For fans of the stage, this is a pleasant peek behind the scenes during a transformative period of British theater history.
A celebrated director shares his memories from his years as the head of one of the world’s most famous theater companies.
Hytner was already an accomplished figure—in the 1990s, he directed the original stage productions of Miss Saigon and The Madness of George III—when, in 2003, he became artistic director of London’s National Theatre. He left in 2015 and has now written this witty memoir, his debut book, most of it devoted to that period. “You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise,” he writes. “And you’re pulled constantly in different directions.” Throughout, Hytner describes the many compromises (the balancing acts of the title) that he and his company of actors and writers—among his collaborators were Alan Bennett, Alex Jennings, Frances de la Tour, and Maggie Smith—had to make, one of which was figuring out what to do when government cuts to arts funding meant that “a huge potential audience…could no longer afford the arts.” In response, he innovated, pioneering the idea of corporate-sponsored, inexpensive seats and putting on a range of programming, from classics such as The Importance of Being Earnest to more challenging fare like Bennett’s The History Boys; England People Very Nice, a raucous “comic odyssey through four waves of immigration to London”; and, most notoriously, Jerry Springer: The Opera. Though the tone of the book is inconsistent, ranging from stream-of-consciousness to gossip to near-scholarly readings of Shakespeare, the many backstage stories, as well as the author’s reminiscences about his flirtation with Hollywood, make this an entertaining read. Among the anecdotes: Harold Pinter’s profane tirade at a restaurant because Hytner didn’t revive the playwright’s Celebration and the story of producer Cameron Mackintosh pushing a composer off a piano stool to show him how to perform a song only for Mackintosh to remember that he didn’t know how to play the piano.
For fans of the stage, this is a pleasant peek behind the scenes during a transformative period of British theater history.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49340-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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