Brenton Plays 1

Howard Brenton is one of Britain's best-known and most controversial dramatists

Christie in Love is based on the story of John Christie, the 19th century serial killer"like Genet, "[Brenton] feels for the outcast...But he's less sentimentally involved with his criminals, clearer about his ultimate strategy to show the unreality of straight lines in a curved universe, of the roles society forces on us" - Observer

"Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am to wreck society", Magificence puts the small people and their protests against the bourgeois state on stage; it was described as "A wonderful piece of theatre; annexing whole new chunks of modern life and presenting them in a style at once fruitful and magnified" - The Times

In The Churchill Play, Brenton brings Churchill back to life to view the future that he invented for England and "Brenton finds a way of making us look again at the past which has shaped the future into which he sees us drifting" - New Society

Weapons of Happiness is "a vision of revolution which is quite extraordinary in its creative ambiguity, its richness, its power to stimulate, to threaten and to inspire" - Sunday Times

Epsom Downs "echoes Bartholomew Fair: a great public festival, held on common land and pulling in punters of every degree...a teaming, Bruegel-like composition" - The Times

The last play in this collection Sore Throats, is a witty and harsh examination of sexual proclivities from within and outside marriage. "No recent play compares for theatrical power and painful bravado" - Observer