Theatre Record for Train-Spotters
I keep a record of every play I’ve ever reviewed and I’m devoted to books of lists, lists of lists, dictionaries of everything, film guides, encyclopedias, companions to this or that and books of anecdotes, insults, and humorous quotations.
But I’ve never seen anything quite like Robert Tanitch’s obsessive new tome — The London Stage in the Twentieth Century, no less — which records every single West End opening from 9 January 1900 (Cyril Maude in She Stoops to Conquer at the Waldorf) to 16 December 1999 (Roy Fearon and Richard McCabe in Othello at the Barbican), with cast details, pithy comments and critical quotes.
It is, in fact, your very own personal theatre museum and you can have it for £30 from most good bookshops and all the good theatre ones. You can check what opened on your birthday and then have a suitably themed party. How am I going to make that work with The Glass Menagerie, I wonder? I’ll come to yours if it’s Oh! Calcutta!
I love all the serendipitous juxtapositions, too. The day before Laurence Olivier opened as Archie Rice in The Entertainer in April 1957, Victor Borge opened as another kind of urbane vaudevillian at the Palace: “I don’t do requests, ” he said, “unless, of course, I’m asked.” (The Entertainer would later transfer from the Royal Court to the Palace.)
And how salutary to be reminded that in 1961 Beyond the Fringe opened just a few days before The Sound of Music. And that, ten years later, Harold Pinter’s shimmering erotic mystery play Old Times was immediately followed by Michael Crawford in No Sex Please — We’re British.
Max Beerbohm once said that, after serving his stint as Shaw’s successor on the Saturday Review, he had acquired that most melancholy of all possessions, a theatrical library. There is indeed something sad about flicking through these information-packed pages, but it does save you the trouble of trying to find specific back numbers of Theatre World or Plays and Players.
And there are useful indices of names, play titles and theatres to help you through the labyrinth. The pictures are good, too, and usually placed conveniently close to the relevant paragraph on the page. I shall be dipping in with pleasure for weeks, if not years, to come, I should think.