Agora: an Epic - Vols 1 & 2 : Boxed Pair

Written over the past twenty-two years Agora contains Francis Warner's plays originally published in the Oxford Theatre Texts series, the theme of which is the West's odyssey in discovery of its own values, and - in the second half of the work - what the Twentieth Century has done with them.

The first half of the epic (Volume 1) meets the classical tradition on its own grounds.

It opens with Healing Nature, a play about Periclean Athens, and this is followed by a trilogy of Roman plays - Virgil and Caesar, Moving Reflections and Light Shadows - then Byzantium, and concludes with Living Creation, a dramatisation of Renaissance Florence under Lorenzo de' Medici.

The second half (Volume II), opening with A Conception of Love, a comedy of love to mark the half-way point, is set in the Twentieth Century, and uses Twentieth Century techniques.

It contains Maquettes for the Requiem Trilogy and the plays themselves, Lying Figures, Killing Time and Meeting Ends.

Added as an appendix is Tim Prentki's Introduction to the one volume edition of Requiem, published in 1980.