You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A new play about the conflict between a West-Indian woman and her English-born daughters.
The Alfred Fagon Award-winning play that retells British history through the prism of the slave trade.
A kaleidoscopic look at black female drug smugglers shuttling between Jamaica and London, sometimes ending up in jail, never meeting the top people, dreaming of a new life.
The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years. It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates abou...
How to Not Sink by Georgia Christou looks at duty, love and dependency across three generations of women. In Wilderness by April De Angelis, a patient and her psychiatrist head into the wilderness to find out how sane any of us really are. In Chloe Todd Fordham’s The Nightclub, three very different women at a gay nightclub in Orlando are caught up in a terrifying hate crime. Fucking Feminists by Rose Lewenstein is a fiercely funny investigation of what feminism means, and what it has become. Winsome Pinnock’s Tituba is a one-woman show about Tituba Indian, the enslaved woman who played a central role in the seventeenth-century Salem Witch Trials. In The Road to Huntsville by Stephanie Ridings, a writer researching women who fall in love with men on death row finds herself crossing the line. White Lead by Jessica Siân explores the expectations and responsibilities of being an artist and a woman. In What is the Custom of Your Grief? by Timberlake Wertenbaker, an English schoolgirl whose brother has been killed on active duty in Afghanistan is befriended online by an Afghan girl. -- Publisher website
The first drama anthology by Black and Asian women writers.
'I am the slave ship. Wrecked. Empty. I am a shark, livid with the desire for blood. I am the sea, boiling with fury.' Amid the gloom of Victorian England, a black sailor, Thomas, prepares to take one last voyage, while an ageing painter, J.M.W. Turner, seeks artistic inspiration in a half-remembered story. In twenty-first-century London, an actress finds herself handcuffed by history - two centuries after abolitionists won her ancestors their freedom. Winsome Pinnock's astonishing play retells British history through the prism of the slave trade. Fusing fact with fiction, past with present, the powerfully personal with the fiercely political, Rockets and Blue Lights asks who owns our past - and who has the right to tell its stories? Winner of the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, the play opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in March 2020, directed by Miranda Cromwell. 'The godmother of Black British playwrights' Guardian
Clean Break is a British theatre company set up in 1979 by two women in prison. It exists to tell the stories of women with experience of the criminal justice system and to transform women's lives through theatre. Over 40 years, Clean Break has commissioned some of the most progressive and brilliant women writers to write ground-breaking plays, alongside developing the writing skills of the women they work with in its London studios and in prisons. This is a collection of monologues from this canon. Rebel Voices: Monologues for Women by Women celebrates the opportunities inherent when women represent themselves. Offering female performers a diverse set of monologues reflecting a range of characters in age, ethnicity and lived experience, the material is drawn from a mix of published and unpublished works. This book is for any performer who does not see themselves represented in mainstream plays, for lovers of radical women's theatre and for rebels everywhere who believe that the act of speaking and being heard can create change.
I want to find it all now know our names know the others in history so many women have been lost at sea so many stories have been swept away Chiaroscuro: (noun) the treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting. Aisha, Yomi, Beth and Opal couldn't be more different, but when Aisha hosts a dinner party, the friends soon discover that they're all looking for an answer to the same question. Does it lie in Aisha's childhood? Or in Beth and Opal's new romance? Who will tell them who they really are? What starts out as a friendly conversation between women, soon turns heated when Yomi reveals what she really thinks about Beth and Opal's relationship. A searing, tender look at queer Black womanhood by award-winning writer and Scots Makar Jackie Kay.
Women playwrights speak about their art and the theatre in this collection of interviews about a key decade of British drama. Twenty leading contemporary dramatists discuss their work from the perspective of being both writers and women. Each talks about the state of the theatre now, the craft of playwrighting, and the pressures of working within a male dominated environment. The book also features Sarah Kane's very last public interview. 'What I think is so exciting about the response to a number of the plays written by women in the last ten years is that they are popular with audiences - because they've got this quality, this energy and this culture that hasn't been seen much on stage before: a humour, sexiness and wit that's been missing' - Charlotte Keatley