The Big House Anthology is a celebration of the last decade of work and plays by a unique theatre company, featuring five original plays that offer a chance for stories with diverse casts to contribute to the canon of theatre's literature. As a UK-based theatre company, The Big House empowers care leavers and other disadvantaged young people through performance and long-term support. Their plays are born from the hearts and minds of the young people they engage, with this anthology offering five very different plays: a runner struck down by MS; a rapper who spits and snarls and tries to find it in herself to forgive; a teenager who fights for wealth, status and respect in the underworld of county lines; a cackling cowboy they call Corona; and a dog that has been tracked, murdered and stuck in a stew. This anthology celebrates the explosive creativity that comes from mobilising and platforming diverse voices, and its importance in generating social change. Framed and introduced by directors and writers discussing their practice, along with an introduction by Jez Butterworth, this is a book for students, educators, artists, theatre-practitioners, social workers and storytellers to tell stories that are rarely told, let alone with such fierce authenticity.

Six Ensemble Plays for Young Actors is an anthology of work written for actors aged 11-25. Ideal for youth theatre groups, schools and amateur dramatic companies, it contains a diverse selection of plays suited to large casts and ensemble performance. Varying in style and subject matter, the plays offer performers, directors and designers a range of exciting challenges: from recreating the mythological world of The Odyssey to a dramatisation of two hundred years of slavery that will take the audience on a journey from eighteenth century Africa to 1990s London in Sweetpeter. Contemporary urban living is confronted in plays ranging from the starkly realistic to the playful, lyrical and surrealistic. From the innocent and imaginative world of a school playground to issues of racism, peer pressure, crime and communication in a mobile phone obsessed culture, this is a wide-ranging anthology that will enrich the repertoire of youth theatre groups and the curriculum in schools. The volume is introduced by Paul Roseby, artistic director of the National Youth Theatre.

In their exposé of Gen Z, The New York Times qualified its members as the “most diverse generation in American history". Recent Broadway hits have found a successful formula in productions showcasing the emotional turmoil of contemporary young people, yet the majority of these works represent predominantly white voices, both in terms of authorship and representation. Non-white characters tend to exist only in a world of colorblind casting rather than speaking to their distinct racial and cultural heritage. This anthology helps correct that balance and presents a unique offering of plays written for multicultural teenagers by diverse authors who have spent a significant part of their careers working closely with young people in urban settings. The playwrights - among them award winners such as Chisa Hutchinson and Nilaja Sun - have created texts that are dramatic and comic, satirical and earnest, touchingly real, and amusingly surreal. Varying in length and format, suitable for classrooms and youth groups of all sizes, the plays address such themes as ethnic and cultural identity; ancestry and assimilation; bullying and self-empowerment; disenfranchisement and alienation; parental pressure to over-achieve, youth activism and community-building; and the very real perils of daily school life in an era of gun proliferation.

This brilliant new collection of ten plays for young people will prove indispensable to schools, colleges and youth theatre groups. Specially commissioned by the National Theatre for the Connections Festival 2012 involving 200 schools and youth theatre groups across the UK and Ireland, each play is accompanied by production notes and exercises. Power struggles, rites of passage, love and forbidden relationships are some of the rich themes that run through the 2012 cycle of plays. Some are deeply funny, some are provocative and some reflective; and one has really catchy songs! For the 2012 Festival, the anthology has an international feel and offers a window on the world. It includes from Australia a play based on a nineteenth century court case in which a teenage girl was falsely convicted; from Brazil a drama about young lovers doomed to tragedy; set in Russia, a play exploring differing attitudes to National Service and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; a drama about students' rights to an education and the Cultural Revolution of 1966 in China; and a comedy involving a group of Irish country girls travelling to London to audition for the X-Factor.

Nominated for ten UK book awards, Theresa Breslin's hit novel tells of how two young boys - one Rangers fan, one Celtic fan - are drawn into a secret pact to help a young asylum seeker in a city divided by prejudice. Now adapted for the stage by Martin Travers, the play has already been produced to great acclaim at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre. Graham and Joe just want to play football and be selected for the new city team, but a violent attack on Kyoul, an asylum seeker, changes everything when they find themselves drawn into a secret pact to help the victim and his girlfriend Leanne. Set in Glasgow at the time of the Orange Order walks, Divided City is a gripping tale about two boys and how they must find their own way forward in a world divided by difference. This educational edition has been prepared by national Drama in Secondary English experts Ruth Moore and Paul Bunyan. Published in Methuen Drama's Critical Scripts series the book: - meets the curriculum requirements for English at KS3, GCSE and Scottish CfE. - features detailed, structured schemes of work utilising drama approaches to improve literary and language analysis - places pupils' understanding of the learning process at the heart of the activities - will help pupils to boost English GCSE success and develop high-level skills at KS3 - will save teachers considerable time devising their own resources.

This abridged edition is designed for schools and has been adapted for 10 actors playing all of the roles. With a running time of just 90 minutes it is suitable for performance in non-theatre spaces, with minimal technical requirements. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time brings Mark Haddon's best-selling novel to life on stage, adapted by two-time Olivier Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens. Winner of seven Olivier Awards including Best Play, along with the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League and Tony Awards for Best Play, this remarkable and exhilarating "theatrical masterpiece" originated at London's Royal National Theatre in 2012 before going on to transfer to the West End for multiple seasons, followed by its acclaimed Broadway run. The play has now been seen on five continents around the world with major productions ranging from Mexico, Australia, Canada, Seoul and Japan. This brand new edition of the play has been abridged specifically with schools in mind and published following a 12-week tour of 60 secondary schools in the UK. The play tells the story of Christopher John Francis Boone, who is fifteen years old. He stands besides Mrs Shears' dead dog, Wellington, who has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in a book he is writing to solve the mystery of who killed Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain and is exceptional at maths while ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventured alone beyond the end of his road, he detests being touched and distrusts strangers. But his detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that upturns his world.

A dazzlingly diverse anthology of thirty-five short plays spanning the theatrical spectrum. A ten-minute play is a blaze of theatrical energy. In this follow-up to their groundbreaking collection Take Ten, editors Eric Lane and Nina Shengold have put together a veritable bonfire of talent. Take Ten II: More 10-Minute Plays provides a fast-track tour of the current theatrical landscape, from the slapstick ingenuity of David Ives’ Arabian Nights to the searing tension of Diana Son’s 9/11 drama The Moon, Please, to Susan Miller’s luminous fable The Grand Design. This remarkably diverse anthology includes thirty-five short plays by such major American playwrights as Christopher Durang, Warren Leight, Romulus Linney and Donald Margulies, alongside a host of exciting new voices. Actors, directors, producers and teachers will find Take Ten II an invaluable source of meaty roles for people of every age, ethnicity and gender; lovers of theatre will find it a richly satisfying read. These deceptively short plays throb with life in all its variety: harrowing, hilarious, and breathtakingly vital. Playwrights included: Taylor Mac Bowyer Laura Shaine Cunningham Anthony David Steven Dietz Christopher Durang Linda Eisenstein Simon Fill Craig Fols Sigrid Heath David Ives Caleen Sinnette Jennings Honour Kane Eric Lane Edward Bok Lee Warren Leight Romulus Linney Donald Margulies Susan Miller Chiori Miyagawa Itamar Moses Sean O'Connor Mark O'Donnell Dael Orlandersmith Rich Orloff Joe Pintauro Craig Pospisil Toni Press-Coffman Claire Reeve Elaine Romero Susan Sandler Nina Shengold Diana Son Alison Weiss Mary Louise Wilson Garth Wingfield Alexander Woo From the Trade Paperback edition.