A Kind Of Alaska
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A Kind Of Alaska
''A Kind of Alaska'' is a one-act play written in 1982 by British playwright Harold Pinter. Summary A middle-aged woman named Deborah, who has been in a comatose state for thirty years as a result of contracting "sleepy sickness," encephalitis lethargica, awakes with a mind still that of a sixteen-year-old. She must confront a body which seems to have aged without her prior knowledge or consent. Her sister Pauline and Pauline's husband, Hornby, who has been Deborah's devoted doctor over these three decades and who may have fallen in love with her, attempt gently to ease her back to her current reality, while withholding some of the more jarring information. Deborah reawakens to a changed world, attempting to take what appear to her to be rather shocking revelations in graceful stride, but ends the play with the ironic observation about her sister and brother-in-law that can only go so far towards accepting the realities that they have allowed her to know. Speaking of Pauline ...
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Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter (; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include '' The Birthday Party'' (1957), ''The Homecoming'' (1964) and ''Betrayal'' (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include ''The Servant'' (1963), ''The Go-Between'' (1971), ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' (1981), ''The Trial'' (1993) and ''Sleuth'' (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works. Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refus ...
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Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He ...
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1982 Plays
__NOTOC__ Year 198 (CXCVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Sergius and Gallus (or, less frequently, year 951 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 198 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire *January 28 **Publius Septimius Geta, son of Septimius Severus, receives the title of Caesar. **Caracalla, son of Septimius Severus, is given the title of Augustus. China *Winter – Battle of Xiapi: The allied armies led by Cao Cao and Liu Bei defeat Lü Bu; afterward Cao Cao has him executed. By topic Religion * Marcus I succeeds Olympianus as Patriarch of Constantinople (until 211). Births * Lu Kai (or Jingfeng), Chinese official and general (d. 269) * Quan Cong, Chinese general and advisor (d. ...
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Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database.The basic Google book link is found at: https://books.google.com/ . The "advanced" interface allowing more specific searches is found at: https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives. The Publisher Program was first known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. The Google Books Library Project, which scans works in the collections of library partners and adds them to the digital invent ...
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The Times Literary Supplement
''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp. History The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication in 1914. Many distinguished writers have contributed, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Reviews were normally anonymous until 1974, when signed reviews were gradually introduced during the editorship of John Gross. This aroused great controversy. "Anonymity had once been appropriate when it was a general rule at other publications, but it had ceased to be so", Gross said. "In addition I personally felt that reviewers ought to take responsibility for their opinions." Martin Amis was a member of the editorial staff early in his career. Philip Larkin's poem "Aubade", his final poetic work, was first published in the Christmas-week issue of the ''TLS'' in 1977. While it has long been regarded as one of the world's pre-emi ...
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Grove Press
Grove Press is an United States of America, American Imprint (trade name), publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an Alternative media, alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1991. Grove later became an imprint of the publisher Grove Atlantic, Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Early years Grove Press was founded in 1947 in Greenwich Village on Grove Street. The original owners only published three books in three years and so sold it to Barney Rosset in 1951 for three thousand dollars. Literary avant-garde Under Rosset's leadership, Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, including French authors Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, ...
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One For The Road (Harold Pinter Play)
''One for the Road'' is an overtly political one-act play by Harold Pinter, which premiered at Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, in London, on 13 March 1984, and was first published by Methuen in 1984. Pinter's ''One for the Road'' is not to be confused with the Willy Russell play of the same name. Background ''One for the Road'', considered Pinter's "statement about the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments", was inspired, according to Antonia Fraser, by reading on May 19, 1983, Jacobo Timerman's ''Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number'', a book about torture on Argentina's military dictatorship; later, in January 1984, he got to write it after an argument with two Turkish girls at a family birthday party on the subject of torture. The year following the publication, Pinter would visit Turkey with Arthur Miller "to investigate allegations of the torture and persecution of Turkish writers"; as he explains further in his interview with Nicholas Hern, "A Play and It ...
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Dramatists Play Service
Dramatists Play Service (also known as The Play Service) is a theatrical-publishing and licensing house, established in 1936 by members of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Society for Authors' Representatives. DPS publishes English-language acting editions of plays and handles the licensing for professional and nonprofessional English-language productions of these plays in the United States, Canada, and throughout the world. DPS is based in New York City, with foreign affiliates in London, Australia, South Africa, India, Asia, and South America that serve DPS' interests in their respective regions. The DPS catalogue consists of over 3,300 titles from over 1,300 authors. DPS authors include Eugene O'Neill, George S. Kaufman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Horton Foote, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Terrence McNally, Beth Henley, Alfred Uhry, Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang, Paula Vogel, Donald Margulies, Richard Greenberg, John Patrick Shanley, Doug W ...
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Marion Bailey
Marion Bailey (born 5 May 1951) is an English actress. She is best known for her work with her partner, filmmaker Mike Leigh, including the films '' Meantime'' (1983), '' All or Nothing'' (2002), ''Vera Drake'' (2004), ''Mr. Turner'' (2014), for which she was nominated Supporting Actress of the Year by the London Film Critics' Circle, and ''Peterloo'' (2018). In 2019 and 2020, she portrayed Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in the third and fourth seasons of ''The Crown'' on Netflix, for which she won a Screen Actors Guild award winner for best ensemble in 2020 and 2021. Personal life Bailey was born in Bushey Hospital, in Bushey, Hertfordshire, to Rose (née Timberlake) and William Bailey. She grew up in Harrow, Middlesex, and attended Pinner County Grammar School. She was a member of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. With writer Terry Johnson, she has a daughter, actress Alice Bailey Johnson. Film career As ...
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Krapp's Last Tape
''Krapp's Last Tape'' is a 1958 one-act play, in English, by Samuel Beckett. With a cast of one man, it was written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee (actor), Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue". It was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from ''Molloy (novel), Molloy'' and ''From an Abandoned Work'' on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957. It is considered to be among Beckett’s major dramas. History First publication In a letter to a London bookseller Jake Schwartz on 15 March 1958, Beckett wrote that he had "'four states, in typescript, with copious notes and dirty corrections, of a short stage monologue I have just written (in English) for Pat Magee. This was composed on the machine from a tangle of old notes, so I have not the Manuscript, MS to offer you." According to Ackerley and Gontarski, "It was first published in ''Evergreen Review'' 2.5 (summer 1958), then in ''Krapp's Last Tape and Embers'' (Faber, 1959), ...
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Bristol Old Vic
Bristol Old Vic is a British theatre company based at the Theatre Royal, Bristol. The present company was established in 1946 as an offshoot of the Old Vic in London. It is associated with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which became a financially independent organisation in the 1990s. Bristol Old Vic runs a Young Company for those aged 7–25. The Theatre Royal, the oldest continually-operating theatre in the English-speaking world, was built between 1764 and 1766 on King Street in Bristol. The Coopers' Hall, built 1743–44, was incorporated as the theatre's foyer during 1970–72. Together, they are designated a Grade I listed building by Historic England. Daniel Day-Lewis called it "the most beautiful theatre in England." In 2012, the theatre complex completed the first phase of a £19 million refurbishment, increasing the seating capacity and providing up to ten flexible performance spaces. Besides the main Theatre Royal auditorium, the complex includes the Studio th ...
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Encephalitis Lethargica
Encephalitis lethargica is an atypical form of encephalitis. Also known as "sleeping sickness" or "sleepy sickness" (distinct from tsetse fly-transmitted sleeping sickness), it was first described in 1917 by neurologist Constantin von Economo and pathologist Jean-René Cruchet. The disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless. Between 1915 and 1926, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica spread around the world. The exact number of people infected is unknown, but it is estimated that more than one million people contracted the disease during the epidemic, which directly caused more than 500,000 deaths. Most of those who survived never returned to their pre-morbid vigour. Signs and symptoms Encephalitis lethargica is characterized by high fever, sore throat, headache, lethargy, double vision, delayed physical and mental response, sleep inversion and catatonia. In severe cases, patients may enter a coma-like state ( akinet ...
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