Free summaries
Plays/Films/Dramas
99 public-domain plays/films/dramas books, summarised. Page 1 of 3.
Jeremiah: A Drama in Nine Scenes
Stefan Zweig
The prophet Jeremiah does not ask for his burden; he finds it, and once it is carried, it can never be put down. This is the story of a man compelled to see the truth while a city chooses to go blind.
The sea-gull
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Every heart on a quiet Russian estate aches for a different, unreachable life, chasing fame or love while destroying the very things that make them whole.
Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
An impending storm drives stranded travelers into a roadside tavern, where long-buried resentments, tragic loves, and explosive tempers collide before the night breaks.
Semiramis, and Other Plays
Olive Tilford Dargan
This collection of three verse dramas explores the volatile intersection of personal desire and the crushing weight of public history. With a tone that shifts between grandiosity and intimate desperation, the work examines how the pursuit of love and ambition often leads to ruin.
Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
This portrait of a Russian country estate captures the quiet, crushing weight of missed opportunities and the fragile, repetitive nature of human endurance. It is a work of profound empathy that finds tragedy in the mundane.
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue
Karel Čapek
A visionary drama that introduced the word "robot" to the world, this play imagines a future where synthetic workers replace humanity, only to find that their perfection comes at a haunting, inevitable cost.
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen
The daughter of a general finds herself trapped in the stifling domesticity of a marriage she never desired. Her attempt to manipulate the fates of those around her leads to a devastating unraveling.
Picture plays
Marguerite Merington
The imagined lives of painted figures take center stage in this collection, where the boundaries between artistic canvas and human reality dissolve. These short dramas breathe motion into static masterpieces, exploring the private longings of those trapped within gilt frames.
Four Plays of Gil Vicente
Gil Vicente
A vivid glimpse into early 16th-century Portuguese life and spirituality, these plays blend allegory, satire, and pastoral charm to explore human nature, society, and the soul’s journey with sharp wit and heartfelt insight.
An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen
A principled doctor discovers contamination in his town's prized public baths, only to be turned into an outcast when he refuses to remain quiet.
Mariucha
Benito Pérez Galdós
When a disgraced aristocratic family collapses into poverty, an unyielding daughter and a pragmatic coal merchant forge an alliance to rebuild their lives on work rather than hollow pride.
Ghosts
Henrik Ibsen
A mother builds a sanctuary of lies to protect her son from his father’s dark legacy, only to watch inherited tragedy claim his mind.
The Arrow-Maker: A Drama in Three Acts
Mary Austin
The power of a medicine woman hinges on her detachment, yet her heart becomes her undoing when she sacrifices her spiritual authority for the love of a man who scorns her traditions.
The Post Office
Rabindranath Tagore
A sick boy sits by his open window, watching a busy road and dreaming of the distant worlds beyond it.
The Buddha: A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes
Paul Carus
A royal heir abandons his throne, his wife, and his infant child to seek an answer to universal human suffering. His return as a spiritual teacher transforms not only his family, but the political fate of rival kingdoms.
Peter Pan
J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie
A boy who refuses to grow up spirits three children away to a magical island, where they navigate the perils of pirates, mermaids, and their own shifting identities.
The Power of Darkness
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A dark, relentless descent into moral ruin shows how a single uncorrected misstep can entangle an entire village in deception, murder, and soul-crushing guilt.
Plays: the Father
August Strindberg
This collection of plays captures the volatile intersection of intellect, gender, and domestic power, exposing the hidden fractures in human relationships. It is a work of unrelenting psychological intensity, where characters dismantle each other’s realities with the precision of a scalpel.
The Master Builder
Henrik Ibsen
A man who has built his life upon the ruin of others faces the arrival of a girl from his past who demands the impossible. He must choose between the security of his terrestrial success and the vertigo of a final, fatal ascent.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Escaping the oppressive monotony of a charity institution, a desperate orphan accepts a post as governess, only to find herself embroiled in the dark secrets and passionate conflicts of a gloomy country estate.
The Lower Depths: A Drama in Four Acts
Maksim Gorky
In a squalid cellar where the forgotten survive on dreams, a group of outcasts clashes over the brutal necessity of truth versus the life-saving power of beautiful lies.
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study
Hugo Münsterberg
A pioneering psychologist explores how the silver screen functions not as a mere recording device, but as a mirror for the inner workings of the human mind.
The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays
Unknown
A collection of short, potent dramas captures the restless spirit of the early twentieth century, offering a window into the lives of those caught between tradition and the relentless march of modernity.
Three Plays
Luigi Pirandello
The masks we wear to survive are often more real than the people beneath them. These three plays dismantle the safety of certainty, revealing that truth is a mirror shattered by the very act of looking.
Swan Song
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
The stage is a cavern of shadows where an aging actor confronts the hollow echo of his own life. Behind the greasepaint lies a man realizing that his greatest performance has been the slow erasure of his soul.
When We Dead Awaken
Henrik Ibsen
Two artistically burned-out souls reunite at a Norwegian spa, attempting to reclaim their lost creative passion before ascending into the mountain mists together.
Plays by August Strindberg, First Series
August Strindberg
A haunting exploration of human discord, these plays peel back the thin veneer of marriage and social convention to reveal the desperate, often irrational struggles of souls trapped by their own illusions.
The wild duck
Henrik Ibsen
A family built on fragile illusions quietly disintegrates when an idealist demands total truth at any cost.
The Live Corpse
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A man attempts to resolve his failed marriage by faking his own death, only to discover that the law and human hearts do not permit such clean, tragic exits.
The Lady from the Sea
Henrik Ibsen
The restless pull of the ocean and the crushing weight of domestic expectation collide in this drama of a woman caught between her marriage and a phantom from her past. A haunting choice defines whether a life can truly be called one’s own.
The Road to Damascus, a Trilogy
August Strindberg
The journey toward redemption is a labyrinthine descent into one’s own past, where the boundaries between memory, reality, and nightmare dissolve entirely. This demanding trilogy serves as a mirror for the soul’s most agonizing internal conflicts.
Ivanoff: A Play
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
A disillusioning look at late nineteenth-century provincial Russia, where a burnt-out idealist finds himself utterly powerless to arrest his own emotional and moral decline.
Boris Godunov: a drama in verse
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
A usurper ascends a blood-stained throne, haunted by the ghost of a child whose death he orchestrated. This sweeping verse drama captures the fragile, volatile nature of power in early seventeenth-century Russia.
Little Eyolf
Henrik Ibsen
The tragedy of a family unravels when a child’s death forces his parents to confront the hollow, selfish reality of their marriage. It is a haunting, intimate look at the wreckage left behind by neglect and the difficult labor of redemption.
Circe
Isaac Flagg
The gods’ own magic is no match for the pull of home, as a weary traveler and a powerful sorceress test the limits of love and memory.
The chief Elizabethan dramatists, excluding Shakespeare
Unknown
The stage becomes a mirror of human obsession, where vanity, ambition, and boundless passion drive characters to their grandest triumphs and total ruin.
Aria da Capo
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A lighthearted harlequinade abruptly shifts into a haunting, circular tragedy about how easily human connection collapses into violence. This play exposes the fragility of peace and the terrifying speed at which casual games turn lethal.
Rosmersholm
Henrik Ibsen
A former clergyman and a freethinking woman attempt to build a noble life together on the ashes of his wife's suicide, only to be dragged down by political malice and inescapable guilt.
Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa
Ernest Fenollosa
An ancient theater of ghosts and gods emerges from these pages, offering a stark, ritualized alternative to the noisy realism of the modern stage. This collection serves as a meditation on how art might reclaim its dignity through silence, symbol, and shadow.
For the parson of Paradise
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A down-on-his-luck parson, a self-important Shakespearean actor, and two wandering cowboys collide in a small Western town, turning the production of a community play into a genuine disaster. This farce captures the collision between high-minded artistic aspirations and the chaotic, irreverent reality of frontier life.
He Who Gets Slapped: A Play in Four Acts
Leonid Andreyev
A man retreats from the hollow life of the intellectual elite to join a traveling circus, hoping to find truth in the stinging sting of a clown’s slap. He soon discovers that the mask of a fool is the only honest way to love a world that prefers the comfort of illusions.
King Lear's Wife
Gordon Bottomley
An icy, atmospheric examination of a domestic collapse, this work reimagines the origins of a Shakespearean tragedy through a cold, unflinching lens. It portrays the final days of a queen, the cold ambition of her daughter, and the decay of a royal marriage.
Plays: Comrades
August Strindberg
An ambitious marriage crumbles under the weight of false ideals, while a ruined family learns to endure the slow, painful work of forgiveness.
The Count of Narbonne: A Tragedy, in Five Acts
Horace Walpole
The tragic ruin of a house built on murder unfolds in this intense drama, where long-buried secrets and a father’s desperate ambition collide with the claims of a rightful heir. It is a cautionary tale of how guilt, when left to fester, eventually dismantles even the most secure of dynasties.
Redemption and two other plays
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Desperate choices tear through rigid lives when love, guilt, and social obligation collide.
East of Suez: A Play in Seven Scenes
W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham
A woman caught between two cultures faces the ultimate reckoning when her past collides with her present. This drama explores the destructive intersection of desire, deception, and the weight of heritage in 1920s Peking.
The Lamp and the Bell: A Drama In Five Acts
Edna St. Vincent Millay
HOOK A queen finds her life irrevocably fractured after a tragic accident, revealing the harrowing distance between a sister’s love and the cold demands of duty.
Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame
Clyde Fitch
A socialite’s engagement collapses under the weight of her fiancé’s dark secrets and her own family’s hidden dishonor. This drama exposes the brittle veneer of high society through a series of shattering revelations.