Showing results by narrator "Peter Tucker" in All Categories

Making his way to a tryst with his "dark lady" near the royal palace the young playwright William Shakespeare encounters a mysterious woman in a cloak. Mistaking her for his lady friend, he accosts her in a familiar fashion, only to discover, to his dismay, that she is in fact the queen. He overcomes his initial discomfort, and takes advantage of the situation to make a petition for royal support to establish a national theatre.

Lucy Honeychurch is a young English girl abroad in Italy for the first time and is ready to experience all the beauty, art, and romance it has to offer. She is hampered by the oppressive attentions of her chaperone, her prim cousin Charlotte, as well as the presence of a substantial British expatriate and tourist community in Florence.

The Online Stage presents Shakespeare’s most famous and most quoted play, a revenge drama which explores the inevitable conflict between conscience and justice, between morality and obligation. The tragedy arises, not from an obvious weakness in the character of Hamlet, but rather from his inability to deal with an apparently insoluble moral dilemma.

Louis Esson is considered to be the first great Australian dramatist. The political comedy The Time is Not Yet Ripe was first produced in 1912 and is one of his best known works. Doris, daughter of the incumbent prime minister, Sir Joseph Quiverton, has news for her father - she has just become engaged. Much to Sir Joseph's dismay her fiancé is none other than an opposing candidate in the forthcoming general election - and a revolutionary socialist to boot. Is Sir Joseph in danger of losing both his reputation and his majority in parliament?

Often considered to be Ibsen's most popular play in his lifetime, The League of Youth caused fighting in the streets, with conservatives claiming it was an attack on their party and liberals claiming it was an attack on theirs! A thought-provoking comedy that's sure to feel shockingly familiar. Unusually for Ibsen, this play has a lot of humour and a more-or-less happy ending.

Stephen Leacock was a prolific and brilliant writer, whose tongue-in-cheek writings have been amusing Canadian fans for decades. He first published Winsome Winnie in 1920 as part of a compendium of short stories entitled Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels. It relates the trials and tribulations of the recently orphaned and penniless Winnifred Clair.

At the opening of this late Shakespearean drama, Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, has been the longtime guest of Leontes and Hermione, the king and queen of Sicily. When the time comes for Polixenes to leave, Leontes urges him to stay longer. At first Polixenes refuses, but soon he yields to the entreaties of Hermione. His rapid change of mind convinces Leontes that the two are lovers and that Polixenes is the father of Hermione's unborn child.

Louis Esson is considered to be the first great Australian dramatist. As with most of his work, these four plays depict life from the view of the common man and provide vivid presentations of life, both urban and rural, in Australia before the First World War.

Santa is in trouble - he catches a cold at the most inconvenient time of the year. As he rests in bed, he ponders anxiously: Who will deliver the presents this year?

Harrison, an embittered scientist who has access to time travel, wants to remove Christmas from the pages of history. Fortunately for humanity, his senior colleague, Horowitz has other ideas.

This is one of George Sand's late great rural novels, dealing with life among the provincial poor, where customs were already changing when she wrote it.