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
Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep (NHB Modern Plays)

Mike Alfreds

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

Five insomniacs try to make it through the night. From dusk to dawn, they struggle with a crisis in their lives which they must resolve by morning. Increasingly conscious of their shortening futures and lengthening pasts, they fill their nights with distracting activities, desperate sleep techniques, evaluations of their lives, delusions, fears, panics and utter foolishness as they prepare to face the day.
Five Characters in Search of a Good Night's Sleep was first performed by ViSiBLE Theatre Ensemble at Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2022, in a production directed by Mike Alfreds. It was devised and written by Mike Alfreds with Sonja Linden and members of the company.
ViSiBLE is a theatre company dedicated to creating performance work that throws fresh perspectives on later life and living longer. A key aspect of its identity is creating work collaboratively, drawing on the creativity and talent of Britain's huge wealth of experienced older actors.
'A masterclass in monologue… an interesting piece of theatre that encourages you to consider the torment of insomnia' - Upper Circle
'The writing is beautifully candid… it's refreshing to see older characters portrayed in a multi-faceted way that explores existentialism and humanity rather than stereotyping and defining them by their age' - North West End UK
'A great example of storytelling, with five sound monologues' - London Theatre Reviews
Available since: 11/10/2022.
Print length: 96 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

    Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in...

    Michel Tremblay

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A bold, quirky play from the renowned Quebecois writer, translated by Martin Bowman & Bill Findlay into a robust earthy Scots.
    On six moonlit Montreal balconies on a sultry summer's evening, eleven people tell their stories of love. Isabelle and Yannick are alive and ecstatic with the thrill of first love. Jeannine and Louise are in torment that their love may be dying. Rose and her son, Mathieu, are suspended in silent complicity, fearful of the other's pain. Gaston and his daughter, Mireille, are caught in a trap of need and blame. Yvon and Gérard are bound to one another through longing and guilt. The Widow sits alone with the memory of a perfect love...
    Inspired by the discovery of a lost mass by Berlioz, Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer dispenses with religion but keeps the ritual to lay its characters bare.
    'Like nothing seen on the Scottish stage before. It is a quirky work that none the less hits home with its classic themes of love, loss and redemption' Mail on Sunday
    Show book
  • Damon Runyon Theater - It Comes Up Mud & Broadway Financier - Episode 16 - cover

    Damon Runyon Theater - It Comes...

    Damon Runyon

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.  Damon Runyon is acknowledged as one of the great writers to come out of twentieth century America.  Runyon's short stories are almost always told in the first person by a narrator who is never named, and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and has no job that can be gleaned from his musings, nor does he admit to any criminal involvement; He’s a bystander, an observer, an average street-corner Joe.  Runyon described himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around".  That line seems to say a lot about Runyon and his life.  It was like you were with him on some street corner hustle or some shady dive and he was filling you in on all the angles, all the gossip, all of life. He was who so many people wanted to be with……or so many people wanted to be.  Of course, the cliché about newspapermen and writers is that they are heavy drinkers, chain-smokers, gamblers and obsessively chase women with a sideline in the gathering of stories and facts and actually getting something written just before the deadline hits. That seems like Damon Runyon and his life summed up in one sentence.  His stories became legendary ways of looking that bit differently at America, of soaking up the atmosphere of a glamorous and rip-roaring age and distilling it into a black and white type or, in our case, The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.
    Show book
  • Everything Must Go - The Life and Death of an American Neighborhood - cover

    Everything Must Go - The Life...

    Kevin Coval

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A unique artistic tribute to a Chicago neighborhood lost to gentrification: “Kevin Coval made me understand what it is to be a poet” (Chance the Rapper, Grammy winner and activist).  Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990s, Coval’s home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters.   Allston’s illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.   “Chicago’s unofficial poet laureate.” —NPR
    Show book
  • Each Day Dies With Sleep - cover

    Each Day Dies With Sleep

    Jose Rivera

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Written by José Rivera, recent Academy Award Nominee for The Motorcycles Diaries, Each Day Dies with Sleep is the story of a young woman’s struggle to find an identity apart from the two men in her life – her father and her husband. Written in Rivera’s typical satiric and super realistic style, this fantastical tragic-comedy leaps from coast to coast, and from one outrageous moment to the next.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Laura Ceron, Noe Cuellar and Frankie Davila.
    Show book
  • Damon Runyon Theater - Melancholy Dane & Brakeman's Daughter - Episode 19 - cover

    Damon Runyon Theater -...

    Damon Runyon

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.  Damon Runyon is acknowledged as one of the great writers to come out of twentieth century America.  Runyon's short stories are almost always told in the first person by a narrator who is never named, and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and has no job that can be gleaned from his musings, nor does he admit to any criminal involvement; He’s a bystander, an observer, an average street-corner Joe.  Runyon described himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around".  That line seems to say a lot about Runyon and his life.  It was like you were with him on some street corner hustle or some shady dive and he was filling you in on all the angles, all the gossip, all of life. He was who so many people wanted to be with……or so many people wanted to be.  Of course, the cliché about newspapermen and writers is that they are heavy drinkers, chain-smokers, gamblers and obsessively chase women with a sideline in the gathering of stories and facts and actually getting something written just before the deadline hits. That seems like Damon Runyon and his life summed up in one sentence.  His stories became legendary ways of looking that bit differently at America, of soaking up the atmosphere of a glamorous and rip-roaring age and distilling it into a black and white type or, in our case, The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.
    Show book
  • Theatre Royal - The Liar & My Uncle Toby - Episode 18 - cover

    Theatre Royal - The Liar & My...

    Henry James, Laurence Sterne

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Theatre Royal. The very name summons up something of grandeur and eloquence. And it was. Hosted by Ralph Richardson, these big-name productions also included the creme de la creme of acting talents from John Gielgud, Robert Morley, and Orson Welles to Trevor Howard, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. They were based on works by the worlds’ leading authors, among them Charles Dickens, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Anton Chekhov.  These are but a few of whose company we shall be keeping as we raise the curtain on our first installment of theatrical history.
    Show book