Making Noise Quietly: three short plays: (NHB Modern Plays)

An acclaimed trilogy of plays exploring the impact of war on ordinary lives. In Being Friends, two young men meet in a Kentish field in 1944 as doodlebugs whizz overhead. One is a conscientious objector, the other an artist, but an intense bond forms between them. In Lost, May Appleton, whose son is serving in the Falklands, receives the visit that every mother dreads. In Making Noise Quietly, set in 1986 in the Black Forest, a German businesswoman takes into her home a fugitive British private and his disturbed stepson. Robert Holman's trilogy of short plays, collectively called Making Noise Quietly, was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in June 1986. It was revived by the Oxford Stage Company at the Whitehall Theatre, London, in April 1999 following a UK tour. It received a major revival at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in April 2012.

About the Author :
Robert Holman (1952–2021) was a British playwright whose work has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, as well as in the West End and elsewhere. He is celebrated for the passionate humanity and quiet intensity of his plays, especially for his triptych of short plays, Making Noise Quietly, which was first seen at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1986, and has since been revived and adapted as a film (2019). His plays include: Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, and revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, 2016); Rooting (Traverse Theatre, 1979); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1980); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1987, and revived at the Donmar Warehouse, 2012); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, 2008, and revived at the Park Theatre, 2014); A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, co-written with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 2010); A Breakfast of Eels (Print Room at the Coronet, 2015); and The Lodger (Coronet Theatre, London, 2021). He also wrote a novel, The Amish Landscape, published in 1992.

Review :
'A supreme example of how a writer can make a play by putting together a triptych of miniatures... Writing of rare sensitivity and cumulative power' 'The modern school of in-yer-face theatrical brutality often boasts of 'exploring the dark side'. Holman, without crude shock tactics, really does so. And goes directly to the heart' 'Marvellous... this haunting trilogy lodges itself in the mind and heart far more deeply than many noisier, flashier plays' 'Charming, funny and faultless... a minor miracle' 'Holman's instinct for truth, and an unaffected ability to spot what's poignant in it, is what one remembers: that, and a paradoxical impression of spare richness, astringent abundance'