About "Monstrous Regiment"

Monstrous Regiment is a stage play adapted by Stephen Briggs from the novel of the same name by Terry Pratchett. The novel is number 28 in the Discworld series.

Who is Terry Pratchett, then? For starters, he is the black-hatted gentleman in the photo on the right. (Author photograph by Robin Matthews, from the hardcover book.) From the jacket notes of the hardcover release of the novel:

Terry Pratchett is the author of the phenomenally successful Discworld series and is one of contemporary fiction's most popular writers. His first Discworld novel for children, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, was awarded the 2001 Carnegie Medal.

Terry's personal website is Turtles All The Way, with TerryPratchettBooks.com and The L-Space Web also being worth a look. Then stay up to date with The Discworld Monthly.

This play is the fourteenth Pratchett work adapted for the stage by Stephen Briggs.

Once you've seen and enjoyed Monstrous Regiment, you might like to borrow the book from your local library or buy yourself a copy.

The novel was published in 2003 and is available in hardcover (ISBN: 0385603401) and paperback (ISBN: 0552149403) from Dymocks and many other book stores.

For those who like blurbs (or are amused by how many different blurbs the same book can get) here are the blurbs of the hardcover:

It was a sudden strange fancy ... and now Polly Perks, in her brother's clothes and her hair cut off, has joined up to fight for her country, just like the song says. But who is the enemy? What is she really fighting for? Why does she need a rolled-up pair of socks? War teaches you a lot, she finds, when it turns out that you joined ... the Monstrous Regiment.

and the paperback:

It began as a sudden strange fancy ... Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers was easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape took more time ... And now she's enlisted in the army, and searching for her lost brother. But there's a war on. There's always a war on. And Polly and her fellow recruits are suddenly in the thick of it, without any training, and the enemy is hunting them. All they have on their side is the most artful sergeant in the army and a vampire with a lust for coffee. Well ... they have the Secret. And as they take the war to the heart of the enemy, they have to use all the resources of ... the Monstrous Regiment.

... and what's in a name, anyway? Pratchett was doubtlessly inspired (in part) by Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment, the biography of Valerie Lilias Arhelt Smith. In 1929 she was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment after it was found that Colonel Victor Barker was not what he seemed - he was, in fact, a woman!