S.O.E. Specials Operations Executive: A Play

During World War II, S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) sends women like MADELEINE and Noor Inayat Khan behind enemy lines for espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance. This drama collection also includes "Best Beloved" based on Rudyard Kipling's 1899 visit to America and "A Necessary Woman" retelling Emily Davison's missing sixty-two hours. Women protested the Census by avoiding and evading it, with Emily Davison concealing herself in a cleaning cupboard to intervene in Parliament.

Format: Paperback / softback
Publication date: 26 May 2022
Publisher: Methuen Publishing Ltd

S.O.E. - SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE - also known as Churchill's Secret Army or The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - is tasked with espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in Europe during World War Two. Women are regularly recruited and sent behind enemy lines. As a wireless operator, their life expectancy is six weeks. MADELEINE is the codename for one such agent. Flown by moonlight to France in 1943, her job is to keep her circuit of agents connected with London. She cannot trust anyone. Josef Kieffer, a Major in the Gestapo, is on her trail... and she doesn't know how much time she has left. The net is closing. Once the war was over, Vera Atkins determined to find the truth. Of all her twelve missing women agents, the one that haunts her the most is MADELEINE, the Indian princess, Noor Inayat Khan. This fascinating, moving drama places two remarkable women at the center of the action.

Also in this collection:

BEST BELOVED is based on the true story of Rudyard Kipling's near-fatal visit to America in 1899, where the whole family was struck down by illness. Told by a young stenographer named Martha Pitcher - who is employed to record Kipling's fevered dreams - the action moves between the chaos of the media scrum outside the Kiplings' Manhattan hotel and from within Kipling's hallucinations (where he imagines he's trapped inside a whale). Kipling begins to recover, but tragically, his daughter Josephine dies; A NECESSARY WOMAN by Deborah Clair and Philippa Urquhart presents an imagined re-telling of what happened during Emily Davison's missing sixty-two hours... Women up and down the country prepared to avoid and evade the Census as a protest and challenge to authority. "No Vote, no Census!" was their battle cry. Two days before the Census, suffragette Emily Davison con.

Weight: 175g
ISBN-13: 9780413778642