Most Read Plays Books

In the streets of Verona, two great households — the Montagues and the Capulets — are locked in an ancient, bitter feud that erupts into violence at the slightest provocation. Into this poisoned world come Romeo, a lovesick Montague, and Juliet, the Capulets' cherished young daughter, who meet at a masked ball and fall instantly, helplessly in love. Married in secret by a well-meaning friar who hopes their union might heal the rift between the families, the young lovers find their happiness colliding with the violence around them. A single fatal brawl sends events spiraling beyond anyone's control, and a desperate plan to keep them together sets in motion one of literature's most famous tragedies. William Shakespeare's tragedy of "star-crossed lovers" remains the definitive story of young love thwarted by hatred, chance, and haste — a play whose language, characters, and heartbreak have shaped how the Western world imagines romance for more than four centuries.

• forbidden love
• betrayal

Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping the solitude will help him finish his writing and hold together a family strained by his history of drinking and a violent temper. He brings his wife Wendy and their five-year-old son Danny, who possesses a psychic gift the hotel's cook calls "the shining" — and who senses, before anyone else, that the Overlook is not empty at all. Snowed in for the winter with no way out, the family is cut off just as the hotel's malevolent influence begins to close in on Jack, working on his insecurities, his temper, and his thirst for a drink he's tried to give up. As the Overlook's ghosts grow bolder and Jack's grip on himself slips, Danny's shining may be the only thing standing between his family and whatever wants them to stay forever. Stephen King's breakthrough novel is a claustrophobic haunted-house story that is as much about addiction and the violence passed from father to son as it is about supernatural horror, and it remains one of the most influential haunted-hotel stories ever written.

Set nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts, this stage play follows Albus Severus Potter — Harry's youngest son, sorted into Slytherin — as he begins his own time at Hogwarts, struggling under the weight of a famous father he cannot live up to and does not fully understand. His unlikely friendship with Scorpius Malfoy, Draco's gentle and bookish son, provides the story's emotional centre: two boys from the wrong houses finding solidarity in their shared experience of being defined by their fathers. When Albus and Scorpius stumble upon a time-turner and attempt to change a moment from the past they consider a mistake, their interference produces consequences far worse than anything they intended — and forces Harry to confront the dimensions of his own legacy that remain unresolved. The script was developed by playwright Jack Thorne from an original story by Thorne, John Tiffany, and J.K. Rowling. The play premiered at the Palace Theatre in London in July 2016, initially in two parts on the same day or on consecutive evenings, and went on to win a record nine Olivier Awards in 2017 including Best New Play — the most won by any production at a single ceremony. The published script was released simultaneously with the premiere and became the fastest-selling book of 2016 in the UK.

• coming of age

Jack Worthing and his friend Algernon Moncrieff are two young Victorian gentlemen with a shared talent for invention. Jack has fabricated a wicked younger brother named Ernest as an excuse to escape his country responsibilities and enjoy himself in town; Algernon has invented a permanently ailing friend named Bunbury for much the same purpose. Both deceptions collide when each man decides to court under the borrowed name "Ernest." As Jack pursues the fashionable Gwendolen and Algernon sets his sights on Jack's young ward Cecily — both of whom are convinced they can only love a man named Ernest — the tangle of false identities spirals toward exposure, presided over by the magnificently formidable Lady Bracknell. Oscar Wilde's most beloved play is a glittering farce and a razor-sharp satire of Victorian earnestness, marriage, and class. Fast, quotable, and endlessly witty, The Importance of Being Earnest skewers the hypocrisies of polite society while delivering some of the finest comic dialogue in the English language.

This classic tale follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a man whose heart is as cold as the winter air. On Christmas Eve, he's visited by three spirits who show him the error of his ways. Can these spectral encounters help him find the true spirit of Christmas before it's too late?

• redemption arc

Charlie Bucket is a poor, kind-hearted boy who lives in a tiny house with his parents and four bedridden grandparents, gazing longingly at the enormous chocolate factory that dominates his town. The factory belongs to the eccentric, secretive genius Willy Wonka, who has not been seen in years — until he announces that five Golden Tickets have been hidden in Wonka Bars, and their finders will be given a tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of sweets. Against all odds, Charlie finds the last ticket. Alongside four spectacularly ill-behaved children, he steps into a wonderland of chocolate rivers, everlasting gobstoppers, and the mysterious Oompa-Loompas. One by one, the other children's greed and bad habits get the better of them, and it becomes clear that Wonka's tour is also a test. Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a beloved modern classic — gleefully inventive, a little wicked, and warmly moral — that has enchanted children and adults for generations.

Prince Hamlet returns to Elsinore to find his father dead and his uncle Claudius on the throne. When his father's ghost names Claudius as his murderer, Hamlet is charged with revenge — and spends the play caught between conscience and action.

• revenge
• betrayal

Christopher Boone is fifteen and sees the world differently from most people. He knows every prime number up to 7,057, cannot bear to be touched, and reads faces and social situations only with great effort. When he discovers his neighbour's dog, Wellington, killed with a garden fork, he decides to investigate the crime and to write a murder-mystery novel about it — modelled on the Sherlock Holmes stories he loves. Christopher's methodical inquiry, though, keeps leading him past the dog and into the far more bewildering territory of his own family. As he uncovers things his father would rather he never knew, his careful, ordered world is upended, and he is forced onto a terrifying journey that takes far more courage than any maths problem. Narrated entirely in Christopher's precise, literal, and often very funny voice, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a crossover phenomenon and a modern classic. It is a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a compassionate portrait of a mind that works by its own uncompromising logic.

• coming of age

Told by three witches that he will be king, the Scottish general Macbeth, spurred on by his wife, murders King Duncan and takes the throne. But guilt and paranoia drive him to kill again and again, and his blood-soaked reign hurtles toward ruin. Shakespeare's darkest tragedy of ambition, prophecy, and moral collapse.

• villain protagonist
• betrayal
• morally grey

Fearing that Julius Caesar's ambition threatens the Roman Republic, a group of senators led by Cassius draws the honorable Brutus into a plot to assassinate him. The murder unleashes civil war, as Mark Antony rouses Rome against the conspirators. Shakespeare's political tragedy of ambition, honor, and the ruinous cost of idealism turned to bloodshed.

• betrayal
• revenge
• morally grey

Set in London and Paris in the years leading up to and during the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities opens with the "recalled to life" of Dr. Manette, a physician released after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment in the Bastille. Reunited with the devoted daughter, Lucie, he never knew, he is drawn into a web of love and history that binds together a French aristocrat who has renounced his name, Charles Darnay, and a dissolute, brilliant English lawyer, Sydney Carton, who loves Lucie without hope. As revolutionary fervour turns to Terror and the guillotine's shadow falls across Paris, old crimes committed by Darnay's family resurface, and the vengeful Madame Defarge knits the names of the condemned. The private loyalties of the Manette circle are swept toward a sacrifice that will define them all. Dickens's most famous historical novel — bookended by two of the best-known lines in English literature — is a story of resurrection, retribution, and self-sacrifice against the backdrop of a society tearing itself apart. Sweeping and tightly plotted, it remains one of the best-selling novels ever written.

Born in a workhouse and cast out for asking for more gruel, orphan Oliver Twist falls in with Fagin's gang of child pickpockets in London. As he's pulled between the criminal underworld and those trying to save him, the mystery of his true parentage moves toward revelation.

• coming of age

In 1692 Salem, a group of girls' accusations of witchcraft ignite a wave of mass hysteria, and a town riven by fear and grudges begins to devour its own. Farmer John Proctor, burdened by a private guilt, must decide what he will sacrifice to tell the truth. Arthur Miller's 1953 drama, written against the McCarthy era, endures as a searing study of conformity, scapegoating, and moral courage.

• betrayal
• sacrifice
• revenge

William Shakespeare's towering tragedy of an aging king who divides his kingdom by how lavishly his daughters flatter him, disowning the one who truly loves him. Betrayal, madness, and grief follow, mirrored in the parallel ruin of the Earl of Gloucester. A devastating meditation on power, family, and folly.

• betrayal

George Bernard Shaw's classic five-act comedy. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins bets that he can pass off Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, as a duchess by teaching her to speak like a lady. The experiment works, but Eliza's transformation forces both of them to reckon with class, identity, and her right to a life of her own. A witty, unromantic satire of English snobbery that later inspired My Fair Lady.

• fish out of water
• mentor figure

Othello, a Moorish general in Venice, has secretly married Desdemona, but his embittered ensign Iago sets out to ruin him. Through insinuation and forged proof, Iago convinces Othello that his wife is unfaithful, and the general's love curdles into murderous jealousy. Shakespeare's intimate tragedy of manipulation, trust, and racism.

• betrayal
• revenge

On a bare country road, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for a mysterious figure named Godot, who never comes. They bicker, reminisce, and consider giving up, joined by the tyrannical Pozzo and his servant Lucky. Samuel Beckett's 'tragicomedy in two acts' is the founding masterpiece of the Theatre of the Absurd — bleakly funny and endlessly interpreted.

Jean Anouilh reimagines the ancient myth of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. In this powerful play, Antigone defies a human law that forbids the burial of her brother, Polynices. First presented during the Occupation in 1944, the story explores the conflict between an individual's absolute principles and the corrupting nature of power, injustice, and mediocrity.

• sacrifice
• morally grey

A brilliant swordsman-poet with an enormous nose loves his cousin Roxane but believes himself too ugly to be loved. When she falls for the handsome, inarticulate Christian, Cyrano secretly lends him his words to woo her. Edmond Rostand's 1897 verse drama is a dazzling, heartbreaking romance of eloquence, honor, and love given away in secret.

• love triangle
• secret identity
• sacrifice

Argan, riche bourgeois en parfaite santé, se croit perpétuellement malade et se ruine en médecins et en remèdes. Pour avoir un docteur dans la famille, il veut marier sa fille à un médecin ridicule, mais la servante Toinette et son frère Béralde s'emploient à le détromper. La dernière comédie-ballet de Molière, satire mordante de la médecine et de l'hypocondrie.

Twelve years ago, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, was overthrown by his treacherous brother Antonio and set adrift with his infant daughter Miranda. Washed up on a remote island, he has mastered its magic, commanding the airy spirit Ariel and enslaving the resentful Caliban. When a ship carrying his enemies passes nearby, Prospero conjures a tempest to wreck it and bring them into his power at last. As the survivors wander the island, Prospero orchestrates their fates: a budding romance between Miranda and the shipwrecked prince Ferdinand, a comic plot among drunken servants, and a murderous conspiracy among the nobles. All of it moves toward a single question, whether Prospero will take his revenge or choose forgiveness. Believed to be among the last plays Shakespeare wrote alone, The Tempest is a luminous late romance about power, art, colonization, and letting go. Rich with music, spectacle, and some of his most quoted lines, it ends with a meditation on mercy and the surrender of the magician's staff.