N. F. Simpson: Collected Plays

Author: N. F. Simpson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571304915
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Book Description
N. F. Simpson was one of the leading exponents of the theatre of the absurd, and is best known for his play A Resounding Tinkle, made famous by its premiere at the Royal Court in 1957, and later to star Peter Cook. But beyond that he was a major force in the satire boom of the sixties, and wrote much exceptional comedy for film and TV for the likes of John Cleese, Beryl Reid, Hattie Jacques and Eric Sykes, as well as a number of brilliantly funny plays for theatre, which starred big names such as Harold Pinter and Kenneth Williams. His influence on everyone from Peter Cook's much-loved character E. L. Wisty to Monty Python's Flying Circus helped spawn a generation of incredible comic talent. Plays included in the collection are A Resounding Tinkle, The Hole, Gladly Otherwise, One Way Pendulum, The Cresta Run, Was He Anyone? and his final work, If So, Then Yes, first performed in 2010. This collection celebrates the work of this lost comic genius, and seeks to put his reputation back at the heart of British - and world - comedy.

A Resounding Tinkle

Author: Norman Frederick Simpson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
N.F. Simpson, whose work includes One Way Pendulum, led the twentieth century British Absurdist movement. His first play, A Resounding Tinkle, was one of the winners in the Observer play competition in 1957. The incessant ambush of non-sequiturs , as Kenneth Tynan described it, is a gloriously comic revelation of the absurdity of every day life. A Resounding Tinkle was revived with the sketch Gladly Otherwise at the Donmar Warehouse in July 2007.

A Reader's Guide to Modern British Drama

Author: Sanford Sternlicht
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815630760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
This book reveals the influences of modern history and psychology on British drama; the all-important influence of Irish dramatists like Wilde, Shaw, O’Casey, and Beckett; the significance of the Independent Theatre of J. T. Grein and the early Royal Court Theatre; the gay community’s contribution to the British theater; the powerful new feminist drama; and the British festival theater. Auseful tool for readers wishing to know more about Britain’s great dramatic tradition and vital contemporary theater, for students pursuing drama studies, and for libraries in need of an accessible reference work.

British Musical Modernism

Author: Philip Rupprecht
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316297985
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 507

Book Description
British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe, the Manchester Group composers - Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle - and their contemporaries assimilated the serial-structuralist preoccupations of mid-century internationalism to an art grounded in resurgent local traditions. In close readings of some thirty-five scores, Philip Rupprecht traces a modernism suffused with the formal elegance of the 1950s, the exuberant theatricality of the 1960s, and - in the works of David Bedford and Tim Souster - the pop, minimalist, and live-electronic directions of the early 1970s. Setting music-analytic insights against a broader social-historical backdrop, Rupprecht traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor, and a sounding myth of national identity.

Collected Plays

Author: Mahesh Dattani
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351181537
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Book Description
Mahesh Dattani is the first Indian-playwright writing in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi award. His plays bring Indian drama into the present day in their themes "sexuality, religious tension and gender issues" while still focussing on human relationships and personal and moral choices which are the classic concerns of world drama.

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama

Author: McGraw-Hill, inc
Publisher: VNR AG
ISBN: 9780070791695
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 538

Book Description
Ranging from the earliest drama to the theater of the 1980's this encyclopedia includes coverage of national drama and theater around the world, theater companies, and musical comedy. Arrangement of the 1,300 entries is alphabetically by name or subject with nearly 950 of these devoted to individual playwrights and their works.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century

Author: Sorrel Kerbel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135456062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1716

Book Description
Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Studying Plays

Author: Mick Wallis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135000734X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Now in its 4th edition, this is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the critical study of drama. Using familiar examples of classic and contemporary works such as Shakespeare's King Lear, Ibsen's A Doll's House and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, the book explores the essential elements of play texts, from character, dialogue and plot to theatrical space. With more in depth guidance on how to study plays in and as performance, both live and in recordings available online, the 4th edition of Studying Plays now includes: · new examples throughout the book drawn from a range of 21st-century plays by established and emergent writers for diverse theatres and companies · new explorations of how plays structure and engage audience response · a complete new section on the analysis of theatre of witness and testimony; monodrama; and postdramatic texts.

One Way Pendulum

Author: Norman Frederick Simpson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Book Description
The Groomkirbys talk and behave very much as any family might who had once been harried for months on end by a runaway drawbridge.

Anger and After (Routledge Revivals)

Author: John Russell Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317917065
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
When it was first published in 1962, Anger and After was the first comprehensive study of the dramatic movement which began in 1956 with the staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and has since brought forward such dramatists as Brendan Behan, Harold Pinter, N. F. Simpson, John Arden and Arnold Wesker. Thoroughly revised in 1969, this book remains important reading for theatre students in need of a comprehensive and authoritative guide to post-Osborne drama in Britain.