Four Modern Verse Plays

Four Modern Verse Plays (1961) by Various — Penguin Plays
ISBN: None (because 1961 assumed you could recognise a book without it shouting its identity in barcode form)
Condition: Good (as sold by Crappy Old Books, specialists in paperbacks that have clearly been to things)

Some books are single stories. This one is a little theatre season in your hand—four modern verse plays tucked into one gloriously angular Penguin cover, ready to prove that poetry isn’t just for wistful moors and tragic larks, it’s also perfectly capable of doing family awkwardness, spiritual dread, historical crisis, and existential side-eye under stage lights.

Four Modern Verse Plays is what happens when the 20th century decides it wants drama, but also wants it to sound slightly elevated, like everyone’s having a breakdown in iambic pentameter while still remembering to offer the sherry. It’s a collection designed to make you feel cultured even if you’re reading it on a bus, which is, frankly, one of Penguin’s greatest services to humanity.

Inside you get:

• The Family Reunion — T. S. Eliot
  Because nothing says “warm gathering” like guilt, fate, and a general sense that everyone should probably sit down and stop pretending. Eliot does domestic tension the way Eliot does everything: with chill precision and an atmosphere that suggests the wallpaper is judging you.

• A Phoenix Too Frequent — Christopher Fry
  Witty, bright, and elegantly odd—like someone turned up to a funeral with a perfectly timed joke and made everyone secretly grateful. Fry’s verse is playful, alive, and suspiciously charming for something with mortality lurking nearby.

• Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury — Charles Williams
  History, conscience, power, faith—no biggies. Williams brings the weight of the past onto the stage and lets it argue with itself in verse, because if you’re going to wrestle with principle and authority, you might as well do it poetically.

• Happy as Larry — Donagh MacDonagh
  A title that feels like it’s smiling at you while hiding a small knife behind its back. MacDonagh’s work has that particular modern talent for mixing lightness with bite, like a tune you hum and then realise the lyrics are about your doom.

What ties them together isn’t plot—it’s the shared belief that verse drama can still work in the modern world, that heightened language can still carry human mess, and that rhythm and metaphor can make a stage feel like a moral pressure cooker. This is theatre for people who like their dialogue a bit more sculpted, their themes a bit more serious, and their entertainment sprinkled with a faintly alarming level of intellect.

And because it’s a 1961 Penguin Plays paperback, it comes with built-in period charm: the confident design, the price on the cover, the assumption that the average person might fancy reading Eliot for fun. (Imagine.) It’s also a lovely object in itself—book as cultural artefact, from an era when paperbacks were quietly trying to improve you.

This copy is listed as Good, which in Crappy Old Books language means solid, readable, and only gently roughed up by real life. Expect some honest shelf wear, perhaps a little scuffing, maybe pages toned by time—nothing dramatic, just the sort of patina that says this book has been handled by people who thought, at least briefly, “yes, I will read verse plays.”

Buy it if you like:

• theatre that doesn’t mind being clever

• poetry that isn’t afraid of plot

• modern classics with big themes and sharper edges

• the comforting smugness of owning a Penguin that looks like it came from a more literary universe

Four Modern Verse Plays: four different flavours of 20th-century seriousness, served in verse, bound in Penguin confidence, and delivered by Crappy Old Books in Good condition—because even existential dread deserves a decent paperback.

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