List: British plays

by likeorhate

•  Cavalcade (play)

  Cavalcade is a play by Noël Coward. It focuses on three decades in the life of the Marryotts, a quintessential British family, and their servants, beginning at the start of the 20th century and ending on New Year's Eve in 1929. The play premiered in London in 1931 at the large Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The spectacular production involved a huge cast and massive sets. The play was very successful and ran for almost a year.

  

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•  Toad of Toad Hall

  Toad of Toad Hall is the first of several dramatisations of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. It was written by A. A. Milne, with incidental music by Harold Fraser-Simson. Milne extracted the adventures of Mr. Toad (which form only about half of the original book) because they lent themselves most easily to being staged. Milne loved Grahame's book, which is one of the reasons he decided to adapt it. The play has four main characters: Rat, Badger, Mole, and Toad.

  

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•  Oh! Calcutta!

  Oh! Calcutta! is an avant-garde theatrical revue, created by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan. The show, consisting of sketches on sex-related topics, debuted Off-Broadway in 1969 and then in London in 1970. It ran in London for over 3,900 performances, and in New York initially for 1,314. Revivals enjoyed even longer runs, including a Broadway revival that ran for 5,959 performances, making the show the longest-running revue in Broadway history.

  

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•  Funny Money

  Funny Money is a farce written by Ray Cooney. It premièred at The Churchill Theatre, Bromley, London, England, in 1994, followed by a successful two-year run in the West End. Cooney directed his own play and also played the part of Henry Perkins. In 2006 the play was adapted into a movie starring Chevy Chase.

  

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•  Busman's Honeymoon

  Busman's Honeymoon is a 1937 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her eleventh (and last) featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. It is the fourth and last novel to feature Harriet Vane.

  

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•  The Ruling Class

  The Ruling Class is a 1972 British comedy film, an adaptation of Peter Barnes' satirical stage play which tells the story of a paranoid schizophrenic British nobleman who inherits a peerage. The film costars Alastair Sim, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Harry Andrews, Carolyn Seymour, James Villiers and Arthur Lowe. It was produced by Jules Buck and directed by Peter Medak. Peter O'Toole described the movie as "a comedy with tragic relief".

  

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•  She Stoops to Conquer

  She Stoops to Conquer is a comedy by the Irish author Oliver Goldsmith, son of an Anglo-Irish vicar, first performed in London in 1773. The play is a great favourite for study by English literature and theatre classes in Britain and the United States. It is one of the few plays from the 18th century to have an enduring appeal, and is still regularly performed today. It has been adapted into a film several times, including in 1914 and 1923.

  

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•  The Madness of King George

  The Madness of King George is a 1994 film directed by Nicholas Hytner and adapted by Alan Bennett from his own play, The Madness of George III. It tells the true story of George III's deteriorating mental health, and his equally declining relationship with his son, the Prince of Wales, particularly focusing on the period around the Regency Crisis of 1788. Modern medicine has suggested that the King's symptoms were the result of porphyria.

  

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•  Escape Me Never

  Escape Me Never is a play written by Margaret Kennedy based upon her 1930's novel The Fool of the Family. Set in pre World War I Europe, it tells the story of two brothers (Caryl and Sebastian Durbok) who are composers, share a flat, and are both in love with two women—an heiress and a young innocent. The original West End run of the play at the Apollo Theatre starred Elisabeth Bergner for whom the play was written. The 1935 film was adapted from the play by Robert Cullen and Carl Zuckermann.

  

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•  The Constant Nymph

  The Constant Nymph is a novel by Margaret Kennedy. It tells how a teenage girl falls in love with a family friend, who eventually marries her cousin. The two girls show mutual jealousy over their common love for the man. The novel was a best-seller after it was first published, becoming the first novel of a genre that became might be called 'Bohemian'.

  

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•  Harlequinade

  Harlequinade is a type of theatrical performance piece, originally a slapstick adaptation of the Commedia dell'arte, which dates back to Italy in the 16th century. The story revolves around the lives of its five main characters: Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine, Clown, and Pantaloon. The British harlequinade, beginning in the 18th century, involved a series of scenes interwoven with scenes from a serious play based on a myth or folklore.

  

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•  Amongst Barbarians

  Amongst Barbarians is a play (1989) by British playwright Michael Wall first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester prior to a transfer to the Hampstead Theatre in London; and a British made-for-TV movie (1990) directed by Jane Howell starring David Jason, Anne Carroll, Rowena Cooper, Con O'Neill and Lee Ross.

  

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•  Not About Heroes

  Not About Heroes is a drama by Stephen MacDonald about the real-life relationship between the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1982. The play has only two characters: Owen and Sassoon. The story of their friendship is told in a series of flashbacks, narrated by Sassoon who survived World War I (in which Owen was killed). Most of the scenes take place during their time as fellow-patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in 1917.

  

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•  The Dumb Waiter

  The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter written in 1957; it premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Club, on 21 January 1960. The critically-acclaimed 50th-anniversary stage revival directed by Harry Burton at Trafalgar Studios, London, from 2 February to 24 March 2007, starred Lee Evans as Gus and Jason Isaacs as Ben.

  

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•  Interlude of Youth

  The Interlude of Youth is an English 16th-century morality play. It is one of the earliest printed morality plays to have survived. Only two or three copies of any edition are known to exist. Waley's edition of the work appeared probably about the year 1554, and has a woodcut on the title-page of two figures, representing Charity and Youth, two of the characters in the interlude.

  

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•  Hot Anger Soon Cold

  Hot Anger Soon Cold is a play written by Henry Chettle, Henry Porter and Ben Jonson. It is mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary in August 1598. No extant copies of the play are known.

  

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•  The Stepmother's Tragedy

  The Stepmother's Tragedy is a play written by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker. It is mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary in August 1599. No extant copies of the play are known.

  

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•  Patient Grissel

  Patient Grissel is a play by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton. It was mentioned in Henslowe's diary in the entry for December 1599. It was first printed in 1603. The play contains Dekker's poem "Golden Slumbers": Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, Smiles awake you when you rise; Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry, And I will sing a lullaby, Rock them, rock them, lullaby.

  

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•  Mountain Language

  Mountain Language is a one-act play written by Harold Pinter, first published in the The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) on 7–13 October 1988. It was first performed at the Royal National Theatre in London on 20 October 1988 with Michael Gambon and Miranda Richardson. Subsequently, it was published by Faber and Faber (UK) and Grove Press (USA). Mountain Language lasts about 25 minutes in production.

  

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•  Talking Heads (series)

  Talking Heads is a series of dramatic monologues written for BBC television by the acclaimed British playwright Alan Bennett. The two series were first broadcast in 1988 and 1998, respectively. The pieces have since been broadcast on BBC Radio, performed in live theatre, and included on the A-level and GCSE English Literature syllabus. A few episodes also aired on PBS in the United States as part of its Masterpiece Theatre programme.

  

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•  The Birth of Merlin

  The Birth of Merlin, or, The Child Hath Found his Father is a Jacobean play, first performed in 1622 at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. It contains a comic depiction of the birth of the fully-grown Merlin to a country girl, and also features figures from Arthurian legend, including Uther Pendragon, Vortigern and Aurelius Ambrosius. The play was first published in 1662, in a quarto printed by Thomas Johnson for the booksellers Francis Kirkman and Henry Marsh.

  

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•  An Ideal Husband

  An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. The action is set in London, in "the present", and takes place over the course of twenty four hours. "Sooner or later," Wilde notes, "we shall all have to pay for what we do. " But he adds that, "No one should be entirely judged by their past."

  

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•  Love on the Dole

  Love on the Dole is a novel by Walter Greenwood, about working class poverty in 1930s Northern England. It has been made into both a play and a film.

  

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•  The World of Suzie Wong

  The World of Suzie Wong is a 1957 novel written by Richard Mason, which has been adapted into a play, a hit film, and a ballet.

  

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•  Champagne Charlie (play)

  Champagne Charlie is a play in which George Lemon, a popular actor, and The Great Vance, his rival, attempt to out-do the other with drinking songs (a little like some modern rap performances), and this turns into a feud. In this it reflects the 1860s London music hall rivalry between George Leybourne and Alfred Vance. A 1944 film was made based on this play, starring Stanley Holloway and Tommy Trinder, and directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.

  

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