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Liverpool Playhouse: A Theatre and Its City
By Ros Merkin
Liverpool University Press £25.00
250 pages
Dateline: 8th December, 2011
Amongst the various celebrations for the Liverpool Playhouse's centenary this year, Liverpool University Press has published a book that documents the theatre's history and celebrates the important place that it has occupied in the culture of the city and the hearts of its people.
Ros Merkin is a reader in drama at Liverpool John Moores University, which may suggest that this would be an academic study, but on first glance this attractive volume looks more like a coffee table book filled with photographs of actors and productions and quotations from various people who have been involved with the theatre over the last century. However Merkin has done something quite clever and unusual to weave these quotations into an accessible narrative that functions both as a valuable sourcebook on north west theatre and as an easily-readable and very interesting story about the struggles to create and run a regional theatre building under financial pressures and with variable public and political interest in keeping the theatre alive.
The book consists almost entirely of quotations from different sources including books about theatre, local and national newspaper articles, theatre programmes, company documents and personal interviews with just the occasional interjection from Merkin to link them together and contextualise them. As a lot of this information was recorded contemporary to the events described, we are taken right into the thick of the arguments and crises rather than looking back on them with nostalgia with the benefit of hindsight. Inevitably some eras are recorded in much more detail than others.
There are a few themes that run through the book, such as the battles between artistic directors and the theatre's board over control of the repertoire, the unpredictable nature of Liverpool audiences even compared to audiences at other regional theatres and a desire to nurture and support local writers, something that was only achieved effectively in the latter half of the theatre's life, especially in the Studio which has just been reopened.
So this is both a book that can be dipped into for interesting quotations and anecdotes and to look at photos of actors when they were much younger and a story that can be read through, but it can also be valuable as a resource for more serious students of regional theatre, showing how it has responded to a changing social and political climate over the last century. While it is far from exhaustive and some periods are skated over rather rapidly, it makes a good starting point and it has a small but useful bibliography to direct the reader to further study.
David Chadderton
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