Alice Birch Boeken

"Alice Birch's new play is scored like a piece of music... It is an extraordinary echoing text, full of pain and strange beauty. The three stories play out simultaneously on stage, the dialogue from one scene overlapping with the other two in a manner that borders on the choral... Birch has provided a text that explores these ideas in a formally invigorating way." The StageThree generations of women. For each, the chaos of what has come before brings with it a painful legacy.A powerful, unflinching look at a family afflicted with severe depression and mental illness. Presented as a triptych of plays performed side by side, this groundbreaking play reverberates with audiences and readers. Published for the first time in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features a brand new introduction by Ava Davies.

She can't stay awake. She sold drugs. She's good at interrogations. She drinks in the mornings. She ate a rabbit. She smashed up a shop. She stabbed a man. She used a hammer. She had a baby. She can't find her mother. She's covered in blood and doesn't know why. Alice Birch's heartbreaking new play reaches across society to explore the impact of the criminal justice system on women and their families.

PIG / SISSY: 'Are you finding this harder to hear, is this more difficult on your stomachs because we are women.'This is about pornography.This is an interview. This is an intervention.This is an interrogation.We're recording now.We want to pull its plug out. We want to stop its heartbeat. We want to blow its brains out and begin again.We know exactly what we're doing.We're not stupid. An unsettling, powerful new piece of theatre tackling pornography and violence against women.

Through a series of arresting vignettes and a collection of nameless characters, Alice Birch examines the language, behaviour and forces that shape women in the 21st century. The play asks what's stopping us from doing something truly radical to change them? Written in response to the provocation that well-behaved women seldom make history, the play is an assault on the language that has fueled violence against women throughout history. Problematic language frequently attached to women is interrogated, from lazy sexist clichés to the conventions around a marriage proposal. Through doing so, the play rails against the conventions of work, sex, motherhood, aging and love. Revolt. She said. Revolt again was first performed at the 2014 Midsummer Mischief Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. It transferred to the Royal Court Upstairs and was more recently produced at New York's Soho Rep. It is published here in a Student Edition alongside commentary and notes by Marissia Fragkou, who locates the play in our contemporary political and cultural context (including second- and third-wave feminism, and the #MeToo movement).

Juniper is looking for love, Robert is trying to avoid it, Ollie doesn't know what it is and Meg has resigned herself to never having it. As these four people move through a July day in London, they orbit each other, unaware that they are hurtling towards one moment that could devastate them all. Many Moons opened at groundbreaking Theatre 503 in summer 2011.