Wesker's Historical Plays

Wesker's Historical Plays PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849437238
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Presented here are four epic history plays from Sir Arnold Wesker, which touch on the age-old conflicts caused by religion, science and the Establishment. Set in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, 1563, Shylock (1972) is based on the same three stories from which Shakespeare wove his play, The Merchant of Venice. The core plot remains, but the relationships and characterisations are very different. Caritas (1980) is at once the story of a monastic young woman in the fourteenth century but also a metaphor for the wrong decisions which can imprison us for life. In 1144 a young boy was found brutally murdered in Thorpe Wood. The Jews were accused of slaughtering a Christian child touse his blood for Passover and mock the crucifixion. Blood Libel (1991) investigates a calumny which persists to this day. Meanwhile Longitude (2002) tells of the eighteenth-century race to accurately measure longitude – and claim a £20,000 reward from Parliament.

Wesker's Historical Plays

Wesker's Historical Plays PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849437238
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presented here are four epic history plays from Sir Arnold Wesker, which touch on the age-old conflicts caused by religion, science and the Establishment. Set in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, 1563, Shylock (1972) is based on the same three stories from which Shakespeare wove his play, The Merchant of Venice. The core plot remains, but the relationships and characterisations are very different. Caritas (1980) is at once the story of a monastic young woman in the fourteenth century but also a metaphor for the wrong decisions which can imprison us for life. In 1144 a young boy was found brutally murdered in Thorpe Wood. The Jews were accused of slaughtering a Christian child touse his blood for Passover and mock the crucifixion. Blood Libel (1991) investigates a calumny which persists to this day. Meanwhile Longitude (2002) tells of the eighteenth-century race to accurately measure longitude – and claim a £20,000 reward from Parliament.

Wesker's Historical Plays

Wesker's Historical Plays PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Wesker's Love Plays

Wesker's Love Plays PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786822067
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Includes the plays The Four Seasons, Love Letters on Blue Paper and Lady Othello Spanning three decades of impassioned and inspiring work, the three plays in this volume show in cross-section Arnold Wesker's development as one of the key figures of late-twentieth-century drama. Each play grapples with the timeless problems accompanying two people in love. The most intimate and personal of relationships are placed under uncompromising scrutiny. Bold, elemental and structurally satisfying, The Four Seasons (1964) depicts the ebb and flow of a couple's relationship, its power games and its politics, over the course of its year-long life. In Love Letters on Blue Paper (1977) we witness the late-blooming love of a woman for her dying husband in a drama of memory and companionship. Playful, witty and continualy surprising, Lady Othello (1987) gets right to the heart of an urgent, all-consuming, passionate affair.

Wesker's Domestic Plays

Wesker's Domestic Plays PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849436916
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In The Friends (1970), Esther is diagnosed with leukaemia, causing her friends to reassess their working-class identity, their imagined achievements as well as their own mortality. Bluey (1993) is a play about repressed memory resurfacing and three imagined futures that the protagonist cannot muster the courage to confront. In Men Die Women Survive (1990) a trio of estranged wives gather around the dinner table. As they conduct a post-mortem on their failed relationships a tale of betrayal and revenge emerges. Telling the story of a 44-year-old actress Gertie and her influence on Sam, a black teenager working as a car-park attendant, Wild Spring (1992) explores acting as a metaphor for the false images of ourselves with which we fall in love.

Wesker's Comedies

Wesker's Comedies PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849437076
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In The Wedding Feast an idealistic, altruistic shoe manufacturer arrives at an employee’s wedding, with disastrous consequences. One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round features a comic plot involving academics who get high on a hash birthday cake, a recalcitrant daughter, and the appearance of an illegitimate son who is a magician. In Groupie 61-year-old Mattie Beancourt is shocked to discover her idol, the famous painter Mark Gorman, living alone in near poverty. She is sunny, he is curmudgeonly and the impact of their friendship is startling. Set against a scene of defiant old age, The Old Ones examines the eccentric rituals of old age and plays out the conflict between the optimistic and pessimistic spirit.

Jews in Medieval England

Jews in Medieval England PDF Author: Miriamne Ara Krummel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319637487
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This volume examines the teaching of Jewishness within the context of medieval England. It covers a wide array of academic disciplines and addresses a multitude of primary sources, including medieval English manuscripts, law codes, philosophy, art, and literature, in explicating how the Jew-as-Other was formed. Chapters are devoted to the teaching of the complexities of medieval Jewish experiences in the modern classroom. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other also grounds medieval conceptions of the Other within the contemporary world where we continue to confront the problematic attitudes directed toward alleged social outcasts.

The Contemporary History Play

The Contemporary History Play PDF Author: Benjamin Poore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135016965X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics' familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes. The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century. For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.

A Companion to British-Jewish Theatre Since the 1950s

A Companion to British-Jewish Theatre Since the 1950s PDF Author: Jeanette R. Malkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350135984
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The first of its kind, this companion to British-Jewish theatre brings a neglected dimension in the work of many prominent British theatre-makers to the fore. Its structure reflects the historical development of British-Jewish theatre from the 1950s onwards, beginning with an analysis of the first generation of writers that now forms the core of post-war British drama (including Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker) and moving on to significant thematic force-fields and faultlines such as the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel/Palestine. The book also covers the new generation of British-Jewish playwrights, with a special emphasis on the contribution of women writers and the role of particular theatres in the development of British-Jewish theatre, as well as TV drama. Included in the book are fascinating interviews with a set of significant theatre practitioners working today, including Ryan Craig, Patrick Marber, John Nathan, Julia Pascal and Nicholas Hytner. The companion addresses, not only aesthetic and ideological concerns, but also recent transformations with regard to institutional contexts and frameworks of cultural policies.

A Dictionary of Writers and their Works

A Dictionary of Writers and their Works PDF Author: Christopher Riches
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019251850X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 1431

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Book Description
Over 3,200 entries An essential guide to authors and their works that focuses on the general canon of British literature from the fifteenth century to the present. There is also some coverage of non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, and science, as well as inclusion of major American and Commonwealth writers. This online-exclusive new edition adds 60,000 new words, including over 50 new entries dealing with authors who have risen to prominence in the last five years, as well as fully updating the entries that currently exist. Each entry provides details of a writer's nationality and birth/death dates, followed by a listing of their titles arranged chronologically by date of publication.

Political Plays

Political Plays PDF Author: Arnold Wesker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849438986
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Includes the plays Chips With Everything, Their Very Own and Golden City, The Journalists, Badenheim 1939 and, published here for the first time, Phoenix Phoenix, Burning Bright. Described variously as ‘a dangerous playwright, ‘a melancholy optimist’, and ‘the unique outsider in the British Theatre’, Arnold Wesker is one of Britain’s most celebrated playwrights. This latest volume in Oberon Books’ Wesker series brings together five of his political plays. It features some of his best-known works including Chips With Everything, perhaps the most celebrated of his plays, and about which Harold Hobson, writing in The Sunday Times in 1961, said ‘this is the first play of which the Establishment need be afraid.’