Jonathan Harvey

From the award-winning author of All She Wants and the writer of Coronation Street and Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, comes this comedy with a huge, beating heart. London 2014. Holly Smith has never fitted in. Adopted when just a few months old, she's always felt she was someone with no history, the girl who just appeared. All she has is the address of where she was born - 32B Gambier Terrace, Liverpool. By a bizarre twist of fate Holly discovers that the flat is available to rent. She travels north and moves in. When she finds a biscuit tin full of yellowing papers under the floorboards, she wonders if this might hold the secret to her past. Liverpool 1981. Fifteen-year-old Darren negotiates life with his errant mother and the younger brother he is bringing up. When the Toxteth Riots explode around him Darren finds himself with a moral dilemma that will have consequences for the rest of his life. Flitting between the present and the past, we discover how Darren and Holly's lives become intertwined. Will Holly uncover the secrets of her past? Or will she always feel like the girl who just appeared?

The Girl Who Just Appeared

Beautiful Thing explores pre-teenage homo-erotic sensuality and the frictions and intimacies of living cheek by jowl on a Thamesmead housing estate.

Beautiful Thing

There are two things you should know about me: My name is Karen Carpenter. Just before Christmas my boyfriend left me. I'm not THE Karen Carpenter. I just have the most embarrassing name in Christendom. Particularly as I'm no skinny minny and don't play the drums. I can't even sing. I'm tone deaf. My Mum's driving me mad. She's come to stay and is obsessed with Scandi crime shows and Zumba. Oh yeah. The boyfriend. After eleven 'happy' years he left me. No explanation just a post it on the kettle when I got in from work. I think I'm handling it really well. I don't think I'm confused at all. What was my name again?

The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

The History of Us

Hello. There are two things you should know about me: 1) My name is Karen Carpenter. 2) Just before Christmas my boyfriend left me. I’m not THE Karen Carpenter. I just have the most embarrassing name in Christendom. Particularly as I’m no skinny minny and don’t play the drums. I can’t even sing. I’m tone deaf. I work in a school in the East End. (Where I came third in a ‘Teacher we’d most like to sleep with’ competition amongst the Year 11 boys) My Mum’s driving me mad. She’s come to stay and is obsessed with Scandi crime shows and Zumba. Oh yeah. The boyfriend. After eleven ‘happy’ years he left me. No explanation just a post it on the kettle when I got in from work. I think I’m handling it really well. I don’t think I’m confused at all. What was my name again?

Helmut Lachenmann

Jonathan Cross

Richard Klein

Albrecht Wellmer

This volume is a collection of essays based on lectures given at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent at various occasions over the last four years.Two of our five distinguished authors are British, three are Germans. Two are prominent composers and both keen and provocative writers about music; one is a musicologist and daring critic who specializes in contemporary music. There are also two philosophers and Adorno specialists that deal with such fundamental and highly complex matters as music and language, and music and time.All authors subscribe to the same seriousness of purpose, so that you may find reminiscences of one text in the others, which will make for a fascinating read. Moreover, this book is all about the current state of music, about thinking, speaking, and writing about music in the immediate aftermath of that stirring and fascinating twentieth century.

Essays on Music, Language, and Time

Identity and Difference

Liverpool 1985 Kathleen, Adam and Jocelyn are three teenage friends who bond over an unconventional nativity play. They all have ambitions, they all have dreams. Adam wants to be a writer, Jocelyn wants to sing and Kathleen - well, she wants to be an embalmer. London 2015 Kathleen is a borderline alcoholic, Adam is holding on to a shocking secret and Jocelyn is dead. Where did it all go wrong? How did having the world at their feet turn into having the weight of it on their shoulders? Filled with Jonathan Harvey's trademark wit, warmth and outrageous humour, The History of Us is a novel about friendship and secrets, the choices we make and the consequences we face.

Years She Stole

It's hard being that woman, the one whose husband disappeared. He went out five years ago for a pint of milk and never came back. So here I am with a daughter who blames me for everything, a son trying his best to pick up the pieces and a gaggle of neighbours who are incredibly nosy. Then I find a left luggage ticket in the pocket of one of his old coats and suddenly I'm thinking... What if he's not dead? What if he's still out there somewhere?

The Secrets We Keep

Jonathan Harvey's most popular plays collected in one volume for the first time. Contains the smash hit plays Beautiful Thing - a bittersweet tale of the joys and trials of living cheek-by-jowl in a Thamesmead housing estate; Babies - based on the playwright's experiences as a teacher which was 'mercilessly robbed from a particular night when I arrived at a pupil's birthday party to be entertained by a drag queen dressed as the Queen'; The Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club - set among the low-life of Soho, centring on the Marti, a gay man of a certain age, who can't believe that anyone might fancy him; and Boom Bang-A-Bang - a play about a gathering to view the Eurovision song contest.

Beautiful Thing; Babies; Boom Bang-a-Bang; Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club

Harvey Plays: 1

There are some things in life you can always rely on. Getting the flu over Christmas, a horny Alsation ruining your best suede boots, and your Mother showing you up in the supermarket. Then there are some things that you really don't count on but they happen anyway. A good dose of fame, getting completely trashed at an awards ceremony, and catching your fella doing something unmentionable on your wedding day. My name's Jodie McGee and to be perfectly frank I've had it all, done it all and messed it all up. This is my story. Read it coz I'm, like, dead famous. But please, don't be too gobsmacked when it all goes tits up. You have been warned... Jodie xx

All She Wants

It's no secret that Sylvie is unravelling. Frozen in time in her Blundellsands house, she inhabits a fantasy world that never was. Garnet, her sister, is older and wiser – and wearier, with her shopping lists and tired love. She's always fanned the flames of Sylvie's fantasies. Because if she didn't... who knows where they'd both end up? But now the whole family's up in Liverpool for a birthday, and Garnet's got a secret of her own to pass on. There'll be a party... but it's not going to be pretty. Welcome to a family more messed up than your own.

Our Lady of Blundellsands

Two gloriously bittersweet plays from the award-winning author of Beautiful Thing and Babies At 15 Rupert Street, Dean is in love with Marti who is in love with Shaun who is in lvoe with Juliet who is in Barbados. Meanwhile George is in love with Malcolm who has left and Clarine just love Jhesus and Zoe Wanamaker. Welcome to the Rupert Street Lonely Hearts Club. Boom Bang-A-Bang is set in Kentish Town on Eurovision night 1995, Lee's first Eurovision party without Michael. He's joined instead by a small but far from select gathering of friends. As the atmosphere heats up reciminations and revelations fly and there will be blood, sweat and tears before the voting of the Belgian jury.

Book-Bang-A-Bang Rupert St Lonely

Jean-Claude Carrière

The opera Wagner Dream, by composer Jonathan Harvey, premiered in 2007. In this cahier, Harvey discusses with his librettist Jean-Claude Carrière the ideas underlying the opera and, in a detailed essay about the undecidability of music, reveals the opera's Buddhist leitmotifs. With images from the opera and explanatory marginalia, this cahier offers a clear insight into the work of one of the foremost contemporary composers of electro-acoustic music.

Circles of Silence

2017 Pregnant Rachel Taylor is enjoying a holiday in Morocco when she gets the phone call to say her mother hasn’t got much time left to live. With a head of mixed emotions she returns to the village where she grew up to say her last goodbyes. It’s true to say their relationship had often been strained and Rachel had never quite understood why. When clearing out her mother’s things she thinks she finds an answer, and her world is changed forever. 1978 Shirley Burke is on a family holiday at Butlin’s when she first sets eyes on Doug, a man considerably older than herself. When his daughter goes missing one night, Shirley’s the one who finds her and returns her to him. When his gratitude turns into something else, Shirley realizes this is her time to shine. But Doug is married, and her young life is about to get very complicated. Rachel and Shirley. Two women from different decades in Jonathan Harvey's The Years She Stole. Somehow their lives are entwined and neither can know the impact one woman will have on the other until it’s way too late . . .

The Years She Stole

Outrageous, bawdy, extremely funny - Gimme, Gimme, Gimme the sitcom starring Kathy Burke and James Dreyus as mismatched flatmates Linda and Tom, who bitch at each other, fight over men, and lead sad deluded lives. They trade vulgar, non-PC insults and bicker endlessly, but the pair are secretly fond of each other and would never dare admit that they are in fact the best of friends.

The Book

Gimme Gimme Gimme

Hushabye Mountain reveals a world that has learned to live with AIDS. It is full of love, pain, laughs and friendship, where drugs in their various combinations are exhilarating, destructive, costly and even life restoring. Hushabye Mountain premiered at the Lyceum Theatre, Crewe, in February 1999, in a production with English Touring Theatre.

Hushabye Mountain

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Maulana)

Music set to words translated into English from a poem by Jalal Al-Din Rumi. This piece was commissioned and first performed by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain in Fiji on 23 July 1996.

For Double Choir (1996)

How Could the Soul Not Take Flight

Howard Brenton

Stacey Gregg

Lucinda Coxon

Lenny Henry

Jemma Kennedy

Anya Reiss

Morna Pearson

Ryan Craig

Jim Cartwright

Drawing together the work of ten leading playwrights – a mixture of established and current writers – National Theatre Connections 2013 offers young performers between the ages of thirteen and nineteen everywhere an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study. Each play is specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department and reflects the past year's programming at the venue in the plays' ideas, themes and styles. The plays are performed by approximately 200 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional regional theatres where the works are showcased. The volume features an introduction by Anthony Banks, Associate Director for the National Theatre Discover Programme, and each play includes notes from the writer and director addressing the themes and ideas behind the play, as well as production notes and exercises. Published to coincide with the 2013 Connections festival, and the 50th anniversary of the National Theatre, this year's collection features work from Howard Brenton, Jim Cartwright, Lucinda Coxon, Ryan Craig, Stacey Gregg, Jonathan Harvey, Lenny Henry, Jemma Kennedy, Morna Pearson, and Anya Reiss.

The Guffin; Mobile Phone Show; What Are They Like?; We Lost Elijah; I'm Spilling My Heart Out Here; Tomorrow I'll Be Happy; Soundclash; Don't Feed the Animals; Ailie and the Alien; Forty-Five Minutes

National Theatre Connections 2013

This, the third National Theatre Connections anthology published with Methuen Drama, is aimed at young performers and schools, and marks the National Theatre's 50th anniversary.

Jonathan Harvey

About

Books

Join the club