Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (NHB Modern Plays)

Caryl Churchill

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, set during the English Civil War, tells the story of the men and women who went into battle for the soul of England. Passionate, moving and provocative, it speaks of the revolution we never had and the legacy it left behind.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, England stands at a crossroads. Food shortages, economic instability, and a corrupt political system threaten to plunge the country into darkness and despair.
The Parliament men who fought against the tyranny of the King now argue for stability and compromise, but the people are hungry for change.
For a brief moment, a group of rebels, preachers, soldiers and dissenters dare to imagine an age of hope, a new Jerusalem in which freedom will be restored to the land.
Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1976, the play was revived at the National Theatre in 1996 and again in 2015, in a production directed by Lyndsey Turner.
Available since: 04/16/2014.
Print length: 80 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Wild Duck - cover

    The Wild Duck

    Henrik Ibsen

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The Wild Duck (1884) (original Norwegian title: Vildanden) is by many considered Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income. 
     
    Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear. (Summary by Wikipedia) 
     
    Cast  
    Narrator: KristingjWERLE, a merchant, manufacturer, etc.: Algy PugGREGERS WERLE, his son: David GoldfarbOLD EKDAL: LewisHIALMAR EKDAL, his son, a photographer: Marty KrisGINA EKDAL, Hjalmar's wife: Helen FalconerHEDVIG, their daughter, a girl of fourteen: ChyAnne DonnellMRS. SORBY, Werle's housekeeper: Carol BoxRELLING, a doctor & A SHORT-SIGHTED GENTLEMAN: Lars RolanderMOLVIK, student of theology & ANOTHER WAITER: David LawrenceGRABERG, Werle's bookkeeper: AvaillePETTERSEN, Werle's servant: DublinGothicJENSEN, a hired waiter: Max KörlingeA FLABBY GENTLEMAN: Leonard WilsonA THIN-HAIRED GENTLEMAN: Martin GeesonAudio edited by: Algy Pug
    Show book
  • Eunoia - The Upgraded Edition - cover

    Eunoia - The Upgraded Edition

    Christian Bock

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002)
     
    Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram.
     
    The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapteris a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!).
     
    Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008.
     
    This new edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bok and an expanded afterword.
     
    'Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.' —Samuel Delany
     
    'Eunoia takes the lipogram and rendersit obsolete.' —Kenneth Goldsmith
     
    'A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.' —Harry Mathews
     
    'An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' —Charles Bernstein
     
    'Bök's dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.' —The Times
     
    'A resounding success ... brilliant.' —The Guardian
     
    'Brilliant ... beautiful and strange.' —Today Programme, BBC Radio 4
     
    'Impressive.' —Sunday Telegraph
     
    'No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it's an ingenious little novel ... playful and irreverent ... charming.' —Metro
    Show book
  • King Lear - cover

    King Lear

    William Shakespeare

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    I am a man more sinned against than sinning. 
    A Shakespeare Society Production. 
    The complete play in five acts.
    Show book
  • The Kingdom of Surfaces - Poems - cover

    The Kingdom of Surfaces - Poems

    Sally Wen Mao

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of Through the Looking-Glass, set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the eponymous China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.
    Show book
  • LibriVox 5th Anniversary Collection Vol 3 - cover

    LibriVox 5th Anniversary...

    Various Various

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    What do you do for a fifth anniversary? We decided to have a collection of short works with a difference. We challenged our readers to find any short works which had 'five' in the title - in any language. They have done us proud, and the collection extends to three volumes of short stories, poems, fairy tales, memoirs, non-fiction and bible readings, in six languages.  This is the third volume. (Summary by Ruth Golding)See also Volume 1 & Volume 2.
    Show book
  • Be My Baby (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

    Be My Baby (NHB Modern Plays)

    Amanda Whittington

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A poignant drama about attitudes to teenage pregnancy in 60s Britain.
    Be My Baby follows the fortunes of Mary Adams, aged 19, unmarried and seven months pregnant. Forcibly sent to a Mother and Baby Home in the north of England by a mother intent on keeping up appearances, Mary - along with the other girls in the home - has to cope with both the shame and the dawning realisation that she will have to give the baby up for adoption whether she likes it or not. Despite this - and an overbearing matron - the girls' youthful effervescence keeps breaking through as they sing along to the girl-group songs of the period.
    Be My Baby was first performed at the Pleasance Theatre, London, in November 1998.This edition includes new scenes added for several successful revivals of the play.
    'you don't have to be young, female or unmarried to find it immensely touching' The Times
    Show book