At the Society for Theatre Research annual Theatre Book Prize presentation at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane this morning, Sir Richard Eyre presented the award to Jackie Harvey, a former stage manager at the National Theatre, for her record of the production process when it put on Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria at the Old Vic.
It is a tale of disaster. Argentinian enfant terrible Victor Garcia, much admired by Kenneth Tynan, was the director. Sir Laurence Olivier, then running the National, had a bad feeling about it. He asked Jackie to keep a detailed rehearsal diary, which forms the core of this book.
As one of the judges, Aleks Sierz, told the audience at the reception, “this book is really thrilling, the story of a slow car crash told with impressive clarity and enormous readability.
"It is a tale of missed deadlines, unauthorized absences, technical hitches, impractical designs, desperate, sobbing actors, controversial nudity and backstage backstabbing. An irresistible concoction of events! But the paradox is that out of this disastrous process came a production that many critics thought was amazing.”
Sir Richard, who remembers seeing it, certainly thought it a disaster. He suggest that the making of this now published record was Olivier’s way of dissociating himself from it.
Stage Management Chaos, which Jackie Harvey wrote with the collaboration of Tim Kelleher, gives a wonderful insight into what the job is really like and, for the reader at least, very, very funny as star Anthony Hopkins is nearly driven to breakdown.
The judges: Sierz, Cathy Hail of the Theatre Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and actress Nichola McAuliffe (currently on tour in Waiting for God) and their chair BTG critic Howard Loxton, made lively presentations about some of the highlight among the 78 books that were entered this year.
Their enthusiasm for some of the other titles made it clear that the winner had hot competition from the other short-listed contenders who also received awards. These were:
- Juggling Trajectories: Gandini Juggling MXMXCI – MMXV by Thomas J M Wilson (Gandini Press)
- London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880-1920 by Catherine Hindson (University of Iowa Press)
- Nobody Knows but Everyone Remembers by Mark Long (People Show)
- Shakespeare in Ten Acts edited by Gordon McMullan & Zoe Wilcox (British Library Publications)
- Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage by Sean McEvoy (Routledge)
The prize is awarded by the Society for Theatre Research and was set up in 1998 to mark the Society’s Jubilee. The event was introduced by actor Timothy West, who is the STR’s President.
Books on all kinds of British theatre are eligible and previous winners have ranged from theatre history and biographies of famous actors and choreographers to understudy memoirs, books about censorship and theatre audiences. They have included Sir Richard Eyre’s National Service on his years at the National and Daniel Rosenthal’s history of that organisation