Other books that might interest you

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  Good Black

  Robert Penn

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  In Pittsburgh in the 1980’s, a young man falls in love with an older woman, and their lives are changed forever.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast production, starring Rolanda Brigham, Yvonne Dabney, Ellis Foster, Donn Carl Harper, Runako Jahi, Audrey Morgan, Kemati Janice Porter, and Valerie Robinson.Directed by Woodie King Jr.

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  Fixer - Poems

  Edgar Kunz

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  From the author of the award-winning Tap Out – “a gritty, insightful debut” (Washington Post) – Edgar Kunz’s second poetry collection propels the reader across the shifting terrain of late-capitalist America.  
   Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet’s estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.

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  Blue Sky (NHB Modern Plays)

  Clare Bayley

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  An exhilarating, challenging new play by Amnesty Award-winning playwright Clare Bayley.
  Isolated airports, midnight landings, secret assignations...how much do we know about what our governments are involved in? And do we want to know - or is it easier to turn a blind eye? Blue Sky is a gripping political thriller about justice, journalism and what might be happening in the English countryside in the dead of night.
  'Bayley shifts fluently between the morality of high politics and the personal variety... painfully convincing.' - Telegraph
  'Skilfully shatters any image of sleepy, bucolic England... the roar of planes will never sound so innocent again.' - The Arts Desk

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  Education Education Education...

  Ensemble The Wardrobe

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  It's May 1997. Tony Blair has won the election and Katrina and the Waves have won Eurovision. Channel 5 is a month old. No one knows who Harry Potter is. Britain is the coolest place in the world.
  At the local secondary school it's a different story. Miss Belltop-Doyle can't control her Year 10s, Mr Pashley has been put in charge of a confiscated Tamagotchi, and Miss Turner is hoping that this muck-up day goes smoother than the last. Tobias, the German language assistant, watches on. Things can only get better.
  Education, Education, Education is The Wardrobe Ensemble's love letter to the schools of the 1990s and asks big questions about a country in special measures, exploring what we are taught and why, and where responsibility lies.
  Inventively theatrical and irreverently funny, Education, Education, Education was co-produced with Royal & Derngate Northampton and Shoreditch Town Hall. It premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017, where it won a Fringe First Award, before touring the UK.
  'A great mix of energy, chaos and passion' - The Times
  'canny, slick work from a company that knows exactly what it is doing' - Guardian
  'Brilliantly handled...superbly drawn...I was riveted' - Spectator

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  The Ballad

  Oscar Wilde, Edna St. Vincent...

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  The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story.  Traditionally they are composed in quatrains, with common meter that follow an a b c b rhyming structure and this, together with the simple language (often the dialect of the region), made them easier to memorise and recite by wandering minstrels as they were passed down orally.   
   
  Originally derived from the Medieval French the name suggests that they were to dance to and whilst widely used around Europe and other parts of the world, became characteristic of British poetry from the Middle Ages to the 19th century when it settled into our current usage of the term as a slow sentimental song. 
   
  By the 17th century the printed version of ballads, often with music and illustration, known as Broadsides or Broadsheets, circulated, probably in their millions throughout Britain and remained popular until the Victorian era when they lost prestige. 
   
  Whether they be folk, literary or lyrical, most ballads contain a self-contained, concise, plot driven story told in the third person narrative, often featuring dialogue and moving at a pace with an emotional urgency to arrive at a dramatic conclusion.  The subject of ballads are limitless and they can be tragic, historical or comic. 
   
  Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal.  We include favourites such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edna St Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee as well as classics such as Sir Patrick Spens, the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats.  There’s many more known and lesser known in this volume celebrating this most popular and accessible poetic form.

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  Heavy Weather (NHB Platform Plays)

  Lizzie Nunnery

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  'The sky. The water. The air. It won't keep snapping back. You can't keep refreshing the screen. A lie is not a white lie, or a half-lie or a false truth or fake news… It's a lie and we call it a lie, or everything's cracking underneath us.'
  Mona is a young woman on the edge. All she sees is the Earth falling apart, but no one really seems to care. Amidst the chaos of competing and contradictory voices, she sets off on a kaleidoscopic journey to find solutions for the planet – and the truth about her family – in the hope that everything might start to make sense again.
  Lizzie Nunnery's Heavy Weather is a powerful, timely play about one girl taking control of her destiny in a world teetering on the brink. It is part of Platform, an initiative from Tonic Theatre in partnership with Nick Hern Books. Aimed at achieving greater gender equality in theatre, Platform comprises big-cast plays with predominantly, or all, female casts, written specifically for performance by young actors.

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