Books in the Student Editions series

An expertly annotated edition of the classic American text A Raisin in the Sun: exploring the politics, context and themes of this important dramatic work.

A play which looks at the political costs of women rising to the top. This volume is published in the Student Edition series and as well as the text of the play there is a chronology of the playwright's life and work, an introduction giving the theatrical and social content of the play and questions for study.

The classic satire about what would happen if the Second Coming of Christ occurred in South Africa

This is a adaptation of Carlo Goldini's 18th century comedy about a wily servant who gets the best of his masters by hook and crook.

The story is of one of the most famous investigations ever conducted by science into the mysteries of the world - and its disastrous ending in the even stranger mysteries of the world within.

Hedda is an intelligent and ambitious woman, trapped in the stifling environment of a bourgeois 19th-century marriage. When writer Eilert Loevborg, an old flame returns to Hedda's life with a masterpiece that might threaten her husband's career, Hedda decides to take drastic and fatal action.

In John Willett's translation, this edition contains expert notes on the author's life and work, historical and political background to the play, photographs from stage productions and a glossary of difficult words and phrases

A reissue of Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo's play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist - a sharp satire on police corruption. The play concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who, in 1969, 'fell' to his death from a police headquarters' window.

In this play a man is dead, and the life of another is at stake. A guilty verdict seems a foregone conclusion, but Juror Number Nine confronts the ignorant prejudice of some of his fellow members, and a fierce conflict ensues.

A Student Edition of Brecht's series of inter-connected playlets that describes events which took place in German households under the rise of the Nazis. The text of the play is accompanied by an extensive commentary and study notes.

"Antigone" was originally produced in Paris in 1942, when France was an occupied nation and part of Hitler's Europe. The play depicts an authoritarian regime and the play's central character, the young Antigone, mirrored the predicament of the French people in the grips of tyranny.

Repackaged and reissued, this is Brecht's classic interpretation of John Gay's The Beggars Opera. It is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, married with the jazz music of Kurt Weill. The text is accompanied by Brecht's original notes.

Barber Shop Chronicles is a generously funny, heart-warming and insightful new play set in five African cities, Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, Accra, and in London

An all-pervasive fear of the future and a guilty pleasure in the excesses of the present drive Mike Bartlett's epic rollercoaster of a play from 1968 to 2525 and back again.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag her manipulative ageing mother whose interference in Maureen's first and potentially last loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that is as gothically funny as it is horrific.

Who knocked Wee Thomas over on the lonely road on the island of Inishmore, and was it an accident? "Mad Padraig" will want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves that cat more than life itself.

'One way of describing Educating Rita would be to say that it was about the meaning of education ... Another would be to say that it was about the meaning of life. A third, that it is a cross between Pygmailion and Lucky Jim. A fourth, that it is simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending.' Sunday TimesThis new student edition includes an introduction covering the play's context; chronology; dramatic devices; critical reception; production history; and key themes such as class and identity, popular culture and education. Educating Rita portrays a working-class Liverpool woman's hunger for education. It premiered at the RSC Warehouse, London, in 1980 and won the SWET award for Best Comedy of the Year. It was subsequently made into a highly successful film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters and won the 1983 BAFTA award for Best Film.Commentary and notes by Katie Beswick, University of the Arts London.

"The Price is one of the most engrossing and entertaining plays that Miller has ever written." - The New Uork TimesWhen patriarch of the Franz family dies, his two sons return home to dispose of the furniture crammed in his attic: one is a successful surgeon, the other gave up everything to support their father following the Great Depression. As the pair sort through these abandoned belongings, frustrations, secrets and surprise guests are uncovered.With its touching and farcical presentation of American life beyond the Vietnam War and Great Depression, The Price is widely recognised as one of Miller's major works, earning him a Tony Award nomination in 1968.This Methuen Drama Student Edition is edited by Yuko Kurahashi, with commentary and notes that explore the play's production history (including excerpts from interviews with the director and designers of the 2017 Arena Stage production) as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

Jew is only the name we give to that stranger. Each man has his Jew; it is the other. And the Jews have their Jews.Arthur Miller's largely forgotten masterpiece, Incident at Vichy is a prescient examination of the evil that exists in us all, inspired by a real-life incident in France in which a Gentile gave a Jew his identity pass during a check, which would have resulted in the Jew otherwise being sent to a concentration camp.This Methuen Drama Student Edition of the play includes commentary and notes by Joshua Polster, Emerson College, US, which investigate the politics of the play in the context of the African-American civil rights movement happening at the time; the Vietnam War; The House Committee on Un-American Activities; and the murder of Kitty Genovese, as well as exploring Miller's own relationships that were central to the play including with psychoanalyst Dr Rudolf Loewenstein, his wife Inge Morath and his friend Elia Kazan.

Follows a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. The woman's barrenness becomes a metaphor for her marriage in a traditional society that denies women sexual or social equality. Her desperate desire for a child drives her to commit a terrible crime.

Tony Kushner's lively version of Brecht's parable of good and evil presented in an English/German parallel text edition with an introduction by Tom Kuhn.

A play for younger people, DNA is a poignant and, sometimes, hilarious tale with a very dark heart. It opened at the National Theatre in February 2008.

A student edition of Marston's classic play

The story of Christy Mahon, a timid peasant youth who is bullied, then rebels. This play of passion, and savage humour disturbed the first audiences at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1907 and led to riots.