Mary Barton (NHB Modern Plays) - Softcover

Gaskell, Elizabeth

3.74

20,057 ratings by Goodreads

9781854599513: Mary Barton (NHB Modern Plays)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1854599518 ISBN 13: 9781854599513

Publisher: Nick Hern Books, 2006

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Set in Manchester between 1837-42, Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel paints a powerful and moving picture of working-class life in Victorian England. It concerns Mary Barton, a millworker's daughter, anxious to rise through the ranks, and her father, who commits murder to thwart her ambition - an episode based on the actual murder in 1831 of a progressive millowner. Like its companion novel, "North and South", "Mary Barton" offers a stirring narrative with real insight into the lives of the Victorian working classes: it was published the same year, 1848, as the "Communist Manifesto". Rona Munro, already well-known for a strand of gritty realism in plays such as "Iron", set in a women's prison, has been commissioned by the prestigious Manchester Royal Exchange to adapt "Mary Barton" for their impressive theatre-in-the-round. It opens in September 2006.

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Review:

"'An exceptionally gripping and deeply moving play... This is psychological drama at its best' Daily Telegraph on Iron"

About the Author:

Rona Munro is 'one of Scotland's brightest dramatists' (The Times). She won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award for Bold Girls in 1991 and the Peggy Ramsay Award for The Maiden Stone in 1995. Her most recent play, Iron, transferred from the Edinburgh Traverse to the Royal Court, London (2002-3). She also wrote the screenplay for Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird and a version of The House of Bernarda Alba for Shared Experience.

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