Theatre

I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After a night time drive under the arms of blue mossed oaks we made it to Emory University and took our seats and the curtain rose on a Victorian living room. Cautiously, with a canine playfulness, from out behind a sofa, tromped a dinosaur. I kept thinking of this moment as I read Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala.  Originally published in 1926 before he became a renowned playwright, Wilder attempted the same tricks here. He interjects Keats, Virgil, and even incarnate Mercury, into a contemporary 1920s narrative, in order to argue that the human condition has never improved, that culture is only a jacket that fits over a skeleton.

Tamsin Greig is so busy at the moment that Debbie Aldridge, the character she plays in The Archers, has to spend most of her time in Hungary. Star of TV shows like Black Books, Green Wing and Episodes, Tamsin Greig is also an accomplished stage actress and is about to reprise her role in Jumpy at The Duke of York in the West End. She tells us about her love for Seamus Heaney and Jackie Magazine. 1) What are you reading at the moment?      Under The Same Stars by Tim Lott and Collected Poems by Wendy Cope 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Jackie magazine 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?  The Road by Cormac McCarthy 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books.

This week's Shelf Lifer is Richard Bean. The British playwright recently won joint best new play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last year for both One Man, Two Guvnors at the National and The Heretic at The Royal Court. He tells us what he used to read to spite his father, which character in Brighton Rock he would sleep with and which play he would put on the GCSE syllabus. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Chavs by Owen Jones The King's War by Miss C. V. Wedgewood (Both social history books. Play research, I hardly ever have the time to read novels.) 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? On the Road by Jack Kerouac; The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle Junior - basically drug and hippy literature, surreptitiously  'cause my dad was a policeman.

Reading a new John Banville novel is like walking into a house you know but finding the dirty old armchair has moved. The shelf, still stacked with the same books, is now bathed in dusty light. The rug has shifted from right under your feet. Time and memory, ‘a fussy firm of interior decorators’, have rearranged the furniture. Whenever a Banville character peers into the recesses of their mind — and introspection is the norm — they experience a similar feeling of disorientation. We last met Alexander Cleave in Eclipse when the former thespian had retreated to wandering around his late mother's house in an attempt to gather his wits following a break down mid-performance.

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. It was 42nd Street. The geography is confusing, but so is the history, and indeed the nomenclature. For 42nd Street was not, of course, a Broadway musical, but a musical film made in 1933, based on a novel about life backstage at a Broadway theatre, with staged setpieces — notably the title song — in Hollywood’s version of the style of Broadway musical theatre.