Plays for public places: Gum & Goo, Wesley, Scott of the Antarctic (Methuen playscripts)

Brenton, Howard

EYRE METHUEN

Brassneck

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

BRASSNECK

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Heinemann

Epsom Downs (Eyre Methuen Plays)

METHUEN

Epsom Downs (Methuen's modern plays)

Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists Christie in Love is based on the story of John Christie, the 19th century serial killer, "like Genet, [Brenton] feels for the outcast...But he's less sentimentally involved with his criminals, clearer about his ultimate strategy to show the unreality of straight lines in a curved universe, of the roles society forces on us." (Observer). "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am to wreck society", Magificence puts the small people and their protests against the bourgeois state on stage; it was described as "A wonderful piece of theatre; annexing whole new chunks of modern life and presenting them in a style at once fruitful and magnified." (The Times) In The Churchill Play, Brenton brings Churchill back to life to view the future that he invented for England and "Brenton finds a way of making us look again at the past which has shaped the future into which he sees us drifting" (New Society). Weapons of Happiness is "a vision of revolution which is quite extraordinary in its creative ambiguity, its richness, its power to stimulate, to threaten and to inspire" (Sunday Times) while Epsom Downs "echoes Bartholomew Fair: a great public festival, held on common land and pulling in punters of every degree...a teaming, Bruegel-like composition" (The Times) The last play in this collection Sore Throats, is a witty and harsh examination of sexual proclivities from within and outside marriage: "No recent play compares for theatrical power and painful bravado." (Observer)

Brenton Plays: 1: Christie in Love; The Churchill Play; Weapons of Happiness; Epsom Downs; Sore Throats; Magnificence (Methuen's Modern Plays)

Methuen Drama

These five short plays date from Brenton's early involvement in such 'shoestring' groups as Portable Theatre. They are deliberately intended for the 'poor theatre' - as relevant today as when they were first written - since each play requires a small cast and minimal set, yet yields maximum theatricality."Christie in Love," "Gum and Goo," "Heads "and "The Education of Skinny Spew," were all first staged in 1969. "The Saliva Milkshake" was first staged in 1975.

Plays For The Poor Theatre: The Saliva Milkshake; Christie in Love; Heads; Skinny Spew; Gum and Goo

Full Length, Drama / 3m, 2f / Bare stage 
This fascinating drama, staged to acclaim in London and New York, has in its cast of characters Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Goodwin. The play is about radicalism artistic, political and more. Taking place in Italy, it concerns the characters' various ideas about radical politics and free love. Along the way, a number of serious questions are raised, not the least of which is why fervent radicals seem so often to be done in by their reprehensible characters. At the end of the play Byron attends the cremation of Shelley on the beach at Viareggio and delivers a stunning ovation over the pyre: "Burn him. Burn us all. A great big bloody beautiful fire." 
 "Radicalism, artistic defiance, an intellectual rage. These are the virtues celebrated in this extraordinary dream play which begins, as it ends, on a foreign shore." London Financial Times. 
 "A phantasmagoric play. . . . Brenton is celebrating the idea of the committed artist who seeks to stir and provoke sullen, defeated, bourgeois England. At the same time with clear eyed honesty, he shows how difficult it is to upset the moral order." London Guardian.

BLOODY POETRY (Modern Plays)

Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists The Romans in Britain was the play that brought calls to bring back censorship when it was first staged at the National in 1980. It conjures up "an era that is culturally as well as historically remote which is a notoriously difficult task, but Mr Brenton acheives it with great skill and effect...a very good play indeed." In The Thirteenth Night: "He sets the characters of Shakespeare to find the elements in the British character which could transform an Englishman into a Stalin, and closes in on his creation with an overall wit to match his horror" (The Times). The Genius "is teeming with memorable stage pictures, and bristling with Brenton's very best writing: flinty, impassioned, explosive" (Financial Times). In Bloody Poetry "Brenton is doing something markedly ambitious in this phantasmagoric play. He is celebrating the idea of the committed artist who seeks to stir and provoke sullen, defeated bourgeois England. At the same time, with clear-eyed honesty, he shows how difficult it is to upset the moral order" (The Guardian). Greenland is "on the one hand a cry of disillusionment with established political forms, on the other it is full of typically lively Brentonesque satire and lampoons...Brenton's message is a welcome antidote to the madness in which we all now seem to be living and a sharp blast against patriarchy as well as other attendant woes" (City Limits).

Brenton Plays: 2 (World Dramatists Series)

Full Length, Drama / 3m, 2f / Bare stage This fascinating drama, staged to acclaim in London and New York, has in its cast of characters Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Goodwin. The play is about radicalism artistic, political and more. Taking place in Italy, it concerns the characters' various ideas about radical politics and free love. Along the way, a number of serious questions are raised, not the least of which is why fervent radicals seem so often to be done in by their reprehensible characters. At the end of the play Byron attends the cremation of Shelley on the beach at Viareggio and delivers a stunning ovation over the pyre: "Burn him. Burn us all. A great big bloody beautiful fire."  "Radicalism, artistic defiance, an intellectual rage. These are the virtues celebrated in this extraordinary dream play which begins, as it ends, on a foreign shore." London Financial Times.  "A phantasmagoric play. . . . Brenton is celebrating the idea of the committed artist who seeks to stir and provoke sullen, defeated, bourgeois England. At the same time with clear eyed honesty, he shows how difficult it is to upset the moral order." London Guardian.

Bloody Poetry

Concord Theatricals

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