A study of the actor, director, playwright and lyricist, Alan Bennett. Peter Wolfe demonstrates that Alan Bennett's success in many spheres was no fluke, and his theatrical eminence has always been accompanied by awards and professional recognition. His play Single Spies won the Oliver Award as England's Best Comedy in 1989. The casts of his plays, starting with Forty Years On in 1968, have included such luminaries as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates and Daniel Day Lewis. His screenwriting earned The Madness of King George a nomination for an Academy Award. This book seeks to illuminate the writer whose instinct for artistic choices has helped him to succeed on his own terms.

Alan Bennett is perhaps best known in the UK for the BBC production of his Talking Heads TV plays, while the rest of the world may recognize him for the film adaptation of his play, The Madness of King George. O'Mealy points out that Bennett is a social critic strongly influenced by Beckett and Swift, interested in depicting and analyzing the role playing of everyday life, a'la sociologist Ervin Goffman.

This second volume of plays by Alan Bennett includes his two Kafka plays, one an hilarious comedy, the other a profound and searching drama. Also included is An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The fascination of these two plays lies in the way they question our accepted notions of treachery and, in different ways, make a sympathetic case for Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

This collection of Alan Bennett's work includes his first play and West End hit, Forty Years On, as well as Getting On, Habeus Corpus, and Enjoy. Forty Years On 'Alan Bennett's most gloriously funny play ... a brilliant, youthful perception of a nation in decline, as seen through the eyes of a home-grown school play ... a classic.' Daily Mail Getting On Winner of the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award in 1971, Getting on is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law in dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a self-esteeming joke. Habeus Corpus 'After two elegiac comedies about the decline of old England, Mr Bennett has now written a gorgeously vulgar but densely plotted facre that is a downright celebration of sex and the human body ... a combination of hurtling action with verbal brilliance.' Guardian Enjoy Enjoy uncannily foresaw the attitudes to English working-class life now enshrined in themeparks. 'The classic tug in Bennett between childhod Yorkshire and intellectual sophistication has never been better, or more daringly expressed.' Observer

New Theatre Quarterly provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet, and where prevailing dramatic assumptions can be subjected to vigorous critical questioning.

On British television drama in the 1980's

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.

This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive treatment of British and American films adapted from modern British plays. Offering insights into the mutually profitable relationship between the newest performance medium and the most ancient. With each chapter written by an expert in the field, Modern British Drama on Screen focuses on key playwrights of the period including George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward and John Osborne and the most significant British drama of the past century from Pygmalion to The Madness of George III. Most chapters are devoted to single plays and the transformations they underwent in the move from stage to screen. Ideally suited for classroom use, this book offers a semester's worth of introductory material for the study of theater and film in modern Britain, widely acknowledged as a world center of dramatic productions for both the stage and screen.

This is the first book-length study of how point of view is manifested linguistically in dramatic texts. It examines such issues as how readers process the shifts in viewpoint that can occur within such texts. Using insights from cognitive linguistics, the book aims to explain how the analysis of point of view in drama can be undertaken, and how this is fruitful for understanding textual and discoursal effects in this genre. Following on from a consideration of existing frameworks for the analysis of point of view, a cognitive approach to deixis is suggested as being particularly profitable for explaining the viewpoint effects that can arise in dramatic texts. To expand on the large number of examples discussed throughout the book, the penultimate chapter consists of an extended analysis of a single play. This book is relevant to scholars in a range of areas, including linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science.

Stage Right is a refreshingly abrasive account of the state of British theatre since 1979, offering an account of the development of a new mainstream formed in conscious opposition to the work of the politically committed dramatists of the 70s and an analysis of the plays of the most successful playwrights of the new mainstream: Nichols, Gray, Frayn, Bennett, Ayckbourn and Stoppard.