British Irish category: 5386 books

This book begins with a simple observation - that just as the theatre resurfaced during the late Renaissance, so too government as we understand it today also began to appear. Their mutually entwining history was to have a profound influence on the development of the modern British stage. This volume...

Rough Breathing is a substantial selection from thirty years of procedurally and formally inventive writing from poet, editor and art critic, Harry Gilonis. A lively, lyrical and clever collection, the poems often cross the boundaries between original and translated works in a variety of intriguing...

Could peace come after? After what? Who will we be? Easter morning, 1916. Gunshots ring out in the Dublin streets. In her suburban sitting-room Hanna prepares for revolution. Frank walks through the crowds calling for peace, while John recalls the trenches and sees a city soaked in blood. Eighteen-year-old...

Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron's notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen "from Kentish town to Pisa." From...

We should all have been taught more of life and less good manners It is three years since Agnes, an artist, left her unfaithful husband Henry. Now he writes to her in her Kensington studio begging to reunite, but Agnes married young; her innocence has gone and her ambition and independence...

The Latest Noel is a collection of poems on subjects as diverse as British Summer Time, car boot sales, the 20th century thinker Georges Bataille, the connection between bird watching and waterfalls and Marxism, Valentine's Day, English folklore, Magpies, extraterrestrials visiting the Earth, and...

A thrilling tale of altruism, greed, and the search for a way to belong. When a British couple are seized by Somali pirates, an East London taxi driver decides to rescue them. Meeting disbelief with determination, he dismisses the fears of his wife and flies out to negotiate their release. Speeding...

Set in a Soho drinking Club just after World War II, this savage, witty slice of Bohemian life in London was reviled by one critic as ‘an insult to the British people’. Its title then was The Pink Room, as close as the law would allow for a play in which one of its central characters is a drunken...

In a fabric shop, a dying mother challenges her daughters to weave her the greatest tale, using nothing more than pieces of cloth. A Fringe First Award-winning play about the power of mythology to change your life. Written in an ensemble storytelling style that will suit younger performance...

The Claim gently invites you into the most British of interviews, then morphs into a dizzying onslaught of bureaucracy and prejudice. A bold, imaginative response to the stories of those seeking refuge in the UK, this play asks what happens when your life is at stake and all you have to save it are your words.

The heartbreaking truth about the lives of women in the criminal justice system is exposed in these six plays by some of the most exciting and distinctive female voices in British theatre. Commissioned and premiered by Clean Break, a theatre and education company working with women whose lives...

Whilst on holiday in India and avoiding his mother's pleas to marry, British-born Asian Nils falls in love with Raj who lives in a house of Hijras (eunuchs). A plan is hatched to smuggle Raj as Nils' wife back to Wembley, and it takes all the resources of Guru Hijra's supernatural support to avoid...

Rodney Ackland is belatedly acknowledged as a master of the British stage, now captivating new audiences. In The Dark River, set in the late thirties, the flamboyant characters are cocooned in a Thames backwater ignoring the turbulent events of a politically unstable Europe. After Octoberntroduces...

An electrifying cabaret about the places we keep in our hearts “We don’t wanna talk about Westminster or Farage or Brussels. We want to talk about us. Here. Cos we’re the bit that matters.” Anna is starting to think she made a mistake in moving to Hull. Steph sees her city changing...