Kirjahaku

The first collection of plays from one of Britain's finest young writers Spoonface Steinberg, Lee Hall's extraordinary, award-winning play about faith, love and the meaning of life was first broadcast on Radio Four in 1997 to unprecedented acclaim. It "contains a good deal more truth than a thousand lectures on the nature of existence" (Guardian). Cooking with Elvis is an Ortonesque black comedy about the family of a famous Elvis impersonator who is now tied to a wheelchair. "Disgracefully entertaining" (Daily Telegraph); "So sharp it could cut itself as it piles on the humour" (Guardian). Bollocks! is inspired by Ernst Toller's masterpiece Hinkemann. Re-located to Northern Ireland it is an examination of the impotence of lives ruined by war. Also included here are six previously unpublished radio and stage plays that prove Hall's talent as our pre-eminent contemporary writer of black comedy.

A collection of major play adaptations by the author of Billy Elliott MR PUNTILA: "Brecht's Puntila is the Jekyll and Hyde of the class war. When he's plastered this Finnish landowner drips with sugary human kindness; once sober again, he's a tyrannical bastard...Lee Hall mixes in-your-face contemporary slang with endearing jokes...It's not often that you can write 'Bertolt Brecht' and 'knockabout fun' in the same sentence" - Paul Taylor, Independent MOTHER COURAGE: For Mother Courage, war is strictly business - a chance to trade in boots and brandy. She's determined to profit from the thirty years war, while protecting her family from the bloodshed that surrounds them. This is an updated, playable translation. THE GOOD HOPE: A voyage of the Good Hope is a journey on which the life of an entire community depends. A storm rages, the women and children wait ashore, the boat follows the Greenland catch...A SERVANT TO TWO MASTERS: "is wildly and inventively farcical. More surprisingly still, it also contrives to find passages of deep feeling amid the comic mayhem...the tremendously promising Lee Hall, who has come up with a superb new version of the play that brilliantly combines hilarity and darkness". Daily Telegraph

Two comic plays by Lee Hall which have had success at the Edinburgh Festival and are coming to London in February 2000 Cooking with Elvis is a domestic play that is both farcical and upsetting. Mam and Jill live together in an uneasy calm. Jill is overweight and a fiendish cook who whips up one exotic dish after another. Her father (and Mam's husband) is stuck in a wheel chair as the result of a stroke. He can neither speak nor move, but he can hear. He was a famous Elvis impersonator and from time to time steps out of the wheel chair in a series of fantasy scenes to give stirring renditions of some of Elvis's most famous hits. But Mam brings into the house a new young lover whose presence in the house become the source for hilarity and big time trouble. The ending is a deadly one, you can be sure. The play has been compared to the early black farces of Joe Orton. Also included in this volume is Bollocks!, Lee Hall's contemporary version of the Expressionist German playwright Ernst Toller's Hinkemann, which has been updated from twenties Bavaria to contemporary Tyneside.

An award-winning play which took the nation by storm when first heard on BBC Radio 4, now in a new stage version Lee Hall's extraordinary, award-winning play about faith, love and the meaning of life was first broadcast on Radio Four in 1997 to unprecedented acclaim. A monologue by an exceptional autistic seven-year-old girl called Spoonface Steinberg, who is dying of cancer, touched the hearts of all who heard it. It is a moving, funny and exhilarating piece of drama. The radio version was immediately repeated due to popular demand and a cassette of the play was rushed into shops and has sold over 80,000 copies. This play edition was performed in Sheffield's Crucible Theatre in December 1999 and then in London's West End in January 2000 at the Ambassador's Theatre. The production starred Kathryn Hunter."And what was the meaning of all these things? And the meaning was as if you found the spark - and it was finding the sparks inside you and setting them free" (Spoonface Steinberg)

In 1934, a group of Ashington miners and a dental mechanic hired a professor from Newcastle University to teach an Art Appreciation evening class. Unable to understand each other, they embarked on one of the most unusual experiments in British art as the pitmen learned to become painters. Within a few years the most avant-garde artists became their friends, their work was taken for prestigious collections and they were celebrated throughout the British art world; but every day they worked, as before, down the mine.The Pitmen Painters premiered at Live Theatre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in September 2007, before transferring to the National Theatre in 2008.

Listen, girls, if we stick together there's no ways we'll even get to the second round... Young, lost and out of control, a bunch of Catholic schoolgirls go wild for a day in the big city, the singing competition a mere obstacle in the way of sex, sambuca and a night back home with the submarine crew in Mantrap. Funny, sad and raucously rude, Lee Hall's musical play Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, adapted from Alan Warner's novel The Sopranos, premiered at the Traverse Theatre in August 2015, in a production by the National Theatre of Scotland and Live Theatre and transferred to the National Theatre, London, in August 2016. The play won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy 2017 and transferred to the Duke of York's, London, in May 2017 in a co-production with Sonia Friedman Productions.

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.Howard Beale, news anchorman, isn't pulling in the viewers. In his final broadcast he unravels live on screen. But when the ratings soar, the network seize on their newfound populist prophet, and Howard becomes the biggest thing on TV.Adapted for the stage by Lee Hall from the Paddy Chayefsky film, Network premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2017.