The Play Podcast

Episode 116: Fences by August Wilson

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Daniel Bailey

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

August Wilson's Pulitzer-prize-winning play Fences is a powerful portrait of a family playing out a universal story of generational conflict against the backdrop of a changing social order in 1950s America. The play i...

Episode 115: The Dance of Death by August Strindberg

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Sir Richard Eyre

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

August Strindberg's The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in a...

Episode 114: Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Tom Littler

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as "A Pleasant Conceited Comedie." I imagine that the epithets were intended...

Episode 113A: Arcadia Footnotes

Host: Douglas Schatz

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Tom Stoppard's dramatic masterpiece, Arcadia, is a teasing detective story, a joyous comedy, and an emotionally rich exploration of love and loss. It is also a play of ideas. These Footnotes supplement our main episode on Arcadia, with...

Episode 113: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Carrie Cracknell

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Tom Stoppard's 1993 play, Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as we...

Episode 112: Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Mark Lawson

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

David Mamet's modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the m...

Episode 111: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Stephen Sharkey and Tom Kuhn

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Bertolt Brecht's 'gangster spectacle', The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political sat...

Episode 110: Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Howard Sherman

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder's Our Town as "the greatest American play ever written." In fact Wilder's quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic A...

Episode 109: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is arguably the most famous love story of all time. The tragic tale of their ecstatic young love has become iconic, not only in the the...

Episode 108: The Lady from the Sea by Henrik Ibsen

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Professor Kirsten Shepherd, Tzen Sam

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

When Henrik Ibsen's lyrical play The Lady from the Sea premiered in 1889, the critics were bewildered. On the surface it is a conventional drama of marital s...

Episode 107: Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Dr Emma Parker

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Joe Orton's black comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane offended many established critics when it premiered in 1964. Orton's first full-length play signalled the arrival of a unique new voice, defined by its an...

Episode 106: End by David Eldridge

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: David Eldridge

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

 David Eldridge's new play End is the final instalment of what David has described as a "triptych for the theatre", following Beginning in 2017, and Middle in 2022. Each of the plays in the series present...

Episode 105: The Weir by Conor McPherson

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Conor McPherson

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

The curtain rises on a small rural pub in northwest Ireland. A few of the regulars have dropped in for company and bit of the craic. This is the simple premise of...

Episode 104: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Will Tosh

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

William Shakespeare's romantic comedy, Twelfth Night, or What You Will is one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies, renowned for its clever cross-dressing plot and festive hi-jinks, but also for its elusive tone, f...

Episode 103: Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Max Webster

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's first tragedy, although in fact, scholars believe that Shakespeare did not write the whole play himself. Whatever its origins, the play is notorious for its graphic horror, which i...

Episode 102: Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Duncan Macmillan
             Jonny Donahoe

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Every Brilliant Thing
When their mother attempts to take her own life, a seven-year old child decides to start a list; a list of "everyth...

Episode 101: The 101 Greatest Plays

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Michael Billington
             Mark Lawson

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

In 2015 the esteemed theatre critic, Michael Billington, published The 101 Greatest Plays – From Antiquity to the Present. Michael wrote that his selection was intended as a "provocation", a "prelude to debate". Ten years on I...

Episode 100: A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O'Neill

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Beth Wynstra

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

A Moon for the Misbegotten is the last play that Eugene O'Neill wrote. It is in some way a eulogy for his brother, Jamie O'Neill, who like the character o...

Episode 099: Till the Stars Come Down by Beth Steel

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Beth Steel

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

It is Sylvia and Marek's wedding day. But this is not an entirely traditional English wedding, because unlike her older sisters, Sylvia's husband-to-be is not a local man; Marek...

Episode 098: Stereophonic by David Adjmi

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: David Adjmi

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

It is 1976, and a fictional rock band are holed up in a studio in California attempting to record their much anticipated second album. The pressures of an inflated studio budget and raised artistic...

Episode 097: Giant by Mark Rosenblatt

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Mark Rosenblatt

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

It is 1983, and the famous children's author Roald Dahl's life is in some turmoil. He has just divorced his wife of 30 years, and his new fiancée has just moved into the family h...

Episode 096: Dealer's Choice by Patrick Marber

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Matthew Dunster

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

A poker game in the basement of a London restaurant is the setting for six men to play out their dreams and disappointments in Patrick Marber's first play, Dealer's Choice. The play p...

Episode 095: Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Omar Elerian

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

A rhinoceros charges through the square of a small French village, and soon all of its inhabitants are being transformed into rhinoceros themselves. Eugène Ionesco's 1959 absurdist satire, Rhinoceros, was conceived as a m...

Episode 094: Oedipus the King by Sophocles

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Professor Edith Hall

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Sophocles' tragic drama of the myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, not only directly inspired Freud's notorious dream theory, but has itself survived as a...

Episode 093: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Rory Mullarkey

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, the third of the quartet of great plays that he wrote in the last years of his short life, is a symphonic study of the search for purpose a...

Episode 092: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorainne Hansberry

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Tinuke Craig

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

When Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun opened in New York in 1959, its author became the first African-American woman to have a play on Broadway, and this wi...

Episode 091: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Arifa Akbar

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Tennessee Williams's third great play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a blistering drama of family conflict and repressed sexuality. The play opened on Broadway in 1955 to ra...

Episode 090: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Max Webster

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is arguably the most famous romantic comedy in theatrical history. The play is renowned for its effervescent portrait of aristocratic romance, and it...

Episode 089: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Matthew McFrederick

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot, is a notoriously confounding work of theatre. The play is renowned for its lack of conventional plot or exposition, and for its existential predicament. Given i...

Episode 088: Roots by Arnold Wesker

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Diyan Zora

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Arnold Wesker's quiet classic, Roots, is a story of doomed love, rural poverty and social protest, and most of all, of cultural aspiration and growing up and away from family, from one's roots.

Episode 087: Look Back in Anger by John Osborne

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Dan Rebellato and Atri Banerjee

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is one of the landmark plays of twentieth century British theatre. It's raging protagonist, Jimmy Porter, represented a generation of disaffected yo...

Episode 086: Death of England by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Roy Williams

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Clint Dyer and Roy William's trilogy of plays, Death of England, is a searing state-of-the-nation drama voiced by both black and white working-class characters. Having been performed individually a...

Episode 085: The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Mark Lawson

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Tom Stoppard is renowned for his intellectual wit and playful dramatic form, both of which are certainly on show in The Real Thing, but the play also explores more personal emotional t...

Episode 084: Abigail's Party by Mike Leigh

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Nadia Fall

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Mike Leigh's 1977 'tragi-comedy', Abigail's Party, is renowned for its iconic snapshot of the material and social fabric of its time. The play's portrait of suburban social pretensions is both hugely funny and ex...

Episode 083: The Caretaker by Harold Pinter

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Justin Audibert

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

When it premiered in London's West End in 1960, The Caretaker catapulted its author to fame and fortune. The play is set entirely in a single room in a dilapidated house, and presents t...

Episode 082: People, Places & Things by Duncan Macmillan

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Duncan Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Duncan Macmillan's People, Places & Things is a blisteringly frank and funny portrait of addiction and invented identity. When the play premiered at the National Theatre in 2015, Denise Gough w...

Episode 081: The Government Inspector by Nikolay Gogol

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Patrick Myles

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Vladimir Nabokov described The Government Inspector as the "greatest play in the Russian language". Gogol's comedy of mistaken identity is an unexpected mix of fantastical farce and serious social satire. that ha...

Episode 080: Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Jeremy Herrin

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

Eugene O'Neill wrote his autobiographical magnum opus, Long Day's Journey into Night, in 1941, but because of the personal revelations it contained he gave explicit instructions that it was not t...

Episode 079: The Hills of California by Jez Butterworth

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Sean McEvoy

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

A new Jez Butterworth play is a theatrical event. The Hills of California is currently running at the Harold Pinter theare in London's West End, directed by Sam Mendes. Do no...

Episode 078: The Lover and The Collection by Harold Pinter

Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Lindsay Posner

Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We'll discuss the play's origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.

We have a double-bill in this episode of two short plays written by Harold Pinter in the early 1960s: The Lover and The Collection, both of which explore sexual com...