John Godber is a popular and prolific playwright. In 1993, the year he turned thirty-seven, a Plays and Players survey cited him as the third most performed playwright in the United Kingdom, after William Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. In his career of more than twenty years Godber has written some forty plays for the theater as well as dramatic works for radio, television, and the screen. He has written in a variety of forms, including early expressionist experiments such as A Clockwork Orange (1976) and Toys of Age (1979), nonlinear narratives such as Bouncers (1977) and Shakers (1985), musical theater with Cramp: The Musical (1986), adaptations of classic literature such as Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1987) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1995), as well as naturalistic plays such as The Office Party (1992) and Gym and Tonic (1996). His plays can be separated into five broad thematic categories: family or biographical plays, plays that focus on youth and youth...