Publisher: Enhanced Media Publishing
Finished in 8 AD, Ovid’s The Metamorphoses is an epic and narrative poem of fifteen books, a stunning arrangement of countless mythological tales masterfully connected by the theme of transformation and love.
An eighteen year-old girl, Mary Shelley, dreams up a monster whose tragic story will capture the imaginations of generations to come. A young scientist by the name of Frankenstein breathes life into a gruesome body. Banished into an indifferent world, Frankenstein's creature desperately seeks out his true identity, but the agony of rejection and a broken promise push him into darkness. Dangerous and vengeful, the creature threatens to obliterate Frankenstein and everyone he loves, in a ferocious and bloodthirsty hunt for his maker. Rona Munro's brilliant adaptation of Mary Shelley's Gothic masterpiece places the writer herself amongst the action as she wrestles with her creation and with the stark realities facing revolutionary young women, then and now. 'An inventive feminist adaptation... an exploration and celebration of female creativity' - The StageShow book
Padraig Regan's poems delight in the sensual and the visual: this pamphlet is alive with the textures of paint, sweat, sugar and overripe fruit. Regan riffs on art history in a way which is playful and inquisitive – Johann Zoffany drinks mojitos with David Hockney; Caravaggio outrages and compels; Queen Elizabeth I is effortfully glorious. Many poems focus on the representation of the human body, discovering alternative histories in responses to paintings where the gaze of the male artist is directed towards the male figure in queerly erotic ways.Show book
A young camel disappears from its trainer’s paddock and the coat of a murdered woman is found abandoned in the sand dunes. These seemingly unrelated events are a far cry from the regular police duties of Constable Chris Blackie and his rookie recruit from Melbourne, Anthea Merritt, in the small Australian seaside town of Queenscliff. Little by little and with a burgeoning sense of menace, these two unlikely detectives carefully navigate the eclectic, often eccentric personalities of the town, as well as the disdain of law enforcement colleagues further afield, to uncover the unsettling truth. Described as a ‘sea-change mystery’ Through a Camel’s Eye deftly juxtaposes the idyllic surroundings of a coastal Victorian town with the gravity of murder. “Still, he looked for hoof prints, glad there was nobody to laugh at him for doing so. Chris shaded his eyes and squinted at a dark object, half covered in sand, then began to walk towards it. He should have been wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes, but he never thought of things like that. It was a woman’s coat, black, or at least it had been.”Show book
A gripping historical drama that dramatises a crucial moment of English history. Premiered at Hampstead Theatre in October 2012. December 1648. The Army has occupied London. Parliament votes not to put the imprisoned king on trial, so the Army moves against Westminster in the first and only military coup in English history. What follows over the next fifty-five days, as Cromwell seeks to compromise with a king who will do no such thing, is nothing less than the forging of a new nation, an entirely new world. Howard Brenton's play depicts the dangerous and dramatic days when, in a country exhausted by Civil War, a few great men attempt to think the unthinkable: to create a country without a king. 'A forgotten era of revolutionary British history is fascinatingly unlocked... electrifying.' Whatonstage.com '[A] confident and idea-packed piece... It could have been a dour history lesson. Instead it engages with the present, raising some pungent questions about the kind of democracy we have in Britain today.' Evening StandardShow book
Tracky is a teenage heavy metal fan with life issues. Her mother's an alcoholic. Her father's a taxi driver with delusions of becoming a tour guide. Now they're being pursued by a loanshark. None of this is going to end well... Chris Hannan's play The Evil Doers is a chaotic, violent, comic odyssey through the dismal streets of 1980s Glasgow. 'An alcoholic is not someone who drinks too much; an alcoholic is an emotional whirlwind, a destructive force which tears up everything in his or her path, and then passes, disappears, utterly unaware of the devastation caused. The Evil Doers is about the whirlwind and those in its path.' Chris Hannan First produced at the Bush Theatre, London, in August 1990, The Evil Doers won a Time Out Award, a Plays and Players' Critics Award, and that year's Charrington London Fringe Award for Best Play. 'Uproariously funny... Hannan has a sharp eye for flaky characterisation and a wonderful ear for quirky vernacular dialogue, a sawn-off language of violent verbal collisions, like a pile-up on the motorway… We never quite stop laughing but it becomes increasingly painful to do so, and I suspect that no-one will be able to watch the bruising final scene without physically flinching.' Telegraph 'A gorgeously enjoyable play. As in the comedies of Ben Jonson and Middleton, the hunt for money gives the play its structure. Like Jonson and Middleton also, Hannan owns a penetrating eye for tricks of character and an equally sharp ear... A world of uncertain egos where the characters bounce off each other like bumper cars, powered by sources beyond their control.' The Times 'A vicious and idiosyncratic Glaswegian city comedy.' Observer 'The verve, the iconoclastic humour is tremendous, each character brilliantly personalised.' Herald 'Extraordinary free-ranging vitality.' Independent on Sunday 'No plot description can explain the beauty, warmth and poetic energy of Chris Hannan's The Evil Doers. In its generosity of attention, its expansiveness and richness, in the scale of its emotional intensities, it is as broad as a city itself. It is a modern masterpiece.' Encore Theatre MagazineShow book
This collection is “an astonishing achievement” that renders grief and illness in “supremely lyrical, brilliantly imagined . . . poetry of the highest order” (Connie Wanek). A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick’s Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the “emotional core of the self,” and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In image-packed lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension. Winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry Winner of the Minnesota Book AwardShow book
