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Urban Hymns by Keith Badham
Performance by Up-Stage Theatre Company won Best Youth Actress award in the Bedfordshire One Act Play Festival, 2011 |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 3. Minimum Female roles = 3. Minimum total with doubling = 6. Minimum total without doubling = 65. No chorus. The nine scripts have casts ranging from two to twenty, however the author expects that some groups will reorganise the twenty-character script for a smaller group - his estimated minimum cast is six. |
| Run Time | Around 30 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | A series of short scripts for teenagers. Simple to set, but with plenty of performance challenges. Contains swearing. |
| Synopsis | Nine short scripts:
Introduction (Nominally twenty roles)
Bittersweet Symphony (Seven roles)
The Drugs Don't Work (Four roles)
Sonnet (Four roles)
Juliet (Two roles)
Romeo (Two roles)
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (Five roles)
24 Minutes From Tulse Hill (Six roles)
Lucky (Nominally 15 roles) |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| The Vanity of Dorian Gray by Valerie Goodwin |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 3. Minimum Female roles = 8. Minimum total with doubling = 11. Minimum total without doubling = 20. Chorus. |
| Run Time | Around 75 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | The producer's copy of the script includes suggestions for 5 (public domain) songs. Lazy Bee Scripts does not supply any sheet music with this script. |
| Style | Seventy-five minute adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel, peppered with Victorian and Edwardian music hall songs and comedy. |
| Synopsis | The hedonistic young man Dorian Gray makes a wish that his portrait would age instead of himself, and the wish comes true. He takes advantage of his eternal youth to court and then dispose of a never-ending line of young women, but four decades later, his sins catch up with him. |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| Varadachary's Annotated Chess Masterpieces by Vithal Rajan |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 10. Minimum Female roles = 1. Minimum total with doubling = 11. Minimum total without doubling = 44. No chorus. Characters include Gandhi, Tolstoy, Fidel Castro, Marcel DuChamp, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Napoleon! |
| Run Time | Around 230 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | A combination of Indian storytelling and chess! Simple props, but needs a means of displaying the chess moves to the audience. |
| Synopsis | A cycle of 11 one-act plays, linked by the character of Ramanujan Varadachary, an old Indian story-teller - who uses the chess games as allegories for discussions about, art, ethics, politics, love and revolution! |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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Voices by Peter Harrison
2012. Hale One-Act play festival. Winner Best Original play. Production by Altrincham Garrick. |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 3. Minimum Female roles = 2. Minimum total with doubling = 5. Minimum total without doubling = 16. No chorus. Designed for one principal character and four on-stage voices, though the voices could be allocated amongst a larger number of actors.
The principal character is an old man, nevertheless, this could be played by a youth theatre company. |
| Run Time | Around 33 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | The producer's copy of the script makes suggestions for accompanying music/songs. (For atmosphere, rather than live performance). Lazy Bee Scripts does not supply any sheet music with this script. |
| Style | One-act play, set in the mind of the principal character, with other roles voiced but not interacting directly with him. |
| Synopsis | A veteran soldier finds himself trapped in his own flat, facing an imagined enemy. |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Awards | Click here to see the awards won by (productions of) this script. |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| The Wakefields at War by Tom Mather |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 10. Minimum Female roles = 4. Minimum total with doubling = 14. Minimum total without doubling = 23. No chorus. Characters are mainly adults, but include three children (who age two years from 9, 10 and 12 during the course of the play). |
| Run Time | Around 100 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | Drama in three acts with multiple settings depicting the horrors of World War One through its effect on one family. |
| Synopsis | The true story of the Wakefields, an ordinary Lancashire working class family whose three eldest sons were all killed in action fighting in the First World War. |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| War Prayer by Mark Twain adapted by Gerald P. Murphy |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 2. Minimum Female roles = 2. Minimum total with doubling = 8. Minimum total without doubling = 9. Chorus. |
| Run Time | Around 10 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | Ten minute play. No specific set requirements and only one prop (a rope). |
| Synopsis | Mark Twain was no pacifist, but here he brings an angel to explain to a congregation the difference between a just war and Jingoism. (Human frailty prevails.) |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| Weir of Hermiston by David McVey from Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 6. Minimum Female roles = 3. Minimum total with doubling = 9. Minimum total without doubling = 9. Chorus. Characters are adults, plus one boy with a playing age of around 10, as the young Archie Weir. The chorus (non-speaking townspeople, servants, etc.) is optional. |
| Run Time | Around 30 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | One-act drama, focusing on the relationship between Archie Weir and his tyrannical father. Adapted from an unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Uses broad Scots (though omitting the less fathomable language from Stevenson's draft.) |
| Synopsis | Archie Weir is the son of the Lord Justice Clerk and in training to be a lawyer himself, though he is fearful of his hard father. Following advice from a family friend, Archie watches a trial held by his father and is horrified at the old man's apparent glee at hanging the poor wretch. He speaks out in public against the death penalty and is exiled to the family's country estate. |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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When Darkness Falls by Sam Simkin
On the evidence of this script, the author won the award for Most Promising Young Playwright, Trinity College London's International Playwriting Competition, 2013-14 |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 2. Minimum Female roles = 4. Minimum total with doubling = 18. Minimum total without doubling = 32. Chorus. Intended for performance by a Youth Theatre company or by a mix of adults and teenagers. |
| Run Time | Around 42 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | One-act drama, very much from the perspective of the central character. |
| Synopsis | Teenager Alex lives with his dysfunctional family in a state of teenage confusion and angst. His witnessing of a murder has a profound effect on his already troubled mind leading to his leaving home. His encounter with homeless people is inspirational and leads him down the right path. |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| The Winter's Tale [60-minute abridgement] by Shakespeare, abridged Jack Shaw |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 5. Minimum Female roles = 4. Minimum total with doubling = 10. Minimum total without doubling = 24. No chorus. The 24 roles could be played by 6M, 4F or 5M, 5F. |
| Run Time | Around 60 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | A 60-minute abridgement of the Shakespeare comedy-drama.
(The abridgement is copyrighted, so we charge for scripts and copying rights, but, because all the words are Shakespeare's and therefore out of copyright, performances are royalty-free.) |
| Synopsis | King Leontes of Sicilia, suspecting his wife Hermione of cheating on him with the King of Bohemia, has her imprisoned and her newborn baby sent far away. When Hermione dies in custody, Leontes is left without an heir. But fifteen years later in Bohemia, the abandoned princess Perdita has a royal suitor.
(Includes Shakespeare's most famous stage direction.) |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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| With Garibaldi In Rome by Peter Parkinson |
| Roles | Minimum Male roles = 13. Minimum Female roles = 2. Minimum total with doubling = 15. Minimum total without doubling = 18. Chorus. Most of the characters are adults, with one eleven-year-old boy. |
| Run Time | Around 100 minutes. [Estimated!] |
| Music | None. |
| Style | Historical drama with multiple locations in Rome indicated largely by lighting and furniture. |
| Synopsis | Eleanor Chadwick is in Rome, looking for answers to her husband's death as the city is liberated from the Pope's authoritarian rule. But the French besiege the city and Eleanor finds more than the answers she sought. |
| Price | For scripts and live performance rights, please click on the Price Link to find the cost. For scripts and lockdown videos/streaming rights, click here |
| Click here to read the script or Click here for more details. |
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