Arden Plays: 1: Waters of Babylon; When is a Door...; Live Like Pigs; Serjeant Musgrave's Dance; The Happy Haven

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'The modern English theatre has had its poets and it has had its dramatists but in John Arden it has acquired its first dramatic poet since - well, let's be rash - the days of Shakespeare.' - Sunday Times. The Waters of Babylon: 'This wild, acidly funny and oddly tragic story of London low-life... reveals Arden's tough linguistic freedom and the free-wheeling ease with which he switches from prose to verse and back again' Sunday Times Live Like Pigs: 'Thrilling theatre... a rumbustious delight, outrageously funny, powerfully dramatic and, when you least expect it, genuinely moving... a modern classic' Daily Telegraph The Happy Haven (written with Margaretta D'Arcy): 'This rare and excellent revival perfectly reflects the play's bizarre atmosphere, its potent mixture of farcical prose, rhymed poetry, its marked avoidance of schematic moral codes' Time Out Serjeant Musgrave's Dance: 'A modern classic... a white-hot piece of work... Since its first appearance in 1959, the play has advanced towards us as if in a slow prophetic march' The Times Also included in the volume is When is a Door not a Door, a one-act 'industrial episode'.

Author Bio

John Arden (1930-2012) was a British dramatist, noted for his politically challenging and linguistically rich plays in the tradition of Brecht; he has written for radio and television as well as for the stage. After 1965 he collaborated on many works with his wife, the Irish playwright Margaretta D'Arcy. Arden's first professionally produced play was a radio drama, The Life of Mars, broadcast in 1956. In the late 1950s Arden was associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where his stark anti-war play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance opened in 1959. The play was something of a commercial failure at the time, but has been frequently revived since. It was during the 1960s that Arden produced most of his major stage works; these include The Happy Haven (1960), The Workhouse Donkey (1963), which concerns municipal corruption in Arden's native Barnsley, Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964), which drew parallels between contemporary political events in the Congo and machinations in medieval Scotland, and Left-Handed Liberty (1965). In 1972 Arden and D'Arcy had a major argument with the RSC about the staging of their Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty. The argument culminated in Arden picketing the theatre and vowing that he would not write for the British stage again. He settled in Galway, Ireland, in 1971. He was elected to Aosdna in 2011, a year before his death.