A strange tale of stage management traumas in the early years of the National Theatre is in competition with company histories and books on celebrity actresses, theatrical riots and 400 years of Shakespeare productions for this year’s Theatre Book Prize.
The judges—actress and director Nichola McAuliffe, critic and academic Aleks Sierz and Cathy Haill of the Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Collections, chaired by British Theatre Guide critic Howard Loxton—have just announced their shortlist, selected from nearly 80 titles submitted by publishers. They are still arguing over the winner, for I gather it is not a year with an immediate consensus though they are keeping mum on the detail.
The prize is given by the Society for Theatre Research and has been running since 1998, when it was set up to commemorate the Society’s Jubilee and to encourage the publishing of books about British theatre history and practice. The first winner was Colin Chambers’s play agent autobiography The Life of Peggy Ramsay (published in 1977, the prize covers books in the previous calendar year) and others have ranged from biographies of Garrick, Samuel Foote, Kenneth Macmillan, John Osborne and Margot Fonteyn to actor’s own memoirs, books on censorship, Shakespeare, the 19th century audience and one on Lionel Bart’s Oliver! as well as a definitive history of the National Theatre.
We won’t know the winner until May. The announcement will be made at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on Tuesday 2 May at a reception where, if you are lucky, you could join the gathering of actors and other theatre professionals, book people and theatre academics to hear the judges talk about some of the titles they found interesting before a still to be named stage personality presents the prize.
The prize isn’t a big one in cash terms (just £500) but over the years it’s gained a considerable cachet. Judging by the people who regularly attend the prize-giving in the elegant Grand Saloon of the historic theatre, that event seems a good one. If you want one of the limited number of invitations e-mail [email protected] and you may be lucky.
This is the full shortlist:
- 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 by Gordon McMullan & Zoe Wilcox (British Library Publications)
- Stage Managing Chaos: A Diary of the Old Vic Production of Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria by Jackie Harvey and Tim Kelleher (McFarland)
- Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage by Sean McEvoy (Routledge)