Stoning Mary (Paperback)

by Debbie Tucker Green (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"'debbie tucker green is one of the most assured and extraordinary new voices we've heard in a long while... Electrifying' Independent '60 minutes of thrillingly high-impact theatre. If tucker green can continue in this rich vein, her future looks assured' London Evening Standard 'There is a sly, controlled power in the writing... and now I cannot get it out of my head' Guardian"

Product Description

Mysterious while compelling, bewildering while intoxicating, Stoning Mary is a mix of Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Edward Bond. Yet Debbie Tucker Green has a voice all her own, one that mixes poetic rhythms with vernacular phrases, rap-song repetitions with complex psychology. In 2004, she won the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1854598562
• ISBN-13: 978-1854598561
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #239,904 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Bringing it home, May 30, 2008

By	Steven Reynolds (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

People dying in their millions from HIV/AIDS. Children being forced into service as soldiers. Women being stoned to death. Such stories are familiar to anyone who watches the evening news. But they're always happening to other people, in other cultures, in some comfortingly far off place. In "Stoning Mary" they aren't. They're happening right here, in this country. Right now. To people just like you. A couple fight over the single prescription they can afford for the AIDS medication they both need. Suburban parents wait for their child-soldier son to return home. A young girl waits in prison to be stoned to death for the unforgivable crime of killing a man. But these people aren't foreigners. They're us... Like Brecht and Pinter before her, Debbie Tucker Green "makes strange" the familiar, and to shocking effect. The abstract third-world atrocities we take for granted are plucked from the realm of global politics and thrust into the context of our own domestic lives. We are asked to see the people at their centre not in terms of economics or militarism, not as statistics to be deplored, nor even as pawns in the grand narratives of colonialism and globalization. We see them as they are: flesh and blood; mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children, siblings; heartbroken, cunning, angry and flawed, railing against indignity and desperation. The play takes them out of the realm of human rights and puts them back into the realm of human being. The result is a bracing assault on our complacency. As Tony Blair observed at the World Economic Forum in January 2005: "If what is happening in Africa today were happening in any other part of the world, there would be such a scandal and clamour that governments would be falling over themselves to act in response." "Stoning Mary" imagines it is so. The result is a play that performs art's ultimate magic trick: it makes us see the world from another's point of view. Makes us feel it, too. It conjures that rarest of global commodities - empathy.