Home page Plays page	Robert Leach : Edited playscripts
	Sergei Mikhail Tretyakov I Want a Baby Cast : large mixed cast. This is one of the most significant plays to have emerged from the golden age of Russian theatre immediately after the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, before Stalin’s tyranny clamped down on creativity. Tretyakov’s canvas is huge, and depicts no less than a cross section of Moscow society from drunks and hoodlums to pristine Party organisers. Milda, a Party specialist, wants a baby with pure working class genes. How can she obtain her heart’s desire? And is there a place for love in the new society? Tretyakov’s ambition in this play is wide; fundamentally, he asks, how does theatre interact with reality? (from I Want a Baby) Alleyway. Dusk. Two men in the shadows. FILIRINOV (the poet) : And after dusk there’s a certain hour when with our work each one of us finishes. Then the houses bill and coo like amorous hippopotamuses. SNIFTER (the doctor) : Have we lived without art? Without poetry, without music, without amorousness? The houses groan with exhaustion. VOICES INSIDE THE HOUSE (singing) : It was where the waves were rolling. Oh again, oh again, and no returning. Burst into the squares ... (In the gateway, two figures – a hooligan and a woman.) HOOLIGAN : You coming to the boozer? WOMAN : I’ll come. Let go of me. HOOLIGAN : Yeah, all right. (Just on the highest note of its declaiming, the choir chimes in with the ecstatic sound of two cats on the roof.) FILIRINOV : The more I groan, the more moved I become. SNIFTER : Sexual neurosis. Sexual psychopathy. FILIRINOV : Stop it, they won’t hear you. MAN’S VOICE : Closer. WOMAN’S VOICE : No, don’t. MAN’S VOICE : Close ... WOMAN’S VOICE : You’ve bruised my lips. Let me go. Go away! The sun, the sun ... (From somewhere the singing of marching troops coincides with the last word.) The sun at midday, Unbearable heat, Budyonny’s cavalry Spread out in the steppe. (Howls and whistles.) FILIRINOV (in a narcotic stupor) : My city, my giant. Steel, concrete, glass. In my name trains rush, trams clank, buses snarl, and droshkies gallop. I am the master. POLICEMAN : Move on, citizen. You’ll be in trouble. SNIFTER : You’ve sniffed yourself stupid again. I Want a Baby is published by the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham, to whom application should be made for all performing and other rights.
	Ewan MacColl Plays: 1 (Operation Olive Branch, Johnny Noble, The Other Animals) Ewan MacColl, best known now perhaps as a folk singer, was a highly accomplished playwright, whose best work was done for Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the years immediately after the Second World War. Here are three superb examples of his radical theatre skills and his revolutionary content. Operation Olive Branch is a wickedly funny adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, and deals with fundamental issues of peace and war in a way not confined to the specifics of its time, though the parody of Winston Churchill, for instance, gives its biting satire a touch of farce. In Johnny Noble, MacColl re-imagines the life of a working man during the hungry thirties and the war-torn forties. A ballad opera with charming songs and scenes of extreme theatricality, this play has been a revelation whenever it has been performed. The Other Animals focuses on a political prisoner, who is asked to renounce his beliefs, and is threatened with torture. In resonant verse and with scenes of dream-like intensity, the play has clear relevance to issues dominating our headlines today. Ewan MacColl, Plays: 1 is published by Methuen, to whom application should be made for all performing and other rights.