A stunning first play about an academic attempting to come to terms with cancer.

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Now an Emmy-award winning feature film starring Emma Thompson

Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned specialist in the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with stage four metatastic ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness — and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy programme — she comes to reassess her life and her work with profundity and an unbearably moving wry humour.

'An original and urgent work of art. Among the finest plays of the decade' — Wall Street Journal

'A dazzling and humane play you will remember until your dying day' — New York Magazine

'A brutally human and beautifully layered new play. You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted' — New York Times

Books in the “Plays I should read” bookshelf created by Fiona Mackinnon