Collection of one-act plays.

A troupe of actors travel through New Zealand in the 1860s and encounter Charlotte Badger, a female convict escaped from Australia.

The Japanese Military Field Code was explicit: 'Japanese forces do not surrender to the enemy under any circumstances.' How then would the eight hundred or so prisoners who found themselves in the first Japanese prisoner-of-war camp anywhere in the world behave? They had been brought from the Soloman Islands to Featherstone in 1942. Six months later an incident occurred in which forty-nine prisoners and one New Zealand guard were killed. Vincent O'Sullivan explores the implications of this event in a play which immediately rises above mere documentation to consider what happens when people of two cultures are brought together in such extreme circumstances, and when even the best intentions of those who try to offer sympathy and understanding fail in the face of ignorance and prejudice.

The product of more than 30 interviews with convicted murderers, their families and the families of murder victims, this work was devised as mixture of documentary and drama to be performed by a solo actor. Miranda Harcourt's performance in prisons and in theatres in New Zealand and Edinburgh has been widely acclaimed. The text of the performance piece is presented, and there is an afterword by William Brandt.

A History of New Zealand Literature traces the genealogy of New Zealand literature from its first imaginings by Europeans in the eighteenth century. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the growth of, and challenges to, a nationalist literary tradition, the essays in this History illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of New Zealand literature, surveying the multilayered verse, fiction and drama of such diverse writers as Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism, biculturalism and multiculturalism in New Zealand literature. A History of New Zealand Literature is of pivotal importance to the development of New Zealand writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

In Wednesday To Come Renée takes four women of four generations in a single family and looks at how they cope with the Great Depression of the 1930's. Working class women, says Renée, have been invisible for too long - not because they are inarticulate but because they are unrecorded. 'I am interested in writing good roles for women, about women we don;t see on the stage but who are all around us.'

The story of a young boy's extraordinary summer on a beach, 'The end of the golden weather' has become a part of New Zealand history, a touchstone of New Zealand experience.--