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John Osborne (1929-1994), unapologetic rebel and original Angry Young Man, changed the face of modern British theatre forever with Look Back in Anger. An actor turned playwright, Osborne was married five times, his private life generating a tumult and drama to match that of his work. This startlightly candid, authorised but intimate and informal biography is the first to have access to Osborne's own notebooks and private letters, which record for posterity his often anguished nature. It includes personal interviews with scores of his friends and enemies, among them a bombshell of a confession from Osborne's alleged male lover, and the first public comments from his estranged daughter Nolan, who was thrown out of the family home at just sixteen. This is an essential, unorthodox, moving and extraordinarily frank portrait of the man, the playwright and his era.
Conference of the Birds is John Heilpern's true story of an extraordinary journey. In December 1972, the director Peter Brook and an international troupe of actors (Helen Mirren and Yoshi Oida among them) left their Paris base to emerge again in the Sahara desert. It was the start of an 8,500-mile expedition through Africa without precedent in the history of theater. Brook was in search of a new beginning that has since been revealed in all his work--from Conference of the Birds and Carmen to The Mahabharata and beyond. At the heart of John Heilpern's brilliant account of the African experiment is a story that became a search for the miraculous.
John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, shocked and transformed British theater in the 1950s with his play Look Back in Anger. This startling biography–the first to draw on the secret notebooks in which he recorded his anguish and depression–reveals the notorious rebel in all his heartrending complexity. Through a working-class childhood and five marriages, Osborne led a tumultuous life. An impossible father, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. His last written words were "I have sinned." Theater critic John Heilpern’s detailed portrait, including interviews with Osborne's daughter, scores of friends and enemies, and his alleged male lover, shows us a contradictory genius–an ogre with charm, a radical who hated change, and above all, a defiant individualist.
The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley An...
This book has been nominated for both the Sheridan Morley Prize for biography, and the Theatre Book Prize. A story of a man whose star rose very quickly and very early, and fell slowly and inexorably. A story of a man who knew himself perhaps too well, but not particularly wisely. It is exhilarating, perplexing and tragic. This new biography offers the most rounded portrait of Osborne yet seen. By embedding him in a social and cultural as well as a biographical context, Whitebrook presents Osborne in a way that has not been attempted before. It is the first book to properly explore the importance of his early collaborative work with Anthony Creighton, his lasting friendship with Pamela Lane,...
From Joan Juliet Buck, former editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue comes her dazzling, compulsively readable memoir: a fabulous account of four decades spent in the creative heart of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, chronicling her quest to discover the difference between glitter and gold, illusion and reality, and what looks like happiness from the thing itself. Born into a world of make-believe as the daughter of a larger-than-life film producer, Joan Juliet Buck’s childhood was a whirlwind of famous faces, ever-changing home addresses, and a fascination with the shiny surfaces of things. When Joan became the first and only American woman ever to fill Paris Vogue's coveted position of...
Well-known playwright and acerbic wit, John Osborne was a man of trenchant opinions which he was unafraid to express. Ranging from his infamous 1961 letter to Tribune which provides the book with its title to columns written in the last decade of his life, the prose on offer here bear witness to the rage, fury - and great tenderness - that inspired so much of his work.
Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality is as disturbing today as when it was first produced Wedekind's notorious play Spring Awakening was written in 1891 but had to wait the greater part of a century before it received its first complete performance in Britain, at the National Theatre in 1974. The production was highly praised, much of its strength deriving from this translation by Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond Pablé, 'scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry.' The Times This translation of Spring Awakening was first performed at the National Theatre, London on 24 May 1974. For this edition the translator, Edward Bond, has written a note on the play and a factual introduction to Wedekind's life and work.
This collection of specially written essays offers both student and theatregoer a guide to one of the most celebrated American dramatists working today. Readers will find the general and accessible descriptions and analyses provide the perfect introduction to Mamet's work. The volume covers the full range of Mamet's writing, including now classic plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, and his more recent work, Boston Marriage, among others, as well as his films, such as The Verdict and Wag the Dog. Additional chapters also explore Mamet and acting, Mamet as director, his fiction, and a survey of Mamet criticism. The Companion to David Mamet is an introduction which will prepare the reader for future work by this important and influential writer.