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Dateline:
2nd April, 2004
Richard Eyre Wins Theatre Book Prize
At a reception at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden today authors,
actors, directors, designers, publishers, press and academics gathered
for the announcement of the winner of the Theatre Book Prize, presented
annually by the Society for Theatre Research to the book an independent
panel of judges considers the best book published in English during
the year on British theatre, its history and practice.
The judges: actor Corin Redgrave, theatre critic Susannah Clapp and
Jane Pritchard, theatre historian and archivist for ENB and Rambert,
talked about the five titles on their short list before the announcement
of the winner by actor Timothy West, President of the Society for Theatre
Research who then made the presentation.
Winner Sir Richard Eyre is known internationally for his work as a
director and for his work in film and television as well as theatre.
He was formerly Director of the Royal National Theatre and his winning
book, National Service,
covers the years when he held that post.
The other short listed authors include two actors (Oliver Ford Davies
and Michael Pennington) a theatre photographer (John Haynes) and two
academics (John Knowlson and David Wiles).
Before the announcement of the winner of the Theatre Book Prize for
2003 the judges spoke about the titles on the short-list. Susannah Clapp
(Theatre Critic of the Observer) had this to say about Richard Eyre's
National Service, his diary of ten years at the National Theatre.
'This is my ideal theatre book, which is actually to say it's an
ideal book. In a sense the interest of this book is quite straightforward:
it is a close-up, first-hand, insider's account of ten years in one
of the most important, and some would say the most important theatre
in Britain. All the things that make this book significant could also
make it ponderous. The sheer weight of material could make it difficult
to get through, but this is so much not the case here. The first thing
that makes me want to advocate this books is that it does everything
that you'd want a book written by an artistic director to do. Anyone
who goes to the theatre can't fail to be interested in an account
of a production mounting, taking-off, or, particularly in this book,
waning, failing, and the moment when you know it's not going to work.
There are really miserable moments when that is the case here - and
soaring moments when that isn't the case.
'It's got a mixture of the consequential and the apparently insignificant
and trivial. It's got the surprise encounter with a young fellow called
Tony Blair who is like a very agreeable academic until he smiles and
looks like a politician. A moment when John Osborne looks like an
Edwardian and Princess Margaret looking like a Maltese landlady and
complaining that she hated opera because it was a lot of people standing
there yelling.
'Although it's a diary account, a journalistic account in some senses,
it's also very subtly written. And a book which should put every theatre
critic on her guard. Because it is consistently demanding about the
theatre. It is very trenchantly written and it takes for granted that
it matters, which means that you can be very hard on what you see:
and Richard Eyre is famously hardest on his own productions. He has
very lightly acerbic things to say about theatre as spectacle. There
are very finely balanced judgements... where you feel both his enthusiasm
for an occasion and also an ultimate recoil to something not being
delivered, not finally being said.
'I think the most important thing about this book is that it makes
a case for theatre not by polemic, but simply by the sheer volume
of life that it includes. It is one of the best accounts of depression
that I have ever read, and extraordinarily so because hers is someone
who has a fulfilled and very successful professional and personal
life and yet is being dogged by melancholia. It's a very tender account
of being a father - almost any daughter reading this book would have
wanted this person as their dad - and a woebegone, wry account of
being a son. In discussing all these aspects it brings to them all
the qualities which make a good production and which make Richard
Eyre a good director and a good runner of a theatre: which is to say
he's got a quick eye and a very receptive ear.
'This book shows a really vital interconnection between the stage
and life. It doesn't co-opt the life onto the stage it shows them
both informing each other.'
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