The Aquarium by Stewart Conn
Cast: 4, 2 male and 2 female
"Dense textured and luminously evocative ... the three characters in Conn's impoverished middle-class family are realised, as they deserve to be, with an almost Chekhovian depth and perception."
Cordelia Oliver, The Guardian
"In Stewart Conn's play The Aquarium a woman asks, 'What's the use of loving someone if you don't show it?' This is the key to the bitter conflict between father and son that Conn so vividly presents. Their hostility does not stem from a lack of affection, but from their inability to express goodwill towards each other. Their relationship steeped in rancour ... neither is prepared to understand the other, or to make the gesture that would bring them closer together."
Allen Wright, The Scotsman
ISBN: 9781906220068
Price: £6.99
Herman by Stewart Conn
Cast: 5, 3 male and 2 female
"An unsettling study of personal obsession, this stimulating and imaginative work continually juggles reality and fantasy in a succession of succinct scenes ... (the central character's) self-loathing translated into a series of blackly-comic confrontations with two men, always different yet always the same ... who emerge from the shadows with sinister authority."
Mary Brennan, The Herald
"... a play with resonances, written with a poet's feeling for words, but without being 'poetic'; the action moving freely but with moments of almost macabre tension, through several planes of 'reality'... At every turn the Furies are there, now blackly comic, now menacing."
Cordelia Oliver, The Guardian
"Stewart Conn ventures into deeper waters than most Scottish playwrights..."
Allen Wright, The Scotsman
Available from February 2008
ISBN: 9781906220082
Price: £6.99
Play Donkey by Stewart Conn
Cast: 8, 5male and 3 female
"Stewart Conn's play is a powerful commentary on one of the violent evils of the age, the facts and acts of mercenary soldiering ... done with a drive and economy Mr Conn has never bettered. Every word sounds exactly right for the speaker in question, and at the same time says more than mere colloquial fidelity could compass ... (presenting) a quite unsentimentalised picture of a callous young misfit, yet a profoundly pathetic glimpse of what can happen to misfits, and how they may be used ... It is absolutely riveting."
Christopher Small, The Herald
"Play Donkey centres on a young Scottish mercenary awaiting an 'exemplary' trial in 'some emergent African state'. Like a child's game of cat's cradle, it links his destiny with some of those most closely affected by it - his bewildered parents, two girls, the clever London lawyer who flies out to plead his cause, knowing it is already as good as lost. Conn's strength is that he refuses to take sides ... Laughter is written into the play, and deftly so. It is laughter only to stop you weeping."
Cordelia Oliver, The Guardian
ISBN: 9781906220075
Price: £6.99