresses the mood of its time, the mood of the 'angry young man'.
The tale of lives won from a cruel sea and crueller landlords. The dawning of the herring fisheries brought with it the hope of escape from the Highland Clearances, and this story paints a vivid pictu
Eliot's haunting verse play, set in a country house in the north of England, was performed at the Westminster Theatre in London in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of war. 'What is wonderf
'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
'Literary criticism is a distinctive activity of the civilised mind.' With Eliot's dictum in mind, Professor Kermode has selected from the whole range of his critical writings, some of them dating bac
Fed up with the dreary round of life in Ballybeg, with his uncommunicative father and his humiliating job in his father's grocery shop, with his frustrated love for Kathy Doogan who married a richer,
George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in, of village cr
