THEATRE.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Collection of plays by gay playwrights. An extensive collection of plays from the 20th and 21st centuries from the library of Clive Hirschhorn, who was the film and theatre critic for the Sunday Express for over three decades. His ownership inscriptions are present in most of the books. The selection is mainly comprised of first editions, with 18 books signed by the authors. Notable plays include first editions of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie, signed first editions of both parts of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and the first edition in English of Jean Genet's Deathwatch.The collection begins in 1925 with Noël Coward's Fallen Angels (1925), and ends with Kevin Elyot's Twilight Song (2017). From Coward's play, which depicts two married women admitting to premarital sex and contemplating adultery, and was only staged after the personal intervention of the Lord Chamberlain, to Elyot's, which examines the historic pressures faced by gay men, the collection reflects changing sexual mores and sexual themes over the century.

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