A Voyage Round My Father is a funny, subtle, touching portrait of his father's enigmatic endurance.

Includes the playsA Voyage Around My Father, The Collaborators, The Dock Brief, Lunch Hour, and What Shall We Tell Caroline? An unsuccessful barrister and even more unsuccessful murderer are the subject of Mortimer’s first play, The Dock Brief. This was followed by What Shall We Tell Caroline? and then Lunch Hour, another short play, about love and lies in the lunch-hour. The Collaborators covers the wear and tear of married life subsequently united by the threat of a third party. A Voyage Round My Father, one of Mortimer’s greatest theatrical successes, is a celebration of the Shakespeare-quoting, eccentric, brave and impossible barrister the author had as a father.

When it was first published in 1962, Anger and After was the first comprehensive study of the dramatic movement which began in 1956 with the staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and has since brought forward such dramatists as Brendan Behan, Harold Pinter, N. F. Simpson, John Arden and Arnold Wesker. Thoroughly revised in 1969, this book remains important reading for theatre students in need of a comprehensive and authoritative guide to post-Osborne drama in Britain.

In Britain every generation produces a national treasure, a lovable figure so English that he could not possibly be of any other nationality, and Sir John Mortimer is just such a figure.Mortimer has delighted millions all over the world with seven television series about the gloriously larger-than-life fictional barrister Horace Rumpole --- Rumpole of the Bailey --- as well as novels, autobiographies, stage plays, film scripts, short stories, television and radio plays, newspaper articles, and even an opera and a ballet. Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Alec Guinness appeared in his plays, and among his greatest theatrical triumphs is his stage and television play A Voyage Round My Father. He won a British Book Awards trophy for Lifetime Achievement in 2005.Mortimer actually practiced as a barrister for thirty-six years, defending husbands, wives, pornographers, and murderers in court and starring as the real-life "Devil's Advocate" in several legendary obscenity and blasphemy cases in the 1970s, quickly becoming a liberal hero.Yet despite huge success, fame, and knighthood there lurks beneath that genial "champagne socialist" mask an unusually complex man who has been plagued by depression, doubt, insecurity, and an irresistible urge to commit adultery.Biographer Graham Lord, whose discovery that Mortimer had a secret son by the British actress Wendy Craig forced Sir John to admit it publicly in 2004, has interviewed scores of Mortmer's family, friends, mistresses, and enemies to write a frank and vital biography that reveals the startling reality behind the beloved public figure. "Breathless prose and many juicyrevelations-an absorbing read."--Kirkus Reviews

With over 500 entries on the most important plays and playwrights performed today, The Theatre Guide provides an authoritative A - Z of the contemporary theatre scene. From Aristophanes to Mark Ravenhill, The Alchemist to The Talking Cure, the Guide is both biographically detailed and critically current, while an extensive cross-referencing system allows for wider perspectives and new discoveries. Stimulating, observant and informative, The Theatre Guide is an essential companion and reference tool for anyone with an active interest in drama.

This illustrated and fully updated Third Edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the most authoritative and international survey of world literature in English available. The Guide covers everything from Old English to contemporary writing from all over the English-speaking world. There are entries on writers from Britain and Ireland, the USA, Canada, India, Africa, South Africa, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Australia, as well as on many important poems, novels, literary journals and plays. This new edition has been brought completely up to date with more than 280 new author entries, most of them for living authors. The general reader will find it fascinating to browse and to discover many new writers and works, while students will find it an invaluable resource for daily use. This is a unique work of reference for the twenty-first century that no reader or library should be without.

Since the Second World War, we have witnessed exciting, often confusing developments in the British theatre. This book, first published in 1976, presents an enlightening, objective history of the many facets of post-war British theatre and a fresh interpretation of theatre itself. The remarkable and profound changes which have taken place during this period range from the style and content of plays, through methods of acting, to shapes of theatres and the organisational habits of managers. Two national theatres have been brought almost simultaneously into existence; while at the other end of the financial scale, the fringe and pub theatres have kicked their way into vigorous life. The theatre in Britain has been one of the post-war success stories, to judge by its international renown and its mixture of experimental vitality and polished experience. In this book Elsom presents an approach to the problems of criticism and appreciation which range beyond those of literary analysis.