Faber began publishing plays in the early 1950s and, seventy-five years later, Faber Drama continues to find and publish the best writing for the stage today.

To celebrate this heritage and an art form we love, we’ve compiled a list of seventy-five outstanding plays, all written (or, in a couple of cases, adapted) since 1950.

So whether you’ve read many of the plays here, or seen them performed live, and perhaps you’re outraged that we’ve missed your favourite – or you’re looking to dip your toe into theatre, to discover a new literary classic or to find out what to book a ticket for when revivals come round, dive in and enjoy.

How this Reading List Works

Dozens of theatre lovers – Faber playwrights, staff and Members – were asked to submit their favourite plays. The Faber team has distilled and edited those submissions down to 75 entries.

The list includes plays not published by Faber. Each play has a single entry with a short summary and sometimes quotes from survey respondents. Dates in brackets refer to the year of its first performance.

This list is a celebration of modern theatre. It is not a ‘best plays’ list. The final section covers the beloved individual plays that were most often cited in the survey, but the list as a whole is ordered alphabetically, a jumble of riches, not a countdown to number one.

How much of a theatre lover are you?

If you’d like to count up how many of the plays below you’ve seen on stage, take our quiz here and let us know at [email protected] or on social media.

Contents

• Great Plays, Part I
• A Play I Love: Playwright Jack Nicholls
• Great Plays, Part II
• Faber’s Plays Survey: Facts and figures
• A Play I Love: Playwright Sid Sagar
• Great Plays, Part III
• Lily Levinson on Waiting for Godot
• Great Plays, Part IV

GREAT PLAYS, PART I

Part three features plays that were cited widely from our group of theatre lovers and practitioners.

1536 by Ava Pickett (2025)

A runaway triumph of recent new writing, Ava Pickett’s 1536 is set in a field outside a village in Essex. Three young women meet regularly to gossip, joke and bully each other, in scathingly funny anachronistic dialogue – until the patriarchal world they live in (one in which the king can simply decide to kill his queen) rips their lives apart.

‘1536 by Ava Pickett is so desperately brilliant it made my head spin. It is funny, thrilling, sinuous and so well wrought. Pickett mines history but never at the expense of emotional truth and she has a poet’s ear for the rhythm of the human heart. At times it put me in mind of Mojo by Jez Butterworth but it belongs fully to itself. Stunning.’
John Donnelly, Playwright

‘I saw this last year at Almeida Theatre and it was absolutely astounding, such a remarkable experience. It was two hours, no breaks, and predominantly just three female actors for the entire play. The play takes you on a journey from humour through to foreboding, fear and anger. A complex weave of emotions that speak to so many experiences of modern-day women even though it is set in 1536 – the year of the killing of Anne Boleyn. One of the most powerful plays I’ve ever seen.’
Lucy Cornwell, Trade Sales Representative

4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane (2000)

Sarah Kane’s last play was performed only after her suicide. It was written during a period of clinical depression, and its fragmented structure and harrowing imagery mean that it is often understood as a bare cry of pain. But her entire body of work, produced between 1995 and 1999, is extraordinary – brutal and violent, yes, but shot through with dark shards of wicked humour and acts of love.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, and Lorraine Hansberry was a remarkable and distinctive playwright who died too young. It follows a family living on the South Side of Chicago who come into a sum of money that might, at last, offer them an escape from the crushing inequality they face daily in the city.

‘As everyone gets lost in small turf wars, and territorial negotiations, and life-draining binary oppositions, the matriarch resolves on a bold new adventure, and to “push on out and do something bigger”. We can all do with that.’
Dominic Dromgoole, Director, author of Time Frames

A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney (1958)

A play that still feels disarmingly, delightfully original, nearly seventy years after working-class Salford teenager Shelagh Delaney wrote it. Its story of a mother, her daughter, a Nigerian sailor and a gay art student bursts with unsentimental optimism and cheeky life.

‘A Taste of Honey is my favourite play because it was the first time I heard my accent on stage and it wasn’t being used as shorthand for a maid, a servant, or a joke. It felt startling to hear voices like mine speaking with complexity, anger, humour and desire, without being flattened into background noise. That recognition mattered. It still does.’
Brooke, Faber Member from Huddersfield

A Whistle in the Dark by Tom Murphy (1961)

Michael Carney has left Ireland and settled in Coventry with his English wife. But when his father and brothers follow him out there, they bring the brutish violence of their shared past with them, in this hard-hitting masterpiece to which Harold Pinter and Enda Walsh owe a clear debt.

Angels in America by Tony Kushner (1991)

The events of Tony Kushner’s epic, funny, moving ‘Gay Fantasia on National Themes’ take place in 1985, at the height of the AIDS crisis and the Reagan administration. Five gay men, one Mormon housewife with a Valium addiction, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg face the surreal, awful glory of the end times.

‘It was an artful, impactful, dramatic representation of gayness.’
Scott, Faber Member from Tremonton

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (1993)

In a large English country house in the early nineteenth century, a young genius discovers the mathematics of the universe. In the same house in the present day, two historians attempt to decipher the truth of the past. Poetry, chaos, sex and death dance across both time periods in Stoppard’s extremely funny and profoundly moving play.

‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza (1994)

Serge has bought a painting. Marc doesn’t get it. Yvan just wants everyone to be happy. Yasmina Reza’s phenomenally successful tragicomedy – which, in Christopher Hampton’s superbly crisp translation, ran for nine years (!) in the West End – wittily challenges notions of value, friendship and modern art.

Attempts on Her Life by Martin Crimp (1997)

Attempts on Her Life is a series of seventeen scenarios, enacted by nameless characters, circling around a woman called Anne (or Annie, or maybe Anya). By turn, the scenes are slyly humorous, terrifying and incredibly eerie: a rollercoaster of sex, violence and other modern obsessions. The play made Martin Crimp’s name, and has since been much imitated, though never quite equalled.

Aunt Dan and Lemon by Wallace Shawn (1985)

A crawlingly uncomfortable little look at the banality of evil from a great American playwright, who has peeled away layers of human moral complicity throughout his terrific body of work. It begins with a direct address from Lemon, perched like a sickly bird in her armchair: ‘Hello dear audience, dear good people who have taken yourselves out for a special treat, a night at the theatre.’ Good luck with that.

Barber Shop Chronicles by Inua Ellams (2017)

Inua Ellams travelled to barber shops in Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Harare, Johannesburg – and Peckham, to research this joyful, generous portrait of Black masculinity and African diasporic identity.

Burgerz by Travis Alabanza (2019)

In 2016, someone threw a burger at Travis Alabanza, and shouted a transphobic slur. This clever, angry, funny show was a reclamation of that act of hatred, an obsessive deep dive into patties and buns that made Alabanza a leading name in contemporary queer performance art.

Collaborators by John Hodge (2011)

Moscow, 1938. Mikhail Bulgakov is offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Collaborators is a macabre, disturbingly funny depiction of art and compromise, based on a true story. John Hodge wrote the screenplays for Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and The Beach – this, his first work for theatre, won the Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Constellations by Nick Payne (2012)

A quantum physicist and a beekeeper meet. They hit it off, or perhaps they don’t. They might go home together, they might not. There are other multiverses out there, and love and free will are not simple things: they’re playful, profound and astonishing, like Nick Payne’s gorgeous little big play.

‘I’ve seen this play four times. It’s a beautiful and complex exploration into love, life and destiny. For a short, two-person show, it packs a massive punch. It doesn’t fail to make me cry.’
Carly-Ann, Faber Member from London

Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka (1975)

Based on real events in 1940s Nigeria, Soyinka’s extraordinarily rich drama examines what happens when Elesin Oba’s ritual suicide, called for by Yoruban tradition, is prevented by Simon Pilkings, a British colonial officer. A landmark of postcolonial literature, it asks huge questions of duty, community and the metaphysical distinction between the living and the dead.

Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar (2012)

Ayad Akhtar’s intelligent, troubling dinner-party play received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In its climactic central scene, Amir, a Pakistani-American lawyer, and his white artist wife host his Black colleague and her Jewish husband. The evening ends in devastation as the play examines racial identity, assimilation and the power dynamics of art and violence.

‘I was panicking about how to build a career in theatre when I watched this play’s UK premiere at the Bush Theatre in London. It was a genuinely transformative experience, both personally and artistically. The play tackles some of the biggest issues of the twenty first century with wit, power and sensitivity. It asks uncomfortable questions and invites progressives to reckon with things often left unsaid in a post-9/11 world. I think this play speaks to anyone who has ever felt lost in a society obsessed with the politics of identity and privilege.’
Sid Sagar, Playwright

Double Cross by Tom Kilroy (1986)

Brendan Bracken was born in Tipperary, William Joyce in Galway. Thomas Kilroy’s genius was to draw their lives in parallel: both men reinvented themselves as English gentlemen, though their identities continued to twist and morph. Bracken became Churchill’s Minister of Information while Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, broadcast Nazi propaganda. They were both played by Stephen Rea in the original production by Field Day Theatre Company.

‘Tom Kilroy is a superlative tactician. The double plot of Double Cross, centring on the connected, contrasting careers in the Second World War, of the Irishmen Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, illuminates the intellectual and emotional ironies that shaped their lives, men consumed by ambition, maimed by their childhood, marred to their core by their nationality. I stand in awe of Kilroy’s skill and daring in Double Cross. The passion of his politics are uniquely his own. A mighty writer.’
Frank McGuinness, Playwright

Downstate by Bruce Norris (2018)

Four convicted paedophiles live together in an isolated group home in downstate Illinois. Norris brings a squirming, sardonic humour to the situation. But when one of the abusive men is visited by his victim, the play asks us to confront a taboo head on, to look seriously and without flinching at the limits of compassion and the nature of justice.

‘Downstate by Bruce Norris is set in a halfway house for convicted sex offenders and asks deeply provocative questions about rehabilitation and justice.’
Sid Sagar, Playwright

Faith Healer by Brian Friel (1979)

Frank Hardy, a travelling healer, offers the promise of redemption to the sick. But his is a dangerous and unreliable calling, bringing him into conflict with his wife, Grace, and his manager, Teddy. Faith Healer is glorious, profound and painful. It’s about what it means to be an artist: to have a gift and to fail it, to wander and come home.

‘It’s a strange dream of a play. It’s death-haunted, melancholy, very beautiful. It’s an incurable prose-writer’s play – its three interlocking monologues are reprises, too, of the short stories that first made Friel’s name. It’s got magic and light in it. It’s got betrayal and the most abject misery in it. It’s a gift to actors and pins directors to their collars. He made so much brilliant work but this is the very best of it.’
Kevin Barry, Playwright

Kyoto by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson (2024)

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s epic political thriller about the 1997 international climate conference somehow managed to make diplomatic wranglings over punctuation marks enormously gripping. Like the duo’s first play, The Jungle, based on their experiences in the Calais refugee camp, it’s an urgent work of hope in a time of crisis, and it might just change the world.

Lear by Edward Bond (1971)

This response to Shakespeare’s King Lear by Edward Bond – the unyielding moral playwright of post-war British society – takes place in a world in which justice has been subordinated to power, and thus violence begets more violence, on an overwhelming, undeniable scale.

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard (2020)

At the age of fifty-six, Tom Stoppard learnt that his grandparents, his great-grandmother, and three of his aunts, Czech Jews, had been murdered by the Nazis. His final play is deeply personal, the story of an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna eventually all by destroyed by the Holocaust. Appearing at the end of the play comes a cousin who was raised in England, who has forgotten his past and lived until this moment ‘as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you’.

‘Master Harold’ . . . and the Boys by Athol Fugard (1982)

Athol Fugard’s shattering, semi-autobiographical play was banned in apartheid South Africa. In it, a white teenager passes the time with two Black waiters who have known him since childhood, but their warmth and affection is threatened by the systematised racism of the society they live in. Fugard died in 2025; the first posthumous production of this play, at the Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles, featured John Kani, Fugard’s friend and collaborator on two other hugely significant political dramas, The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead.

Medea, adapted by Ben Power (2014)

Ben Power’s adaptation of Euripides’ classic Greek revenge tragedy is sharp and clean – the stark horror of the play’s action is appallingly plausible. Helen McCrory was exceptional in the title role, realising not only Medea’s savage fury but also her vulnerability.

‘Ninety minutes of uninterrupted theatre. Performed by Helen McCrory at the National Theatre in 2014. One of the most powerful, intense and amazingly adapted pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Captivating, devastating and raw. Have since watched it on National Theatre at home and it still holds up as an incredible play and performance.’
Katie Henderson-Thomas, Sales Operations Executive

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn (2012)

Once seen, never forgotten, Anne Washburn’s tremendously exciting, formally explosive play about a group of people in the devastated wilds of post-apocalyptic America trying to salvage the remnants of their culture culminates in a freaky extravaganza of a third act. Mad in the best way, it’s a play that gives us a reason to keep telling stories.

‘Mr. Burns is billed as a ‘post-electric’ play, in which society has collapsed and a group of survivors try to recall the plot of the classic Simpsons episode ‘Cape Feare’ (you know the one, Sideshow Bob tries to kill Bart, can you remember it?). Years later into the new society, a travelling troupe of performers travel around what’s left of America, performing a distorted version of pop culture ephemera: advert jingles, celebrities, pop songs. As a disciple of pop culture and celebrity gossip, the final act of Mr. Burns was unbearably horrifying to me when I saw it on stage for the first time. Set nearly a century after the play begins, a Frankensteined version of The Simpsons has become operatic high art. As I watched twisted rebirths of Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa take to the stage at The Almeida (where Mr. Burns had its UK premiere in 2014), I childishly wanted for it all to stop. It had gone too far, it was all wrong, I wanted to correct them back to my Simpsons, the ones I’d seen on my screen for decades. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a oversized reaction to seeing Bart Simpson before. Sure, Mr. Burns is about The Simpsons and the dumb stuff we can’t quite recall without looking it up. But it’s also about grieving for a world that’s been lost, what stories get remembered and who gets to remember them.’
Sara Sherwood, Head of Faber Academy

Noises Off by Michael Frayn (1982)

In maybe the funniest farce ever written, Michael Frayn shows us the backstage shenanigans and mishaps of a troupe of touring actors attempting to perform a terrible (and terribly British) sex comedy called Nothing’s On.

Not I by Samuel Beckett (1972)

In a completely dark theatre, a woman’s mouth is illuminated, eight feet above the stage. It utters a stream of consciousness, as fast as possible, over the course of nine-to-fourteen minutes. When Billie Whitelaw performed Mouth at the Royal Court Theatre in 1973, she was strapped into a chair, head clamped in place, shrouded in black cloth.

‘I saw Not I at the Royal Court with Lisa Dwan in 2013. I had read it and thought I knew what to expect. I was mistaken. Going into the auditorium and sitting down felt like we were about to go on a roller coaster. Nervous chatter, people readying themselves. And then all the lights went out – including the fire-escape ones. I hate fire-escape lights in theatres. Beautiful real pitch black and the mouth came, started gabbling. So fast you can barely understand. So small, the only thing you can see in all this black, it starts floating left and up or is wobbling down . . . you can’t tell, it doesn’t feel fixed. It’s weird, magical, otherworldly. As a piece of drama it follows no conventional rules and this gave me real hope. It was closer to an emotional feeling or a taste. It was a real theatrical experience and that made me excited. I knew I wouldn’t be able to have imagined it. I then went and wrote several almost carbon copies. Same thing when I saw Hamlet. Everything had a ghost at the beginning. It’s why I don’t go to the theatre.’
Moses Raine, Playwright

Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu (2017)

Inspired by Waiting for Godot, the Book of Exodus, and the murder of Trayvon Martin, Antoinette Nwandu’s searing modern classic exposes the violence – both overt and insidious – of white oppression as experienced by young Black men, with mordant humour and blazing anger.

Plenty by David Hare (1978)

Susan Traherne, a fiercely intelligent secret agent, was parachuted into France during the Second World War. David Hare’s ambitious, fractured narrative presents her life over the following twenty years, as it curdles into disillusion and despair. The play offers a fantastic role for a female actor, and a caustic commentary on British national identity.

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller (2019)

Shortly after Prima Facie opened in the West End – with Jodie Comer playing barrister Tessa in an outstanding solo performance – a High Court Judge asked Suzie Miller for permission to quote from her script when revising the instructions to juries in sexual assault trials. This play has provably changed lives; its real world, global impact has been phenomenal.

‘As a monologue, it is devastatingly precise. It shows how language, law and power can collapse in on a woman, and how articulation itself can fail under trauma.’
Brooke, Faber Member from Huddersfield

random by debbie tucker green (2008)

In debbie tucker green’s short but uncompromising dramas, she writes the voices of Black characters with raw, dignified force. This wrenching, rhythmic one-woman play tells the story of a family’s grief over a single day, in the aftermath of the stabbing of a teenage boy. It was adapted for television in 2011, winning a BAFTA.

Roots by Arnold Wesker (1958)

Beattie Bryant is a young woman from rural Norfolk, torn between her family’s traditional way of life and the radical Marxist ideas of her London boyfriend. At the end of the play, she majestically arrives into herself, with one of the best final speeches ever – furious, ecstatic and as relevant today as it was at the time.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966)

Musing on the end and purpose of existence, the two ill-fated attendant lords from Shakespeare’s Hamlet take centre stage in Tom Stoppard’s dazzling tragicomic debut, the play that made his reputation. (On its transfer to Broadway, when asked what it was about, the young Stoppard replied, ‘It’s about to make me very rich.’) Erudite, exuberant, entertaining, existential: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead does it all, and then some.

Shining City by Conor McPherson (2004)

John keeps seeing the ghost of his wife, who died a violent death. So he goes to talk to Ian, a therapist and former priest – but both men are haunted by guilt, and the loneliness of things left unsaid. McPherson manages to create subtle and compelling drama from the stilted, painful dialogue of their therapy sessions.

‘Beautiful, mysterious play. As with most Conor McPherson it has a great title. Brilliant on regret, ghosts, therapy, alcohol (of course), and even sex. Really has it all. Characters speak at great length about personal anecdotes but it is unfailingly unboring.’
Joseph Charlton, Playwright

Shirley Valentine by Willy Russell (1986)

A middle-aged, working-class Liverpudlian housewife embarks on a hilarious – and ultimately triumphant – journey of self-discovery when she goes on holiday to Greece, in Willy Russell’s huge-hearted monologue.

‘I can still quote whole scenes. Though no age is the right age to sit next to your parents for the clitoris interchange I have since discovered.’
Louisa Joyner, Publisher, Fiction

Small Change by Peter Gill (1976)

In this luminous, quietly bruising work, typical of Peter Gill, the intense friendship between two boys in ’50s Cardiff and their relationships with their Catholic mothers are excavated twenty years later, with a final, tragic sense that some wounds remain raw forever.

‘I first encountered Peter Gill’s haunting, hallucinatory memory play Small Change quite young, and I’m certain I wouldn’t be a playwright without it. Thanks to Peter’s heartbreakingly beautiful writing, I was aware from day one of everything the theatre can do that film could never hope to; the unique expressionist dreamspace that a stage provides. The play formed so much of my ethics as a writer – its loving exploration of ordinary, harmed, occluded lives, and of family, felt revelatory to me, growing up as I was in a town where the plays put on were about the middle classes and the TV shows were all cops and robbers. Real people and real human emotion getting written about as if they were important, and more beautifully than anything I’d ever read – that was mindblowing to me!’
Barney Norris, Playwright

Small Hotel by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (2025)

Rebecca Lenkiewicz (BAFTA-winning screenwriter of Ida, She Said and Hot Milk) is perhaps best known as the first woman to have a play produced on the Olivier stage of the National Theatre (Her Naked Skin, 2008). Small Hotel is lesser known, a fabulously and bravely strange later work: a lush and unsettling tale of love and Hollywood.

GREAT PLAYS, PART II

Standing at the Sky’s Edge by Chris Bush, Richard Hawley (2019)

This musical (book by Chris Bush, music and lyrics by Richard Hawley) is a love letter to Sheffield, set on the infamous Park Hill council estate. A big, warm, weepy story of a changing community, it has been a success both locally and nationally.

‘Powerfully and intelligently encapsulates the good, the bad and the ugly of both working class and modern families, lives and relationships within the last 75 years across the UK.’
Matthew, Faber Member from Sheffield

That Face by Polly Stenham (2007)

That Face is a savagely funny dissection of the lives of the rich, a revelation of the pain that a controlling mother causes her children. It was the most talked-about debut of the noughties, written, almost unbelievably, when Polly Stenham was nineteen years old.

That Time by Samuel Beckett (1976)

An old man’s head, suspended ten feet above the stage, listening to three accounts of his life. That Time was written for the Irish actor Patrick Magee, for whom Beckett also wrote Krapp’s Last Tape, and is a sort of brother piece to Not I. At the end comes a smile, ‘toothless for preference’.

‘The marvelous rhythm and flowing desperation. Also the three warring voices in the one man floating above him as he sits there with his white head and toothless smile. Beckett throws all caution to the wind. The freedom and ease in the writing, the run-on sentences, the zilch punctuation, the confusion and disintegration of the addled memory. The hurt mind, as they say, in full fugue. And still the glorious attempt to capture moments, one moment, any moment that will convince and console and authenticate the fragility of our brief sojourn here. The staging is marvellous in its conception. Stark and still, yet overwhelming in thought and feeling, building to that fabulous toothless smile at the close.’
Marina Carr

The Aliens by Annie Baker (2010)

Annie Baker is one of the most important contemporary American playwrights. Her style is wholly distinctive, a kind of weird naturalism, marked by the gradual accumulation of meaning across scenes full of awkward silences and non-sequiturs. Her concerns are the big ones – time, death, how to live, how to be a person among people – and The Aliens is typical: odd, endearing, tentatively hopeful, slowly devastating, lovely.

‘The Aliens does a lot of things magically that I find near-impossible to do myself. It feels completely realistic in every way: setting, characters, dialogue, story – and is one of the first instances of Annie Baker pushing realism so far that it becomes completely beautiful and strange, while never compromising the truthfulness of the whole thing. The structure is deeply satisfying, too, but this is concealed so sweetly by the unending surprises that happen whenever the characters open their mouths, that you’re left feeling the emotional weight of it all before you understand it, like in the best poems. She isn’t afraid for them to say stupid or embarrassing things, and not in a play-y way, in the actual ways people are. The directionless, pseudo-intellectual, hippie-ish guys in the play, who spend their days doing nothing in an unappealing no-place outside a coffee shop, would, in life, be very easy to dislike, but in letting us spend time with them, the question of liking or disliking them becomes irrelevant. As it happens, though, I really like the people in Annie Baker plays, and I like these guys the best.’
Jack Nicholls, Playwright

The Castle by Howard Barker (1985)

Stucley and his band of knights return home from the Crusades to find that the women of England have established a matriarchal society and his wife is now in a relationship with a witch. Barker coined the term ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’ to describe his work, which often interrogates gendered power with dark poetry and ribald humour, and has influenced later writers from David Greig to Lucy Kirkwood.

The Children by Lucy Kirkwood (2016)

In the wake of nuclear disaster, Hazel and Robin are living out their days in a cottage on the coast, making their own parsnip wine and doing daily yoga exercises, maintaining a semblance of normality, of a continued life. Until Rose turns up, thirty-eight years after the three last met, and catalyses a great reckoning.

‘Lucy Kirkwood is as good as it gets and The Children might be my favourite play of the century so far. Wise, well made and funny. Often plays labour under the weight of their themes but here those themes erupt from detailed characterisation rendered with a lightness of touch. The line-by-line writing is scabrous, sometimes dirty, and always felt. People who look and sound like people are rarer on stage than you might think.’
John Donnelly, Playwright

The Colour of Justice by Richard Norton-Taylor (1999)

Richard Norton-Taylor’s powerfully un-showy verbatim drama was based on the court transcripts of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, which exposed the failures of the police investigation into the racist murder of the Black teenager in 1993. Its carefully distilled, faultlessly authentic dramatisation amplified the inquiry’s revelations and struck a deep chord with audiences.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953)

Of Arthur Miller’s four monumental, unequivocally great plays – The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman – this is the only historical drama. Though set during the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, it is also a brilliant analogy for the anti-Communist culture of fear whipped up in Miller’s own time.

‘I also love The Crucible especially because of how powerfully it uses historical fiction to speak to the present. Seeing a contemporary political climate mirrored through Salem was unsettling and clarifying. It reminded me that theatre can expose injustice sideways, making it impossible to dismiss.’
Brooke, Faber Member from Huddersfield

The History Boys by Alan Bennett (2004)

In the best-known, most beloved play (and its 2006 film adaptation) by one of Britain’s best-known, most beloved writers, an unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys pursue sex, sport and a place at university.

‘Bennett allows intelligence, wit and cultural fluency to belong to boys who are not supposed to own them. The play understands class not as a lack of intellect, but as a system that polices who gets to speak confidently and who is made to feel like an imposter.’
Brooke, Faber Member from Huddersfield

The Inheritance by Matthew López (2018)

One of the major American plays of the early twenty-first century, a tour de force of contemporary gay writing, The Inheritance follows a group of gay men in 2010s New York. They are haunted by the losses of the AIDS epidemic; watched over by the ghost of E. M. Forster; protected or destroyed by money.

The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project (2000)

In 1998, a twenty-one-year-old student called Matthew Shepard was murdered in a homophobic attack, and died in a prairie field near the town of Laramie, Wyoming. Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project visited Laramie in the aftermath and created this gripping and compassionate collage piece from real interviews with the townspeople.

The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini (2013)

Racing fleetly (in three-and-a-half hours, or 184 pages) from 1844 to 2008, The Lehman Trilogy tells the riveting, roller coaster history of Western capitalism through one family. The Broadway production won five Tony Awards, including Best Play.

‘Total banger – epic – knotty – so theatrical.’
Matt Woodhead, Playwright

‘I’ve always loved family sagas. This is a family saga with bells on! Three men, actors who play all the parts, tell a story of the Lehmans from their arrival in Alabama from a small town in Germany in the early nineteenth century as Orthodox, observant Jews. It tells a story of how they make money through hard work, through crises, through good marriages and clever investments and how, in the end, the love of money and the abandonment of any religious or ethical values leads to their downfall. And with this the financial crisis of 2008 begins. The play ends.

‘The staging at the National Theatre and the acting was simply immense. It was told in three parts and after the first part I didn’t realise an hour had passed. So riveting is the storytellings.’
Anne, Faber Member from London

GREAT PLAYS, PART III

The Norman Conquests (Trilogy) by Alan Ayckbourn (1973)

A slight cheat, here, because The Norman Conquests is a trilogy – but perhaps that’s appropriate, given that Alan Ayckbourn is probably Britain’s most prolific playwright, with over ninety plays to his name. These three take place across one chaotic weekend, in two rooms and the garden of the same country house. The original London cast featured Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal (who would go on to star together in the TV sitcom The Good Life, which was inspired by this production).

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (2003)

A writer in a totalitarian state is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of local child-murders, in Martin McDonagh’s horrible, hilarious black comedy.

‘The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, is one of the most shocking plays I have ever seen on stage, and it stayed with me long after seeing it.’
Andréa, Faber Member from Oxford

‘I saw the first production at the National. It was dark, funny and moving. A modern-day Brothers Grimm.’
Dominic, Faber Member from Bexhill

The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer (1964)

The Royal Hunt of the Sun is revived less often than Peter Shaffer’s other masterpieces such as Amadeus and Equus, perhaps partly because any production has to deal with its notorious stage direction, ‘They cross the Andes’, and the vast spectacle of its setting in sixteenth-century Peru. This didn’t put off director John Dexter in 1964, however, who made it the first new play produced at the recently opened National Theatre.

The Season at Sarsaparilla by Patrick White (1962)

The Season at Sarsaparilla follows three suburban families in the dog days of an Australian summer. Beneath the suffocating normality of their lives lie tangled and grotesque desires. A novelist’s play, the stage directions are deliciously long and odd.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart by David Greig (2011)

One wintry morning, academic Prudencia Hart sets off to a conference in the Scottish Borders. Stranded there by snow, she is swept up on a journey filled with devilish encounters, witty tunes and moments of wild and rambunctious magic. A play-with-music, or a ceilidh-with-words, written to be performed in pubs and hotel bars, it’s a total, rowdy, rhyming delight.

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus by Tony Harrison (1990)

Tony Harrison was a fierce, fine and true poet of the people, and a leading translator-adaptor of classical Greek drama. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, based on 400 lines of Sophocles, was first directed by the writer: the production opened at the stadium in Delphi and transferred to Salts Mill, Bradford, and then to the National Theatre. It collides ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, grief-ridden but mischievously silly, featuring clog-dancing satyrs.

This Restless House by Zinnie Harris (2016)

Zinnie Harris’s trailblazing reimagining of Aeschylus’ Oresteia places Agamemnon’s wife and daughter, Clytemnestra and Electra, at its centre. This is a common theme in Harris’s powerful body of work, which includes bold feminist adaptations including The Duchess (of Malfi) and Macbeth (an undoing).

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas (1953)

The only radio play on this list, first broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme with Richard Burton as the narrator. It’s a glorious, bubbling, chuckling tumult of language, the sweetly melancholy dream of a day in the life of the town of Llareggub (‘Bugger all’ backwards).

‘I was introduced to it by my dad in my teens. We saw a great version together in the early ’90s. And I read from it at his funeral. I treasure his copy, bought in 1958, the day he was demobbed from National Service.’
Andrew, Faber Member from Preston

Unreachable by Anthony Nielson (2016)

Unreachable was devised in just six weeks, after Neilson arrived at rehearsals with nothing but an idea about a film director searching for the perfect light. The company, including Matt Smith (as Maxim, the director) and Jonjo O’Neill (as his bonkers, anarchic European leading man), continued to improvise at every performance. Unreachable was as deliriously disorientating as it sounds – a hugely fun interrogation of the creative process.

‘It felt as though the actors were improvising the whole play (maybe they were?), and every line felt genuine and truly funny. It had a beautiful set piece ending, and the entirety felt full of energy and vital. As far as I know, the text has never been published, which adds to the ephemerality of the play. I can remember only the gist of the story, but mostly how it made me feel while watching it. It felt like a moment that was truly captured in my memory, and I’ll never forget.’
Hannah, Faber Member from Reading

When You Cure Me by Jack Thorne (2005)

Jack Thorne is a superstar writer now – his credits include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; The Motive and the Cue; the acclaimed Netflix series Adolescence; and the BBC adaptations of His Dark Materials and Lord of the Flies – but his promise was there in this early play (first staged at the Bush Theatre, which in 2005 was an 80-seat room above a pub), about how serious illness complicates the fragile, bloody business of loving and being loved.

‘When I was working as an agent’s assistant in 2005 I went to see this play by one of our playwrights. The subject matter is really difficult and raw, but the conversations between a mum and her daughter were so real, and so moving, you are there with them. I have never known anyone write what is unsaid so well.’
Bonnie Jones, Commercial Director

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee (1972)

An unbeatable portrait of the toxic marriage to end all toxic marriages. Martha and George invite a young couple back to their home after an academic faculty party – and proceed to make them witnesses and pawns in a series of vicious psychological games. It’s a rancidly nasty, acidly funny evening, moving through three acts from ‘Fun and Games’, to the climactic ‘Walpurgisnacht’ and a final purge, ‘The Exorcism’.

Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith (2002)

In 1960s California, Alma and Eugene fall in love. But Alma’s skin is dark and Eugene’s is light, and both their lives are shadowed by their parents’ disappointments, and by the brooding, violent weight of gendered and racial stereotypes.

‘This was an unexpected, quietly overcoming experience. It’s a play about the multitude lived experiences within any identity and an exercise in empathy. Pulitzer Prize-nominated.’
Hayley Sothinathan, Head of Faber Members

GREAT PLAYS, PART IV

Part four features the five plays most cited by our theatre-loving panel.

More from Faber

About the author

Lily Levinson is the Drama Editor at Faber.

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More great plays

If you’re hunger for lists of great plays is not sated, we suggest Michael Billington’s 101 Greatest Plays.