Howard Brenton

War rages in the Balkans. While NATO bombs Serbia, the Kosovan Albanians are driven out of their homes. Europe is divided. In homes everywhere, people debate the rights and wrongs of the war. This play reveals the results.

A fascinating portrait of Harold Macmillan in an epic play about the decline of British fortunes in the middle of the twentieth century. Set against a back-drop of fading Empire, war, the Suez crisis, vintage champagne, adultery and vicious Tory politics at the Ritz, Never So Good paints the portrait of a brilliant, witty but complex man, at times comically and, in the end, tragically out of kilter with his times. Harold Macmillan, the Eton-educated idealist who rushed, with Homer's Iliad under his arm, to do his duty in the Grenadier Guards, is tormented by the harsh experiences of war and an unhappy marriage. His career in the 1930s is blocked by his loyalty to Winston Churchill, and he nearly loses his life in the Second World War. When at last he becomes Prime Minister he is brought down by the Profumo scandal. Howard Brenton's Never So Good was first performed in the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre in March 2008, directed by Howard Davies and starring Jeremy Irons as Macmillan.

This title is re-issued alongside its return to Shakespeare's Globe in May 2007: Howard Brenton's take on the Abelard and Heloise story. A new spirit of philosophical and religious enquiry is growing in 12th-century France. In its vanguard is the brilliant Peter Abelard, a man of great learning, independence of mind, and sensuality. He starts a war of ideas with the powerful Abbot and Pope-maker, Bernard of Clairvaux, the arch-priest of medieval mysticism and austerity. But when Abelard begins a wild affair with his equally brilliant but disastrously connected student Heloise, his enemies find just the pretext they need to destroy him. Mainly known for populist Shakespeare in its Elizabethan open-air theatre, the Globe forged into virgin territory in 2006 with this 'first': a new play by a well-known living writer. Its success was such that it is being revived in Spring.

An irreverent and provocative drama questioning the basis of Christianity, by the author of The Romans in Britain. The most famous conversion in history - when Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus - was a trick. It was actually Jesus appearing to him. Jesus did not die on the cross but was rescued and sheltered by his brother James, by Peter and by Peter's wife, Mary Magdalene. But they prefer to keep Paul in the dark because, although he is mistakenly preaching that Christ rose again, at least it keeps him busy and gets the Christian message out there... Now imprisoned by Nero, Peter finally tells Paul the truth before they go to their deaths as the first Christian Martyrs. Howard Brenton's play Paul was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 2005.

Also includes The Stigma Manifesto Pity Tony's nannies at New Labour's Millbank election war-room: they're working night and day to get 'Red Ken' and prevent him from becoming Mayor of London. Suddenly it's Ken, the cuckoo in the nest, who's getting the people's vote and Millbank, charged with plotting his downfall, is getting desperate. Ever more dastardly plots are afoot as the election draws nearer. Snogging Ken was produced at the Almeida in April 2000: 'the first step in the return of democracy to London'.

A collection of writings from one of one of Britain's most controversial playwrights; includes four separate diaries published here for the first time.

An intimate and at times savagely funny psychological study of two sisters, one of who has made her home in East Berlin and one who has stayed on in their native London. Fleeing from an encounter that has destroyed her marriage, Rosa Brine leaves Berlin in the wake of the downing of the Wall and seeks shelter with her sister Alice. But the sinister figure of 'Berlin Bertie' follows and finds her. A turbulent Easter weekend of explosive confrontations ends in an oddly comic kind of salvation. Howard Brenton's play Berlin Bertie was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1992.

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) while 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)