Modern Drama

This selection of texts makes original and inimitable works of music-theatre accessible to a wide audience for the first time.

A dazzlingly entertaining dramatisation of three stories by the celebrated black iconoclast, Zora Heale Hurston: a rich folk tapestry of rural and urban black America in the 20th century.

Fifty-four monologues and dialogues drawn from ‘found’ stories told by everyday people living everyday lives in East Tennessee and the Appalachia region of the USA.

In this tragi-comic quartet, Cuban-American dramatist Eduardo Machado explores the meaning of his homeland's history. The plays tell the stories of several extended families, linked by marriage and then by exile in the United States.

These plays are not only jet-black comedies. They are fairy tales, fables, passion plays, masquerades...

The complete book and lyrics of Norman’s Tony Award-winning Broadway musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s classic.

Three plays delicately exploring issues of love, faith, family and race.

‘A work of burning anger and bruising emotional power’ about the foisting of powdered milk on Third World infants. Plus seven monologues.

One of the greatest musicals of all time, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents.

The story of two siblings reunited at their mother's funeral.

The full text of cult-performer Bogosian's solo show, attacking the dark underbelly of the American dream with blistering accuracy.

A bold exploration of colonisation and objectification, based on the true story of the 'Hottentot Venus'.

The time is December 1939, when the most important thing in Lala Levy's life is the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. More urgent to her widowed mother, Boo, is the question of who will be Lala's date for the last night of Ballyhoo, the formal dance that crowns the party season for Atlanta's Jewish society.

David Hwang invokes the age in which his great grandfather broke with Confucian tradition by converting to Christianity and unbinding his daughter's feet. Golden Child explores the impact of these momentous decisions  on succeeding generations.

A rueful comedy of love, friendship and haute cuisine.

Set in a fictional fundamentalist country where chewing gum is outlawed, Gum explores the human need to tame nature and control desire.

When a handsome new lector arrives at a family-run cigar factory with a copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, not everyone is delighted. Pride and passions are already running high as the factory is threatened by the race to industrialise and join the American Dream. In the heat of the crowded factory floor, Tolstoy's words inflame desires, inspire jealousies and force the family to look to its future.

The homebody of the title is a bored but highly intellectual Englishwoman who finds refuge and escape in the alternate world of Aghanistan, exoticised in her mind's eye with the help of an out-of-date guide book.