Lisa Evans

A moving and powerful play about the joy and the heartbreak that motherhood brings to three very different mothers. Ali was always going to be a dancer. She was still dancing the day she gave birth. Careful Kitty, housewife and mother, sits in her silent home and waits for the daughter who doesn't return. And Milena, desperate to protect her children and carrying a terrible secret.

Once We Were Mothers

When Danielle was a child, three women loomed large in her life: her gritty, responsible mother, her wild-child Aunt, and their best friend. Now a young woman herself and facing the break-up of another relationship, Danielle takes stock of her childhood years - of an absent dad; of her fascination with a neighbourhood "bad boy" - and uncovers a story of everyday heroism and the strange tricks that memory can play. A warm and witty play, Getting to the Foot of the Mountain premiered at the Birmingham Rep in May 2002.

Getting to the Foot of the Mountain

Bryony Lavery

Dracula and Frankenstein: Two Horror Plays brings together two classic horror tales updated for the 21st century and adapted for the stage by two of Britain’s leading playwrights. Bram Stoker’s Dracula adapted by Bryony Lavery: This is the modern world. Its inhabitants can go anywhere, even toTransylvania. They can communicate globally in the blink of an eye. But their feet, in their modern shoes, walk upon the gravestones of a vast cosmic graveyard. Count Dracula is still alive. He could always come through walls, arrive on a moonbeam but, in the modern world, he has emails, smartphones, webcams and the worldwide web... Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein adapted by Lisa Evans: Mary is imprisoned in a present-day psychiatric hospital, convicted of murdering her baby daughter. During her incarceration she becomes obsessed with Mary Shelley’s famous novel. The novel comes to lifewithin her imagination, and we are left to question just who the realmonster really is, Mary or Frankenstein himself...

Two Horror Plays

Dracula and Frankenstein

Mrs. Henry Wood

A classic of Victorian literature, East Lynne was published in 1861. It was a sensational success, selling more than 500,000 copies and making its author as famous in her lifetime as Charles Dickens himself. Beautiful, kind and unblemished, Lady Isabel Vane is the perfect wife and mother. Until, in a fit of jealousy, she leaves her neglectful husband and infant children to elope with her aristocratic suitor. Her fall from grace is absolute. Can she be redeemed? And will she ever see her children again? Dramatic and moving, East Lynne draws aside the curtains of the respectable Victorian middle-classes to reveal their hypocrisy, cruelty and lust. And we witness the terrible punishment of those that dare to disobey a merciless moral code. This dramatisation of East Lynne opened at the New Vic Theatre, Staffordshire, in June 2005.

East Lynne

In June 2020, a private Facebook group was set up for mothers of all ages and backgrounds to submit a sentence using the phrase 'Motherhood is ...', in order to represent their experiences of mothering during this challenging time. The aim was to collect the same number of sentences to the number of days the UK was in the first national lock-down; 92 in total. This number also took into account the length of time vulnerable mothers needed to shield. Over six months, 189 mothers joined the group, contributing a sentence and/or portrait picture of themselves drawn by their children which have been added to the book. The sentences are presented alongside beautiful artworks by artists who are mothers.

Motherhood Is

Daphne du Maurier

In Jamaica Inn, at the heart of the bleak Bodmin Moor, young Mary Yellan soon discovers mysterious goings-on in the dead of night. But worse is yet to come as Mary finds herself helplessly ensnared in the deadly activities taking place around her.

Lisa Evans

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