Willy Russell

Willy Russell beschreibt in seinem St?ck ?Educating Rita? die Ver?nderung der Protagonistin, nachdem sie beschlossen hat, einen Bildungsabschluss an der Summer School nachzuholen. Es wird der Versuch unternommen, einen Zusammenhang zwischen Bildung auf der einen und sozialer Stellung auf der anderen Seite aufzuzeigen. Die Ausgabe mit themener?g?nzenden Zusatztexten setzt besondere Schwerpunkte. Neben einem neueren Inter?view mit Willy Russell und aktuellen Informationen zur Bedeutung der Open Univer?sity, wird auch ein st?rkerer Bezug zu Pygmalion von G.B. Shaw hergestellt. (Video-Cassette erh?ltlich bei Lingua Video)

Our Day Out is both funny and poignant, asking what a group of back-street kids from Liverpool can expect beyond a rare 'day out'? 24 parts: 10 adult males, 4 adult females, 10+ children. Age 13+

The heroine in this actor's tour-de-force is an ordinary middle class English housewife. As she prepares egg and chips for dinner, she ruminates on her life and tells the wall about her husband, her children, her past, and an invitation from a girlfriend to join her on holiday in Greece to search for romance and adventure. Ultimately, Shirley does escape to Greece, has an "adventure" with a local fisherman and decides to stay. This hilariously engaging play was a hit in London and New York, performed by Pauline Collins, who later recreated her role on film garnering an Oscar nomination.

Shirley Valentine, 42-year-old put-upon mother and housewife, leaves the drudgery of cooking dinner for her husband, packs her bags and heads for the sun. The note on the kitchen table reads "Gone to Greece back in two weeks." "It is a simple and brilliant idea...the profound and perennial point of the comedy is the problem we seem to have contemplating the idea of a woman alone - in a pub, on a beach, in a restaurant. This is what Shirley learns to combat as she unravels her own sexual and social identity. The play is not only funny, it is also moving." (Michael Coveney, Financial Times) One for the Road "starts...with the mid-life hero torn between the security of married life in a dormer bungalow on a northern housing estate and dreams of being a rucksacked super-tramp. Mr Russell writes with knowledgeable venom about a world where Beethoven Underpass leads to Wagner Walkway and where anyone who doesn't join Weight Watchers or the Ramblers Club is regarded as a social deviant." (Francis King, Sunday Telegraph)

Musical drama / 5 male, 3 female, plus small chorus Scenery: Interiors/ExteriorsBlood Brothers, by the author of Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, is ahauntying rags to riches tragedy of our times. A woman with numerous children to support surrenders one of her new born twins to the childless woman she cleans for. The boys grow up streets apart, never learning the truth but becoming firm friends and falling in love with the same girl. One prospers while the other falls on hard times. A narrator warns that a price has to be paid for separating twins: the life of the blood brothers who die on the day they find out they are related."The most exciting thing to have happened to the English musical theatre for years."-Punch "A full bodied musical, a wonderful melodrama that is also a thoroughly modern ballad opera."-Wall Street Journal "There are so many good things to shout and sing about in this new musical."-Daily Mail

This cynical play by the author of Educating Rita is a comedy of wedding eve nerves set in the loos of a tacky Liverpool club where Dave and Linda, unbeknownst to each other, are having parties.

This revised version of Willy Russell's much loved play won rave reviews when it opened in Liverpool in 2009. Slightly updated and featuring more songs, it retains all the humour and appeal of the original.This educational edition in Methuen Drama's Critical Scripts series has been prepared by national Drama in Secondary English experts Ruth Moore and Paul Bunyan. Building on a decade of highly effective work and publications endorsed by national organisations and supported by teachers and consultants across Britain, each book in the series: meets the new requirements at KS3 and GCSE (2010) features detailed, structured schemes of work utilising drama approaches to improve literary and language analysis places pupils' understanding of the learning process at the heart of the activities will help pupils to boost English GCSE success and develop high-level skills at KS3 will save teachers considerable time devising their own resources.Mrs Kay's Progress Class are off to Alton Towers - until Mr Briggs gets on board. The destination might have changed in this new version of Willy Russell's classic play, but mixing humour, lively songs and the poignancy of the original, this drama of a class day out to remember is ideal for Year 9 and above.

Frank is a tutor of English in his fifties whose disillusioned outlook on life drives him to drink and bury himself in his books. Enter Rita, a forthright 26 year-old hairdresser who is eager to learn. After weeks of cajoling, Rita slowly wins over the very hesitant Frank with her innate insight and refusal to accept no for an answer. Their relationship as teacher and student blossoms, ultimately giving Frank a new sense of self and Rita the knowledge she so craves. The play became a hit film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters.

Superior council house dwellers Betty, Reeny, Vera and their men regard themselves as a close knit family team despite their concealed jealousies and occasional recriminations. When Betty's daughter Sandra announces she is pregnant and intends to live unmarried with her student lover, the news explodes like an atom bomb.4 women, 5 men