The new collection of plays from multi-award-winning playwright Gary Owen. Includes the plays: Violence and Son, Iphigenia in Splott, Blackthorn, In the Pipeline, Mrs Reynolds and the Ruffian, Love Steals Us From Loneliness and Mum & Dad Violence and Son: People know, you're my boy. And they know better than to lay a fucking finger on you. See? You are safer here with me, than you have ever been.' Liam's 17 years old, loves Dr Who and has lost his mum. He has had to move from London to Wales, to the valleys, to the middle of nowhere, to live with a dad he doesn't know. Whose nickname isn't Violence for nothing. Iphigenia in Splott: What gets me through is knowing I took this pain, and saved all of you from suffering the same.' Stumbling down Clifton Street at 11:30 a.m. drunk, Effie is the kind of girl you'd avoid eye contact with, silently passing judgement. We think we know her, but we don't know the half of it. Effie's life spirals through a mess of drink, drugs and drama every night, and a hangover worse than death the next day - till one night gives her the chance to be something more. This powerful new adaptation of the enduring Greek myth drives home the high price people pay for society's shortcomings. Blackthorn: Kate and Tom with their troubled daughter Evie decide to leave the London rat race and start afresh in the peace of the countryside. They buy a farmhouse in Wales... Watch the drama unfold. Blackthorn is a darkly comic new play by Gary Owen about the clash between the newcomers with their expectations and the way of life a Welsh farmer holds dear . . . In the Pipeline: A massive liquid gas line tears through the countryside of west Wales. Gary Owen opens the doors to three of the residents in the port of Milford Haven, Andrew, Dai and Joan, who are caught in the path of this terrifying phenomenon. Mrs Reynolds and the Ruffian: Friendships grow in the most unlikely of places. Mrs Reynolds is a little old lady. Jay is a troubled youth. When he vandalises her lovingly tended garden, the authorities send him back to help her fix it. It seems a recipe for disaster - but human beings are more complex than the headlines. Love Steals us from Loneliness: A play about the stupid things you do when you're f*cked. A night out. Friends, alcohol, a shit club, a strop - the usual. But tonight is different. Tonight will change things forever. Gary Owen, one of Wales's foremost playwrights, returns to his hometown of Bridgend. The media have told us their Bridgend story, but what will a writer who spent his own teenage years here have to say?

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language. The fifth volume in the Brecht Collected Plays series brings together two of Brecht's best-known and most frequently performed and studied plays: Life of Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children. Galileo, which examines the conflict between free inquiry and official ideology, contains one of Brecht's most human and complex central characters. Temporarily silenced by the Inquisition's threat of torture, and forced to abjure his theories publicly, Galileo continues to work in private, eventually smuggling his work out of the country. As an examination of the problems that face not only the scientist but also the whole spirit of free inquiry when brought into conflict with the requirements of government or official ideology, Life of Galileo has few equals. Mother Courage is usually seen as Brecht's greatest work. Remaining a powerful indictment of war and social injustice, it is an epic drama set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years' War. The plot follows the resilient Mother Courage who survives by running a commissary business that profits from all sides. As the war claims all of her children in turn, the play poignantly demonstrates that no one can profit from the war without being subject to its terrible cost also. The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.

Now in paperback, the long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930s Volume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930s, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus, a starkly pacifist text originally written in response to a commission from Swedish radio, portrays the Roman general tried by the Underworld for his military triumphs. Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, unique in Brecht's work, consists of some thirty short scenes of life under the Nazis between 1933 and 1938, designed for use by groups in exile. Señora Carrara's Rifles is based on J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, but relocated by Brecht in the Spanish Civil War. Also included are two one-act plays, Dansen and How Much is Your Iron?, minor works designed for amateurs in Scandinavia, where the Brechts lived till spring 1941. The volume includes an introduction and notes by Tom Kuhn and John Willett, as well as Brecht's own notes on the texts.

In Killology, players are rewarded for torturing victims, scoring points for “creativity”. But Killology isn’t sick. In fact it’s marketed by its millionaire creator as a deeply moral experience. Because yes, you can live out your darkest fantasies, but you don’t escape their consequences. Out on the streets, not everybody agrees with him. “There is an instinctive revulsion against taking a human life. And that revulsion can be conquered.”

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary and filmic representations of vulnerability depict embodied forms of vulnerability across languages, media, genres, countries, and traditions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The volume gathers 12 chapters penned by scholars from Japan, the USA, Canada, and Spain which look into the representation of vulnerability in human bodies and subjectivities. Not only is the array of genres covered in this volume significant— from narrative, drama, poetry, (auto)documentary, or film— in fiction and nonfiction, but also the varied cultural and linguistic coordinates of the literary and filmic texts scrutinized—from the USA, Canada, Spain, France, the Middle East, to Japan. Readers who decide to open the cover of this volume will benefit from becoming familiar with a relatively old topic— that of vulnerability— from a new perspective, so that they can consider the great potential of this critical concept anew.

Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.

'What gets me through is knowing I took this pain, and saved all of you from suffering the same.' Stumbling down Clifton Street at 11:30 a.m. drunk, Effie is the kind of girl you'd avoid eye contact with, silently passing judgement. We think we know her, but we don't know the half of it. Effie's life spirals through a mess of drink, drugs and drama every night,and a hangover worse than death the next day - till one night gives her the chance to be something more. This powerful new adaptation of the enduring Greek myth drives home the high price people pay for society's shortcomings. Winner of Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards 2015