Where can you find the best places to buy theatre books from? What are the best theatre bookshops in London? Well, look no further. We’re completely addicted to theatre at A Younger Theatre and when it comes to getting our hands on the latest plays and theatre related books in London we suggest the following places.

1. National Theatre Bookshop – ££
National Theatre, Southbank,

An integral part to the National Theatre, the NT Bookshop (which is soon to relocated further inside the building) boasts one of the largest collections of plays, theory and general theatre books in London. Not only are the staff extremely helpful and knowledgeable, they play good music, have fun displays which tie in with their main house productions, and of course, have a heck load of theatre books. Entry Pass members also receive 10% off books!

2. Foyles – £££
113-119 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0EB
www.foyles.co.uk

There may be a lack of comfortable reading places but Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road is a theatre lover’s dream. Accommodating a whole corner on the ground floor, Foyles have an extensive collection of playtexts and theory books. If you’re a fan of Shakespeare you’ll be lost for hours.

3. Royal Court Theatre Bookshop – ££
Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, SW1W 8AS
www.royalcourttheatre.com

If new writing is your thing then the bookshop at the Royal Court Theatre will be of use to you. It’s very small, but the real gem is being able to get hold of play-texts for £3 to £5, especially Royal Court Theatre productions. The only downside is the opening hours. Monday-Friday 4-8pm and Sundays 2-8pm.

4. Waterstones – Gower Street – £££
82 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6EQ
www.waterstones.com

This may not be your most obvious spot for browsing theatre books, but due to the throng of students at local universities, Gower Street Waterstones is full to the brim of theatre books. There’s a good mix of play-texts with theory based books to draw you in, plus the theatre section is normally quiet during the week for optimum browsing.

5. Samuel French Bookshop – ££
52 Fitzroy Street, London, W1T 5JR
www.samuelfrench-london.co.uk

Known for their publishing of plays across the world, the Samuel French Bookshop is quite a hidden when it comes to theatre bookshops in London. They naturally stock most of their own publications with a focus on play-texts and musicals. It often feels like a quiet bookshop but don’t let that put you off. Make sure you try and scout out the bargains in their regular sales.

6. Southbank Centre Book Stalls – £
Under Waterloo Bridge, London
www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Come rain or shine you’ll find these book sellers under Waterloo Bridge on the Southbank. They may not have an extensive collection but it feels good to rummage in their theatre and poetry sections for second hand books. They’re open everyday too!

Some other suggestions for theatre bookshops and places that sell theatre books:

Any Amount of Books – ££
56 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0QA
www.anyamountofbooks.com

Calder Bookshop Theatre – ££
51 The Cut, London, SE1 8LF
www.calderbookshop.com 

Skoob Books – £
66 The Brunswick, off Marchmont Street, London, WC1N 1AE
www.skoob.com

Have we missed your favourite bookshop? Do you know a hidden gem to grab plays from? Leave a comment and let us and A Younger Theatre’s readers know.

Image credits to Oberon Books, Royal Court Theatre and The Londonist.

Natalie Wilson, Theatre Centre’s Artistic Director, gives AYT an idea of what to expect from its forthcoming conference…

On 20 June, Theatre Centre will host Write Lines, a conference on new writing for young audiences for writers and industry professionals. Guest speakers include playwrights Amanda Dalton, Rob Evans, Bryony Lavery, Philip Osment and Evan Placey, and industry representatives Anthony Banks (NT), Jonathan Lloyd (Polka Theatre) and Purni Morell (Unicorn Theatre).

Theatre Centre is celebrating 60 years of working with writers to produce outstanding theatre for young people, and Write Lines is inspired by my experience of running our Skylines writers programme. Over the past 12 months, Skylines has encouraged 47 emerging writers to develop work for audiences aged four to 18.

I noticed how much energy was generated when writers came together, exchanged ideas, listened, questioned and debated. These moments of reflection and learning seemed to be cherished by the writers, and I want to present this opportunity again but on a bigger scale. New writing for young audiences is a niche area but the beauty is that it is open to all: experienced, emerging, young or old.

The Write Lines conference is designed to bring together writers, artists, commissioners and producers, and to harness a sense of shared purpose and best practice to produce quality new plays. The contributors offer an extraordinary and diverse wealth of experience and perspective which I hope writers will find immensely valuable.

Our contributors will galvanise debate on collaborative working with young people, cross-artform inspirations and making extant stories fresh for a contemporary stage.

Writers will be able to meet like-minded artists and hear from the commissioners about what they want from the plays they stage. TYA-England’s series of debates, Whose Title Is it Anyway?, will take a new turn with Evan Placey (winner of the Brian Way Award 2012) presenting a provocation to four leading new writing commissioners on what writers can offer the programmes of our theatres and companies. Write Lines aims to bring writers and producers together, and perhaps a few new collaborations will be seeded by the end of day. Each delegate will arrive at Write Lines with questions and curiosity. I hope each will leave with some answers, a new question, fresh vigour and a strong line to pursue in their individual practice.

With this in mind, acclaimed playwright Rob Evans whets our appetite by telling us why he writes for young audiences…

Children have not yet had the link between their imagination and their physicality broken. They move and fidget and squirm, and if you get it right they lock on tight to your play with eyes as wide as saucers and they really, really watch. This is so satisfying to me as a writer because it’s how I feel when I’m writing.

Writing is a visceral thing; it can make me cry or explode with laughter. I think this very strong physical reaction is why I work a lot on plays that get performed to young people and their parents and teachers.

The reaction of young audiences in turn affects adults who watch the shows. Adults often think of plays for young people as a kind of babysitting service, then find they get sucked into the story. Theatre that engages both adults and young people equally is something to strive for. When you see young people and adults (their parents or teachers) enjoying the same story, the boundaries we might perceive between young and old seem made of the flimsiest stuff.

Visit the Theatre Centre website for details of the event.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won seven Olivier awards on Sunday night, including Best New Play.

If you’ve seen Curious Incident, which transferred from the National Theatre to the West End’s Apollo Theatre earlier this year, you may not have been too surprised. But how does a bestselling novel transform into an award-winning West End show? A couple of weeks ago, Bloomsbury Institute hosted a talk between author Mark Haddon and acclaimed playwright Simon Stephens, who adapted Haddon’s novel for the stage. AYT’s Becky Brewis reports.

“It was like looking at it through frosted glass”, Haddon said, on the process of having his work adapted, and emphasised the importance of distance. “One of the things I was really hoping for was to sit in the theatre on the first night and have the book returned to me. And, amazingly, that’s what happened.” Fans of the novel will no doubt feel similarly. But although Haddon has written a number of plays, he says he wouldn’t have had the distance necessary to adapt the work himself. When asked why he didn’t cut out the middle man by chair Geoffrey Colman, Head of Acting at Central School of Speech and Drama,  he answered: “for the same reasons surgeons don’t operate on their own children […] you need to approach it clinically.”

Stephens and Haddon met at the National Theatre, when Stephens was on a year-long residency and Haddon on an attachment. At the time, Stephens was writing Motortown, and had read Curious Incident as part of his research on an autistic character. They agree that it was probably theatre director and playwright Dominic Cooke who first suggested, in passing, that Stephens should do the adaptation.

To Stephens, much of the appeal of the novel lay in its ambiguities, and this is something he is proud to have stayed true to in the stage piece. “The interrogations at the heart of this book”, he says, “are the empathetic nature of honesty, and the nature of optimism now.”

Stephens seems to have had little difficulty translating Christopher’s distinctive narrator’s voice to the stage – a leap from the first person that Haddon initially flinched from. For him the main problem was always how to get from Swindon to Willesden on stage. And that’s why he enlisted the help of Frantic Assembly, who did the choreography. A practical move, undoubtedly, but also one which brought an extra dimension to the complex psychology presented on stage: “It struck me that there was something balletic about Christopher’s mind”, says Stephens. “Intellectually, he dances.”

Christopher (played by Luke Treadaway, who won the Olivier Award for Best Actor on Sunday) describes himself as “a young mathematician with some behavioural issues”. The autism label which quickly attached itself to the book is something that Haddon rejects, regretting having “Asperger’s” appear on the cover, especially since it is Christopher’s universally empathetic appeal that has made the book the success it is – a point Stephens is keen to stress: “He’s not an ‘other’”. In fact, as Haddon says, “Christopher represents the complete pleasure of ‘indulging your obsessions’”.

It is clear that from hearing Haddon and Stephens speak that this has been a truly collaborative venture – something Sunday’s Olivier’s were  testimony to, with awards garlanding the whole team, from lighting and sound to acting and directing. Haddon’s book has certainly come a long way. As he said himself:  “For the first couple of years it feels like your baby. It’s about 36 now: it looks after itself. It rings home occasionally. It’s a very robust thing.”

In Hytner’s modern production of Othello, it is only Brabantio, Desdemona’s father (played by William Chubb) who is racist and any jibe made at Othello’s skin colour causes a flinch to ripple across the stage. By making it clear that this Othello is not set in a racist society, Hytner  removes one of the barriers that have, all too often,  produced unsatisfactory, and over- simplified productions of this play. This gives the excellent cast greater freedom to unlock the more emotionally complex layers within the piece.

Two stunning performances from Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago provide the emotional centre which helps drive the show. Initially, it seems that Lester’s Othello will be too charming as we are introduced to him polished in a smart suit and flawlessly calm as Brabantio accuses him of ‘bewitching’ his daughter Desdemona (Olivia Vinall) into marriage. However, the true strength of Lester’s performance is not revealed until the second act, once Iago has convinced him that Desdemona has slept with his Lieutenant Michael Cassio (Jonathan Bailey) and, driven mad by jealousy, Lester uses his imposing physique to brawl, fit on the floor, spit and vomit; a broken man who we cannot help but pity.

Kinnear’s soliloquies are compelling, eloquently using Shakespearean English with the ease and familiarity of a first language. Iago uses the façade of ‘the- good- bloke- down- the- pub’ to conceal his devious scheming, thus allowing him to build a hilarious repartee with the audience. He makes us laugh and therefore we like him, thus twisting our sense of morality because we are egging him on to destroy Othello. He switches rapidly from joker to madman and in the final scene, his wide- eyed and open-mouthed stare onto the bed and the three deaths he has caused sends shivers down the spine. This is a chilling portrait of a man who is fascinated by his own capabilities of evil.

Other notable performances include Tom Robertson’s wonderfully posh, stupid Roderigo and Lyndsey Marshall’s hardened Emilia. Vinall’s Desdemona is eager to please, but flits about the stage without any sense of direction. The portrayal of her as naïve and childish doesn’t sit well with the Desdemona written in the text, who has natural purpose, drive and integrity.

The Oliver Theatre is enormous. The last Shakespeare play held here, 2012’s The Comedy of Errors failed to fill the space, trying to make up what it lacked in humour with an overly elaborate set. This is not an issue with Othello. The communication of the language is simple and effective, and therefore easy to understand by all of the audience members. Vicki Mortimer’s design plays with the vastness of the stage, as pokey box- rooms lit with nasty strip lighting are wheeled on, thus narrowing the audience’s focus into a tiny area of the space and creating a heightened sense of claustrophobia that fits with the play’s impossibly narrow time-frame. At times all of the set is removed, leaving you staggered at the true depth of the space, symbolic of the scope of the military operation that Othello is managing.

This Othello is another example of what will be Hytner’s legacy: making theatre accessible to all and is an example of the most effective type of Shakespeare production; one in which you forget the actors are speaking a four hundred year old language. Hytner currently has a track record of directing excellent productions, and it looks like he will leave the National Theatre in 2015 on an all- time- high.

Othello will be broadcast live to two hundred and fifty UK cinemas and many more worldwide on 26September 2013. For more information, visit www.ntlive.com. Othello is running at the Olivier Theatre until 18August 2013. For more information and tickets, see the National Theatre’s website.