Routledge’s Fourth Wall books are short, accessible accounts of some of modern theatre’s best loved works. They take a subjective but easily digestible approach to their topics, allowing their authors the opportunity to explore their chosen subject in a way that is absorbing enough to be of use both to lovers of theatre and those who are being asked to study a play more deeply.
Each book in the series looks at a specific play, variously exploring its themes, contexts and characteristics while prioritising original, insightful writing over complexity or scholarly weight. While other cultural products such as albums and films are well served by this kind of writing, the Fourth Wall series aims to find room between rigorous analysis and the short format of reviews or articles. They are extended accounts that get to the heart of their chosen works without being bound by the density that academic treatments can often require.
By Ladrica Menson-Furr
June 04, 2020
"Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!" - Bynum Walker August Wilson considered Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) to be his favourite play of the ten in his award-winning Pittsburgh Cycle. It is a drama that truly examines the roots, crossroads, and intersections of African, ...
By Julian Woolford
March 04, 2020
'Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow, Bloom and grow forever' Often dismissed as kitsch sentimentalism, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music has proven an enduringly popular and surprisingly influential cultural icon, both within the field of musical theatre and the wider world. The ...
By Brian Granger
October 31, 2019
'Hasa Diga Eebowai' In 2011, a musical full of curse words and Mormon missionaries swept that year’s Tony Awards and was praised as a triumphant return of the American musical. This book explores the inherent achievements (and failures) of The Book of Mormon—one of the most ambitious, and ...
By Caridad Svich
July 10, 2019
'… love creates something that was not there before.' – Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened on Valentine’s Day,1998, in New York City, and ever since, it and its genderqueer heroine have captivated audiences around the world. As the first musical to ...
By Sam Kinchin-Smith
February 12, 2018
‘Who can turn skies back and begin again?’ -Peter This book contends that Peter Grimes, widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential operas of the 20th century, is also one of the British theatre’s finest ‘lost’ plays. Seeking to liberate Britten and Slater’s work from the ...
By Karoline Gritzner
February 12, 2019
'Everyone's an abyss. You get dizzy if you look down.' -- Woyzeck Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck was left unfinished at the time of its author’s death in 1837, but the play is now widely recognised as the first ‘modern’ drama in the history of European theatre. Its fragmentary form and critical ...
By Lucie Sutherland
November 05, 2018
‘Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe!’ – Peter Pan Peter Pan is a narrative many of us believe we know well, and yet the J.M. Barrie play that premiered on a West End stage in December 1904 is not the depiction of Peter, Wendy, Hook, and Never Land that most people have ...
By David Ian Rabey
December 19, 2017
‘It’s all real. All of it. Everything bad is real’ - Moe Alistair McDowall’s Pomona was first staged in 2014 and won properly startling, and startled, acclaim. Its edgeland setting permits a surrealistic disengagement of linear forms of time, which is both dreamlike and wildly funny; nightmarish ...
By Lynette Goddard
October 09, 2017
Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958) after becoming disillusioned about the lack of good roles for black actors on the British theatre scene. While this situation has only slightly improved since, his response has become the most revived black play in Britain, from its original ...
By Glenn D'Cruz
February 20, 2018
"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ...
By Sarah Whitfield
July 18, 2018
"One more dawn! One more day! One day more!" Did Les Misérables make you miserable? Or did it inspire you? When Sarah Whitfield was a teenager, her Dad frequently embarrassed her with his love of this musical above all others. So, after he was diagnosed with late stage cancer, Whitfield set out to...
By Michael Y. Bennett
July 10, 2018
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shocked audiences and critics alike with its assault on decorum. At base though, the play is simply a love story: an examination of a long-wedded life, filled with the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and pain that accompany the passing of many years ...