Plays for Young People

(Paperback)

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Description

The four plays in this volume were written for teenage audiences and deal with issues of gender, AIDS, disability, relationships, ethnic strife, crime, drugs and bullying. In Who's Breaking a young man, learning that he is HIV-positive, is forced to rethink his life and attitudes. At the heart of Listen is the fractured relationship between a deaf teenager and his uncomprehending father. Sleeping Dogs concerns the love affair between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl during the war in former Yugoslavia. Through its three troubled protagonists, Wise Guys poses the central question addressed by all these plays: can young people caught up in self-destructive cycles break free of them

Author Bio

Philip Osment read Modern Languages at Keble College, Oxford and trained as an actor at Webber Douglas. He acted with leading alternative theatre companies including The Half Moon, Shared Experience and Gay Sweatshop (who performed his first scripts) and then went on to work as a director and writer. He has also written and directed plays for young people for Theatre Centre and Red Ladder. His trilogy of Devon plays (THE DEARLY BELOVED, WHAT I DID IN THE HOLIDAYS and FLESH AND BLOOD) was commissioned by Mike Alfreds and produced by Cambridge Theatre Company (aka Method and Madness). These were all nominated for Writers Guild awards and THE DEARLY BELOVED won the award for best regional play in 1993. In 1999 Mike Alfreds commissioned BURIED ALIVE which played the southwest before coming in to Hampstead Theatre. In 2000 LITTLE VIOLET AND THE ANGEL was the co-winner of the Peggy Ramsey Award; WISE GUYS was performed as the inaugural production at the new Contact Theatre and was nominated for TMA and Manchester Evening News Best Play awards.