2 - Shakespeare in performance

Summary

Reviewing a big doorstep of a book such as the first volume of John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland's A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005, it's tempting to stress quantitative vital statistics in a sort of academic publishing version of Top Trumps. Length: 1756 pages: I win. Weight: I win again. Number of entries: 'almost 1200': me again. Price: yes, you got it. Or, to spar with other kinds of data. Did you know there are more index entries for the Guardian's veteran theatre critic Michael Billington than for Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall and Simon Russell Beale combined? Or that productions of Timon of Athens come round once every four years, while if you miss a Hamlet there'll be another along ere those shoes are old? Or that Laurence Olivier spoke a prologue written by Christopher Fry before a 1973 National Theatre touring production of Twelfth Night to celebrate Britain's entry into the EEC? What country, friends, is this? So what, avoiding the clichés of both 'did you ever?' and 'phew, what a whopper', does this Directory have to offer? A good deal. It's an immense standalone resource which, caveats about its coverage aside, gives a substantial snapshot of performance trends for particular plays, enables a preliminary trace of the careers of Shakespearian theatre professionals, and samples some pithy, informative newspaper reviewing. It will be an indispensable first point of call for anyone reading up the recent stage history of a particular play: neither overwhelming with detail like the Shakespeare in Production series nor over-interpreted as the Shakespeare in Performance series can be. Each entry has the details of cast and crew, of place and date, and then two or three gobbets from reviews in major newspapers and periodicals.