Plays by Harley Granville Barker

Harley Granville Barker, one of the most versatile figures in twentieth-century theatre, was the leader of the campaign to reform the English stage in the Edwardian period. His work as an actor, director, playwright, and manager set new standards of production and gave Shaw his first successful showings; his later career as a critic, after he abandoned the stage, opened new interpretations of Shakespeare and led the way to the establishment of a national theatre. This volume presents three of Granville Barker's best plays: The Marrying of Ann Leete (about a young woman rebelling against convention), The Voysey Inheritance (digging at middle-class hypocrisy), and Waste (banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the tragedy of a politician caught in a sexual trap). Written between 1899 and 1907, and collected here for the first time in a scholarly edition, they reveal Barker as an exciting, subtle and innovative dramatist.

Dennis Kennedy's books include The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Foreign Shakespeare, and Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance is due late 2009 (edited with Yong Li Lan). He has twice been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, twice won the Freedley Award for theatre history, received the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea. His own plays have been performed in New York, London, and many other places, and he has frequently worked as a dramaturg and director in professional theatres.