Penhall Plays: 2

Contains the huge hit Blue/Orange, recipient of the Evening Standard Best Play Award, the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2001 and Critics' Circle Best New Play 2000 Dumb Show (2004): 'At every point the sheer skill of Dumb Show confirms how fortunate we are to have a playwright under forty with such finesse, rhythm and diversity' Financial Times The first ever publication of Penhall's first work for the stage, Wild Turkey. His most recent work, Landscape With Weapon, premiered at the National Theatre in 2007.

A second collection of plays by Joe Penhall, featuring the award-winning Blue/Orange and Dumb Show and with an introduction and chronology.Penhall's 1994 play Some Voices was described as 'the most thrilling playwriting debut in years' by the Sunday Times. He has consistently lived up to and exceeded that early promise as the plays in this second volume of his work testify. Characterised by a taut mood, a grappling with moral dilemmas, and tough, eloquent dialogue, punctuated by outrageously comic moments, the plays in this volume are: Blue/Orange: An incendiary tale of race, madness and power set in a psychiatric hospital. 'Britain's best new play since Michael Frayn's Copenhagen ...thrillingly original' Financial Times Dumb Show sees TV star Barry caught in a tense game of manipulation and entrapment in this satire on the fame game and the media industry: 'Penhall brings the same sharpness and wit to Dumb Show that he did to his hugely successful Blue/Orange' The Times Wild Turkey (1993): a characteristically taut work about the acrimonious relationships of people in a late-night burger bar. 'More than any of his peers Penhall has shown a rare aptitude for confronting headline issues of the day, using his gift of the gab as a dramatist to interrogate their underlying complexities and contradictions' Daily Telegraph