Contains the text to two of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's greatest works, a single-act play and a single-person mime sketch. Endgame is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned shack in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who mention their awaiting some unspecified "end" which seems to be the end of...

"Two characters--a woman buried up to her waist in the first act and up to her neck in the second, and a man who revolves around the mound in which she is placed--probe the tenuous connections that hold people to people and people to the universe in Happy Days"--Cover.

Krapp's last tape is a monologue of a man who, after 30 years, plays back the autobiographical tape he had recorded on his 39th birthday. All that fall is about the pilgrimage of an old Irish woman to meet her blind, grumbling husband at the train. In Embers, an old man and his wife ramble on and on. In Act without words I, a man responds to inviting off-stage whistles only to be thrown back from the wings. Act without words II has two men emerging...

Where there is nothing: Paul Ruttledge, a man of wealth, comes to the conclusion, after a long process of development and growth, that riches are wrong, and that the life of the propertied is artificial, useless and inane. The unicorn from the stars: A youth has visions which eventually bring him into conflict with the Crown. He goes into a trance and experiences heavenly visions until two policemen arrive to arrest him. A clash ensues and the youth...

This classic traces the life of Joan of Arc from the time she appears to her regional governor, her visit to the Dauphin (where she is undeceived by his disguise) to the siege of Orleans, coronation at Rheims, trial and recantation, and culminating with her death at the stake. Followed by the famous epilogue regarding her canonization, Shaw explores the themes of faith, nationalism and Protestantism. Called variously "the greatest play in English...

The only extant play by the great Irish novelist, Exiles is of interest both for its autobiographical content and for formal reasons. In the characters and their circumstances details of Joyce's life are evident. The main character, Richard Rowan, the moody, tormented writer who is at odds with both his wife and the parochial Irish society around him, is clearly a portrait of Joyce himself. The character of Rowan's wife, Bertha, is certainly influenced...

"An evocative play about Virginia Woolf's life and relationships with her husband, Leonard, and her lover, Vita Sackville-West." --

Volunteers is set on an archaeological site in a contemporary Irish city centre. For five months, the 'volunteers', who are all political prisoners, have been excavating 'from early Viking down to late Georgian'. All around them is 'encapsulated history, a tangible precis of the story of Irish man'. On the last day of the dig, before the builders move in, the volunteers learn that they have been sentenced to death by their fellow internees for treason....