Eldridge Plays: 2

This second collection of plays by David Eldridge showcases the development of one of the most impressive playwriting talents of recent years. His plays combine emotional impact with complexity, realistic characterisation with humour, and are among the most powerfully moving dramas of contemporary playwriting. Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness moves between a dream story and real lives to tell an intricate, complex story of a young man dealing with the break up of his family and the legacy of race responsibility. Market Boy is a gloriously raucous rites-of-passage drama set in Romford Market in the 1980s. Bringing a market jungle to life with the decade's Thatcherite capitalist fervour, this spectacular, savage, and beautiful yarn is a tale looks at a boy's coming of age and loss of innocence. The Knot of the Heart has themes of love, family and addiction, and explores the creeping onset of self-destruction beneath a veneer of respectability. Full of David Eldridge's trademark lyricism within everyday family life and interaction, this is a play where emotions are high and relationships are sensitively written. The Stock Da'wa explodes the wafer thin bonhomie of a long-awaited reunion into a blackly funny maelstrom of pique and long repressed truth-telling - and with shocking consequences. Eldridge Plays 2 contains the definitive version of the four plays and an introduction by the author.

David Eldridge was awarded the Time Out Live Award for Best New Play in the West End in 2001 for Under the Blue Sky. His full-length plays include Serving it Up (Bush 1996), Festen (Almeida and Lyric Theatre 2004), M. A.D. (Bush 2004), Market Boy (National Theatre 2006), The Lady From The Sea (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester 2010), The Stock Da'wa (Hampstead Theatre, 2011), The Knot of the Heart (Almeida Theatre 2011) and In Basildon (Royal Court 2012).