Neil Bartlett

Address Book is the new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of Skin Lane. Neil Bartlett's cycle of stories takes us to seven very different times and situations: from a new millennium civil partnership celebration to erotic obsession in a Victorian tenement, from a council-flat bedroom at the height of the AIDS crisis to a doctor's living-room in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, they lead us through decades of change to discover hope in the strangest of places. 'Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page and we are lucky to have him telling our stories' DAMIAN BARR ﻿'One of England's finest writers' EDMUND WHITE

Address Book

At 47, Mr F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine, so when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them.

Skin Lane

From Neil Bartlett, author of Who Was That Man?, comes Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, a novel which follows the story of the love affair and happy marriage between two gay men.

Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

Reggie Rainbow got his name at the orphanage. He had polio as a child, and seventeen years of using crutches have given him strong hands and nimble fingers. It is this dexterity, perfect for illusions, which first led Mr. Brookes to hire him for the act. Reggie has been a disappearance boy for years now, making a long string of alluring assistants vanish while Mr. Brookes tricks and misdirects the audience. But in the spring of 1953, the public no longer seem interested in illusionists. Bookings are slim, even in London. When Mr. Brookes gets a new slot at the down-at-the-heel Brighton Grand, Reggie finds himself in a strange town, one full of dark and unexplored corners. And it is the arrival of Pamela Rose, a beautiful new assistant, that truly turns his life upside down. As the Grand's spectacular Coronation show nears, Reggie begins to wonder how much of his own life has been an act-and sets out to find somebody who disappeared from his life long ago. Masterful and heartfelt, The Disappearance Boy is the tale of one young man coming into adulthood amidst the smoke-and-mirrors backstage world; a story of love, tears, and illusion-of all that stays behind the curtain.

A Novel

The Disappearance Boy

Heinrich von Kleist

David Bryer

The night before he leads his troops into battle, the Prince of Homburg strips off his uniform and goes sleepwalking. Moonstruck, his mind races with a young man's fantasies: love, ambition and victory. But when morning comes, a single reckless act of disobedience sets in motion a chain of events that seems to lead inexorably to the one event he never dreamt would happen: his own death. Kleist completed his masterpiece only months before his suicide in 1811. Cruel, surprising, visionary, it is one of the most beautiful and mysterious plays of the nineteenth century.

The Prince of Homburg

In 1886 an architect called Richardson built a house on the South side of Chicago. In 1985 the Daily Mirror reported the death of Rock Hudson. Halfway through the century that falls between these dates a man who claims his name is Mr Page sits down by his gas-fire on a snowbound Christmas Eve and sets himself the task of explaining a story that connects these apparently unconnected events. Neil Bartlett?s new novel spins a dark and erotic web of conjecture in the gaps of history. It takes its reader from the brittle glamour of the twenties into the violent repression of the fifties; from Mayfair dining rooms to the steam room of a gentlemen?s Turkish Bath; from the ordinary world of Mr Page into the strange and unsettling world of the black-haired, well-dressed and immensely wealthy Mr Clive.

Mr Clive & Mr Page

Sophie Faucher

'I took my tears and turned them into paintings' In the electric calm of a blue-painted room, a dying woman reassembles the images of an extraordinary life. The woman is Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. The life is one of struggle - with love, with the body, with her country, and most of all, with her art. La Casa Azul is a collaboration between Quebeçois playwright Sophie Faucher, who also played Frida Kahlo in this production, and internationally acclaimed director Robert Lepage.

Inspired by the writings of Frida Kahlo

La Casa Azul

A gay man named Mr. Page reminisces about his association with a wealthy young man named Mr. Clive, a relationship that took him from Turkish bath steam rooms to Mayfair dining rooms and released him from his previous humdrum life

The House on Brooke Street

Jessica Walker

‘... I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s thinking; hang on a minute; “I seem to have the knack of pleasing ladies.” In trousers? With short hair? In public? Was that allowed? Indeed it was.’ A cool and contemporary look at one of the most intriguing aspects of musical theatre – just what is it that makes a woman in trousers so appealing? Accompanied by a piano, mezzo-soprano Jessica Walker dons a few well-chosen items of male attire, giving a supremely well-sung performance that conjures up an entire world, from the swaggering cross-dressers of the Victorian Music Hall to the ambiguous boy-heroes of Mozart and Strauss, to the back-room bulldykes of the Harlem Renaissance. Commissioned and produced by Opera North Projects with the Southbank Centre touring partner Welcome to Yorkshire. The Girl I Left Behind Me is a provocative, flirtatious, personal one woman-guide which deliciously recalls a forgotten chapter of female performance. The Girl I Left Behind Me will be performed at The Barbican Centre in November 2011 as part of the Bite Season.

The Girl I Left Behind Me

Oscar Wilde

Believe me, no civilised man ever regrets a pleasure... As London slides from one century into the next, a young man is cursed with the uncanny ability to remain both young and beautiful while descending into a life of heartless debauchery. With its glittering dialogue, provocative imagery and radical questioning of sexual and moral freedoms all brought sharply into focus by this brand-new adaptation, Oscar Wilde’s infamous parable has lost none of its power to provoke and disturb. Using Wilde’s original words, a company of sixteen actors and all of adaptor Neil Bartlett’s trademark theatricality, this new stage version of Wilde’s black-hearted parable was commissioned by and first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre in the autumn season of 2012.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Robert Falls

The Misanthrope

In the winter of 2036, in a shabby apartment in Port Elizabeth, two old men search for a way to say goodbye after a lifetime spent together. In the perfect summer of 1971, in a very different South Africa, their handsome younger selves search for the courage to fall in love. And poised halfway between these two stories – one imagined, one remembered – their real-life counterparts bear witness to both the beginning and ending of an incredible journey. Neil Bartlett returns to The National in collaboration with the award winning War Horse team to create an intimate history of two very private lives, lived in extraordinary times.

Or You Could Kiss Me

Sitting up reading late at night, the author reflects on the links between the homosexual of the 1980s and his counterparts of a century ago, between gay lives today and those of Oscar Wilde, his friends, lovers and acquaintances. Many books have been written about Oscar Wilde. Who Was That Man? is unique - the acting out of a love-hate relationship between Wilde and a gay Londoner of today. Neil Bartlett has grabbed history by the collar and made bitter love to it. I can think of no other way to describe this fantastic personal meditation on Oscar Wilde and the last hundred years of English homosexuality. At the very moment gay existence is endangered by disease and a renewed puritanism, Bartlett has embraced what was alien and criminal or merely clinical and loved it into poignant life - Edmund White

A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde

Who was that Man?

First published in 1947, The Plague was an immediate best-seller, striking a powerful chord with readers who were struggling to understand the fascist 'plague' that had just overwhelmed Europe. Seventy years later, author and director Neil Bartlett has adapted Camus' classic for our own dangerous times. Using just five actors, his frank and gripping new stage version uses Camus' original words to put chaos under the microscope and to find hope in the power of our common humanity.

The Plague (after La Peste)

Kate Pullinger

On Platform One of Paddington Station in London, there is a statue of an unknown soldier; he’s reading a letter. On the hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war everyone in the country was invited to take a moment and write that letter. A selection of those letters are published here, in a new kind of war memorial – one made only of words.

Neil Bartlett

Books

Your next favorite book is out there