| “Hugely Informative, Zestful, Crammed with Arresting Detail” |
Theatre Critic Book |
| Aleks Sierz & Lia Ghilardi- “The Time Traveller's Guide to British Theatre” , Methuen Drama , February 20, 2025 |
Good writers don't stand still. Aleks Sierz is the author, alongside a long critical career, of two standard books on theatre's modernity.“Rewriting the Nation” is reviewed below 6th and 8th April 2011. His co-edited guide to modern playwrights is reviewed below 10th and 11th April 2012. “The Time Traveller's Guide to British Theatre” was written in part during his time as senior research fellow at Rose Bruford College. Its subtitle is “the First Four Hundred Years” with eight chapters that canter through theatre's centuries of 1550-1955. Lia Ghilardi is described as a cultural geographer who has written extensively on urban politics and place branding. The result of the two authors' collaboration is a hugely informative, zestful account, crammed with detail, much of it arresting and novel. A theatre culture that flourishes is a rich ecology. From fledgling days the authors record it as such. “Gorboduc” by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville was an early tragedy of the Elizabethan era. A short distance away audiences could crowd into “Ralph Roister Doister”, critically assessed as “an hour's worth of fart and burp joking.” The numbers can astonish. In the decades 1560-1640 three thousand plays were written. By the end of the period of Jacobean theatre twenty thousand Londoners were seeing theatre every week. In 1875 the city had 375 music halls. The Society of West End theatre was formed in 1909. Audiences, Sundays apart, were one hundred thousand a night. In the days of local government pre-eminence the London County Council organised matinees for children. A part of culture's history is the relationship with authority. These were not always so amicable. “The Isle of Dogs” (1597) by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe was denounced as seditious and Jonson was imprisoned. Every copy of the play was hunted down and destroyed by the Privy Council. A Royal proclamation was made that all theatres should be pulled down. It was not enacted. Assaults on theatre came from different directions. A parliamentary bill “to restrict the number of playhouses” was introduced in 1735 but failed. “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage” (1698) by Jeremy Collier ran to 280 pages. The Society for the Reformation of Manners contended that “the business of plays is to recommend virtue and discountenance vice.” Informants were sent out to plays to write down profanities and lewdnesses. A pamphlet “Players' Scourge” (1757) declared that “Play actors are the most profligate wretches and the vilest vermin that hell ever vomited out. They are the filth and garbage of the world.” The authors stress the contributions made by women. Aphra Behn and Githa Sowerby are recognised today. They recall Elizabeth Inchbald who, starting in 1780, had twenty plays staged. The powerhouse producer Lilian Baylis kept prices at the Old Vic pegged to that of a pint of beer. Her audiences were clerks, typists, shopworkers. Much detail of interest flies by in the narrative. Thomas Otway of “Venice Preserved” was an actor who appeared just once out of stage fright. Thomas Shadwell in “the Virtuoso” mocked the outer reaches of science. His hero swam on dry land and stored air from different parts of the country as if in a wine cellar. David Garrick was of such renown as to feature in more than 250 portraits, either in character or as himself. Closer to the present day the Unity Theatre, founded 1936, produced Odets' “Waiting for Lefty”, Britain's first Brecht production in 1938 and Sean O'Casey's “The Star Turns Red.”in 1940. More than a dozen other Unity Theatres were set up, including in Bristol, Glasgow, Sheffield and Merseyside. This is a book of scale recounted in a tone of buoyant effervescence. A guide to the sequence of books by critics can be read in the first link below. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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