Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English playwright and, early in his career, actor.
The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written by William Wycherley and first performed in 1675. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. The title contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of "country". It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes. It turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men. The implied condition the Rake, Horner, claimed to suffer from was, he said, contracted in France whilst "dealing with common women". The only cure was to have a surgeon drastically reduce the extent of his manly stature; therefore, he could be no threat to any man's wife.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Sir David Rippon Hare is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. Best known for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hoursin 2002 and The Reader in 2008.
Top Girls is a 1982 play by Caryl Churchill. It centres on Marlene, a career-driven woman who is heavily invested in women's success in business. The play examines the roles available to women in old society, and what it means or takes for a woman to succeed. It also dwells heavily on the cost of ambition and the influence of Thatcherite politics on feminism.
The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a non-commercial West End theatre in Sloane Square, London, England. In 1956 it was acquired by and remains the home of the English Stage Company, which is known for its contributions to contemporary theatre and won the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities in 1999.
Thomas Edward Bond was an English playwright, theatre director, poet, dramatic theorist and screenwriter. He was the author of some 50 plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. His other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1975), Restoration (1981), and the War trilogy (1985). Bond was broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.
Fuenteovejuna is a play by the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. First published in Madrid in 1619, as part of Docena Parte de las Comedias de Lope de Vega Carpio, the play is believed to have been written between 1612 and 1614. The play is based upon a historical incident that took place in the village of Fuenteovejuna in Castile, in 1476. While under the command of the Order of Calatrava, a commander, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, mistreated the villagers, who banded together and killed him. When a magistrate sent by King Ferdinand II of Aragon arrived in the village to investigate, the villagers, even under the pain of torture, responded only by saying "Fuenteovejuna did it."
Vinegar Tom is a 1976 play by the British playwright Caryl Churchill. The play examines gender and power relationships through the lens of 17th-century witchcraft trials in England. The script employs features of the epic theater associated with German playwright Bertolt Brecht, particularly through use of song as well as the added anachronism of the actors, who performed music in modern dress, despite the play's 17th century setting. There were seven songs and twenty-one scenes. The play's title comes from the name of one character's pet cat, supposed to be her familiar spirit, likely inspired by the supposed imp of one Elizabeth Clarke, a woman tried and executed for witchcraft in Essex in 1645.
Via Dolorosa is a play by British dramatist David Hare, in the form of a monologue. It deals with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through Hare's own 1997 journey through Israel and Palestine, and the 33 people whom he met.
Martin Andrew Crimp is a British playwright.
Our Country's Good is a 1988 play written by British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, adapted from the Thomas Keneally novel The Playmaker. The story concerns a group of Royal Marines and convicts in a penal colony in New South Wales, in the 1780s, who put on a production of The Recruiting Officer.
Maxwell Robert Guthrie Stewart "Max" Stafford-Clark is a British theatre director.
Portable Theatre Company was a writer-led company that toured alternative arts venues in the UK between 1968 -1973. Their aim was to present original and provocative new writing that challenged the staid mediocrity of mainstream theatre.
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? is a 2006 political play with eight scenes by Caryl Churchill. It addresses the application of power by the United States mostly since the Vietnam War. Critics' responses to the play are divided.
Edith Ailsa Geraldine Craig, known as Edy Craig, was a prolific theatre director, producer, costume designer and early pioneer of the women's suffrage movement in England. She was the daughter of actress Ellen Terry and the progressive English architect-designer Edward William Godwin, and the sister of theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig.
My Zinc Bed is a play by the British playwright David Hare. It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000 and its three characters were played in that production by Tom Wilkinson, Julia Ormond and Steven Mackintosh, with Hare himself directing. It was adapted into a television film, in 2008.
Vassily Vladimirovich Sigarev is a Russian playwright, screenwriter and film director. His plays Plasticine, Black Milk and Ladybird were first produced in the West by the Royal Court Theatre, in 2002, 2003 and 2004, respectively. In 2002, Sigarev was named the winner of the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright given out by the Evening Standard for Plasticine.
Journey Among Women is a 1977 Australian film directed by Tom Cowan.
Midsummer Mischief is a series of four plays performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place and the Royal Court Theatre in 2014.
