A Methuen modern play

First staged in Berlin in 1928, 'The Threepenny Opera' remains one of Brecht's most performed plays. Based on John Gay's 18th century satire, 'The Beggar's Opera', the play is a satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic.

Set in Kiev during the Russian revolution White Guard tells a story about the war's effect on a middle-class family and was turned into a hugely successful play on publication. It brought the author overnight success and became 'a new Seagull' for the new generation, although it also received hostile reviews for the sympathetic portrayal of White officers. Paradoxically, The White Guard was one of Stalin's favorite plays. It was banned in 1929, reinstated in 1932 but published only in 1955.

A moving drama of the complexities of marriage and personal transformation. Two men meet in a visitors' room at a mental hospital where their wives are being treated for nervous breakdowns. As the women mutually discover a well-spring of strength and hope inside themselves, they set out to englihten their husbands and transform their marriages.

Also contains The War in Heaven, Angel's Monologue by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard.

'Duck Song' was first produced in 1974 in the dying days of the failing Heath government and the characters represent a society in decline as the younger characters attempt to find a solution through feminism or psychiatry, it presents 'a world to which one cannot relate, which one cannot control, which one cannot understand, and which one cannot manipulate'.