These plays are set in the cruelest decades of 20th century Europe. Their characters suffer extreme conditions which are at the same time their ‘normal' everyday lives. They survive, or succumb, with more or less honour, as history - in the forms of revolution, war and cold war - plays out its own dramas around and through them. Using a range of dramatic forms in over eighty plays, Roger Howard has developed a ‘theatre of contradiction', celebrating people's resistance to injustice and inhumanity. He founded the Theatre Underground, for which the plays in this collection were written.