Category Archives: Books

IN SUPPORT OF THE FOURTH WALL: PROSCENIUM ARCH THEATRE’S SURPRISINGLY RADICAL HISTORY · Sep 11th

(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/11/2026. Vaulted ambition … the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. Photograph: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images.)

Dominic Dromgoole’s new book, Time Frames, shows how this format’s stuffy reputation belies the room it has made for daring experiments from Chekhov to Brecht and beyond

How do you make theatre history come alive? One way is through creating lists backed up by quirky essays. I tried that myself in The 101 Greatest Plays, which is one reason why I’m in awe of Dominic Dromgoole who, in Time Frames extends the possibilities of the format and comes up with a book that is passionate, personal, informative and argumentative. It just seems unfair that a director should outperform most of us critics.

He starts with the advantage of a strong framework. His book covers the years from 1865 to 1965, when the proscenium theatre was dominant, and deals with more than 70 playwrights. Today we celebrate the limitless possibilities of theatre with open, apron, traverse and circular stages but Dromgoole enthuses over a time when plays were mainly enclosed behind a proscenium arch. He describes the form as “liberatingly restrictive” like the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues and he has a point.

We associate the proscenium with the good-mannered, well-made play but it also gave birth to Chekhov’s work for the Moscow Art theatre, Brecht’s revolutionary ideas in East Berlin and, closer to home, Joan Littlewood’s radical populism at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the explosion of energy at the Royal Court. Seizing on the closely crafted, socially critical plays of John Galsworthy, Dromgoole says they are perfect examples of the proscenium paradox: “entertainment encasing dysfunction”.

While charting the proscenium century Dromgoole also forces us to question existing assumptions. One of his great discoveries, initially unearthed in a book by Maggie Gale, is that between the wars 21% of West End plays were written by women: a considerably better ratio than later times. This leads Dromgoole to examine a whole host of neglected female writers. He shows how Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement dealt seriously with the problem of men returning from war still saturated in violence. He makes a strong case for Dodie Smith whose Dear Octopus was recently revived at the National but whose Call It a Day, with its “shamelessness about unbridled female desire”, sounds even more fascinating. He suggests that sex was also at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s achievement in rarely seen plays such as September Tide and The Years Between. He also rediscovers Alice Childress, an American playwright who was a big influence on Lorraine Hansberry and whose 1955 play, Trouble in Mind, dealt with the tension between a black female actor and a white male director.

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STEPHEN SONDHEIM “SUPERB” NEW BIO BY DANIEL OKRENT · May 21st

(Emma Brockes’s article appeared in the Guardian, 5/21.)

Stephen Sondheim by Daniel Okrent review – a superb biography of the musical master

Among the many great pleasures of Daniel Okrent’s new biography of Stephen Sondheim – a book perfectly weighted between the gossipy and erudite – is its rendering of the milieu beyond its immediate subject. You come for the biography and stay for the world of mid-20th-century New York, in which Leonard Bernstein says terrible things about Sweeney Todd (“disgusting”), Sondheim says terrible things about Barbra Streisand (“doesn’t have one sincere moment left inside her”), and Arthur Laurents says terrible things about everyone. In the early 2000s, during a particularly poisonous exchange of letters between Laurents and Sondheim, the latter told his old collaborator, “you’re just good enough to know you’re mediocre”.

The entire book is sheer delight and Okrent, formerly an editor at the New York Times and a baseball fanatic who effectively invented the modern fantasy baseball league, does a terrific job of telling Sondheim’s life story alongside shrewd analysis of his body of work. We meet Sondheim’s mother, known as Foxy, whom the writer and composer made an elaborate play of hating his entire life and who Okrent brings to life in order to get behind that particular performance.

We see the young Sondheim taken under the wing of Oscar Hammerstein, the great man of musical theatre, who called out the young Stevie, as he knew him, for early missteps: “You’re writing like me,” said Hammerstein. “You’re imitating me, you’re talking about nature and things like that. You don’t believe in those things.” He then gave Sondheim a piece of advice the younger man would carry close to his chest throughout his career: “Write what you believe, and you’ll be 99% ahead of the game.”

The early chapters are a fascinating study in the gestation of genius. Sondheim attended Williams College, Massachusetts, where he switched from studying maths to music once he understood the latter could have the same “exactitude and rigor”. This shift was largely down to his tutor, Robert Barrow, an unpopular figure among students for being dry and doctrinaire but a perfect fit for Sondheim. Barrow’s instruction was pivotal; on Claude Debussy’s La Mer, Barrow said, “Anybody here hear the sea? Well, even if you do, that’s not what it’s about. What the piece is about is the whole tone scale.” Music to Sondheim’s ears, who later credited that moment for teaching him “that music is a thought-out process, that it is craft, not inspiration”. (Forty years later, he would make the hero of Sunday in the Park With George have similar insights.)

In those early years of his career, we see Sondheim at the mercy of the big beasts of musical theatre – in 1958, Ethel Merman rejects him as a potential composer for Gypsy because, as she sees it, he is “a beginner” (Sondheim later referred to her as a “loud, vulgar, cheap, small-eyed lady”). Instead, he was relegated to writing the lyrics, a job Sondheim considered far inferior to composing. This story made me laugh: when Sondheim shared his lyrics for Everything’s Coming Up Roses with Jerome Robbins, the show’s director, Robbins asked: “Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?”

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SHAKESPEARE WAS ACTUALLY A BLACK JEWISH WOMAN, NEW BOOK CLAIMS · Jan 31st

(Sami Quadri’s article appeared in the Standard, 1/28.)

Feminist historian identifies Tudor poet Emilia Bassano as true author whose identity was hidden by literary establishment

William Shakespeare was a “black Jewish woman” whose work was stolen by a semi-literate businessman, a controversial new book has claimed.

Feminist historian Irene Coslet argues the real genius behind the world’s most famous plays was Emilia Bassano, a Tudor court poet who used “Shakespeare” as a pen name.

According to The Real Shakespeare, written by the LSE graduate, Bassano’s true authorship was covered up in favour of William Shakespeare, an “uneducated interloper” from Stratford-upon-Avon.

Ms Coslet contends that Elizabethan society preferred the narrative of a “white” male genius to acknowledging a black female playwright.

Bassano had intimate connections to the theatre world as mistress of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon – Elizabeth I’s Lord Chamberlain and patron of Shakespeare’s own troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Literary scholars have long speculated she could be the “Dark Lady” immortalised in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

No one during the Bard’s lifetime ever disputed his authorship. Even his theatrical rival Ben Jonson praised him as a genius “for all time”.

Yet conspiracy theories have persisted for centuries, with some suggesting Christopher Marlowe contributed to the enormous body of work.

Shakespeare’s modest origins – a glover’s son from Warwickshire with limited schooling – have fuelled doubts about how he achieved such literary brilliance.

Ms Coslet tackles this directly in her book, writing: “Historians have not managed to explain how the Stratford man, a semi-illiterate moneylender, managed to gain such a level of erudition.”

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‘THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA’: HOW PAUL ROBESON WENT FROM HOLLYWOOD TO BLACKLIST · Jan 21st

Paul Robeson as Othello, 1944; photograph by Carl Van Vechten

(Howard Bryant’s article appeared in the Guardian, 1/21/2026.)

The groundbreaking singer, actor and athlete became a victim of McCarthyism and saw his shining career destroyed and his legacy tarnished

In August 1972, the front page of the New York Times arts section published a story titled, Time to Break the Silence on Paul Robeson? The legendary bass-baritone spent the first half of the 20th century as one of the greatest talents the US had ever produced, and its second, both in life and in death as an outcast, the greatest casualty of the second Red Scare period to which today’s current attacks on liberal and progressive politics draw comparison.

This week marks 50 years since Robeson’s death and the silence remains. His erasure from the lineage over the decades shows that what Robeson’s political opponents did not take from him, the years have most certainly. Robeson’s decoupling from the story of African American culture has been so complete that in the half-century since his death, even generations of Black Americans have never heard of him.

His talent was prodigious. Robeson integrated Broadway in 1943, the first Black man to play Othello in the United States. Previous productions of Shakespeare’s jealous Moor casted white actors in blackface, and Robeson’s Othello run of 296 performances remains a Broadway record for a Shakespeare production. A two-time All-American at Rutgers, he was one of the greatest college football players in history. He graduated from Columbia Law, and, before becoming world renowned as a concert singer, stage and Hollywood actor, Robeson even played defensive end for two years in the National Football League. The Robeson legacy spawned a staggering list of Black stage performers, from Lena Horne to Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, Andre Braugher, Keith David and Denzel Washington. At his peak, Paul Robeson was the most famous Black American in the world.

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LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI WINS THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025 · Oct 9th

(Emma Loffhagen’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/9/2025; Photo: ‘Beauty in language. Fun in hell’ … László Krasznahorkai Photograph: Carlos Álvarez/Getty .)

The Hungarian novelist whose books ‘reaffirm the power of art’ was announced as winner at a ceremony in Stockholm
Nobel prize in literature 2025 live: László Krasznahorkai wins ‘for his compelling and visionary oeuvre’

The Nobel prize in literature for 2025 has been awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The Academy cited the 71-year-old’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

Krasznahorkai is known for his dystopian, melancholic novels, which have won numerous prizes, including the 2019 National Book award for translated literature and the 2015 Man Booker International prize. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, have been adapted into feature films.

“Krasznahorkai richly deserves the prize,” said the novelist Hari Kunzru. “He has a reputation as an austere figure of European high culture, and indeed some of his work is uncompromisingly bleak and difficult, but he’s also a curious, playful and very funny writer. When I read him, I feel fortified, both as a human being and as someone who’s trying to make art. He shows me what’s possible.”

Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai first made his mark with his 1985 debut novel Satantango, a mesmerising portrayal of a collapsing rural community. The novel would go on to win the Man Booker International prize in English three decades later, in 2015. It was also famously adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai has had a long creative partnership.

Often described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai is known for his long, winding sentences (the 12 chapters of Satantango each consist of a single paragraph) and the kind of relentless intensity that has led critics to compare him to Gogol, Melville and Kafka.

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OLIVER GOLDSMITH, PLAYWRIGHT, MORE, ON BBC RADIO 4 IN OUR TIME · Feb 27th

Listen at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00282pq

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

In Our Time (Discussion Program)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith’s life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield.

With

David O’Shaughnessy
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway

Judith Hawley
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

And

Michael Griffin
Professor of English at the University of Limerick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

ISMAIL KADARE, GIANT OF ALBANIAN LITERATURE, DIES AGED 88 · Jul 1st

(Richard Lea’s article appeared in the Guardian, 7/1; Photo: Ismail Kadare, pictured in 2005. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian.)

His allegorical stories, informed by life under state communism, drew international praise but he insisted that he was not a political writer

Ismail Kadare, the Albanian writer who explored Balkan history and culture in poetry and fiction spanning more than 60 years, has died aged 88, his publisher has said.

Bujar Hudhri, Kadare’s editor at Tirana-based publishing house Onufri, said Kadare died on Monday after being rushed to hospital, with Reuters reporting the writer had suffered cardiac arrest.

Writing under the shadow of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, Kadare examined contemporary society through the lens of allegory and myth in novels including The General of the Dead Army, The Siege and The Palace of Dreams. After fleeing to Paris just months before Albania’s communist government collapsed in 1990, his reputation continued to grow as he kept returning to the region in his fiction. Translated into more than 40 languages, he won a series of awards including the Man Booker International prize.

Born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, an Ottoman fortress city not far from the Greek border, Kadare grew up on the street where Hoxha had lived a generation before. He published his first collection of poetry aged 17. After studying at Tirana University, he won a government scholarship to study literature at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. He returned to Tirana in 1960 with a novel about two students reinventing a lost Albanian text. When he published an extract in a magazine, it was promptly banned.

“It was a good thing this happened,” he told the Guardian in 2005. “In the early 60s, life in Albania was pleasant and well-organised. A writer would not have known he should not write about the falsification of history.”

Three years later he made it past the censors with The General of the Dead Army, a novel about an Italian general who travels across Albania in the 1960s to recover the remains of Italian soldiers who died during the second world war. The unnamed general trudges through dismal villages and muddy fields, questioning the point of his gloomy mission: “When all is said and done, can a pile of bones still have a name?”

Albanian critics attacked a novel that was a world away from the socialist realism required by Hoxha’s regime, but when it was published in France in 1970 it caused a sensation. Le Monde hailed it as “astonishing and full of charm”.

While his international profile offered some protection, Kadare spent the next 20 years charting a course between artistic expression and survival. After his political poem The Red Pashas was banned in 1975, he painted a flattering portrait of Hoxha in his 1977 novel The Great Winter. In 1981 he published The Palace of Dreams, an allegorical attack on totalitarianism in which a young man discovers the dangerous secrets of a government office that studies dreams. It was banned within hours. Despite these reverses, Kadare became an important figure in the Albanian writers’ union and served as a delegate in the People’s Assembly. He was also able to publish and travel abroad.

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‘SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS’ BY RAMIE TARGOFF REVIEW – FOUR WOMEN WHO WROTE THE RENAISSANCE · Apr 12th

(Stephanie Merritt’s article appeared in the Guardian, 4/8;Photo: Child prodigy Elizabeth Cary, the author of the first published play by a woman in English. Photograph: Magite Historic/Alamy.)

This lively, accessible insight into a quartet of female writers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England explores the complex political, patriarchal and religious backdrop to their lives

Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, famously asserted that any hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare would have had her literary gifts thwarted from the outset, thanks to the restrictions on women’s education in the Elizabethan age, not to mention the burdens of motherhood and domestic drudgery.

In the last few decades, the field of feminist literary and historical studies has vastly expanded, holding up to the light those female writers who, despite Woolf’s dismissal, did exist and create in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Ramie Targoff, professor of English at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, sets out to examine the life and work of four of the most prominent in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance. One is the prolific diarist Anne Clifford, who was certainly known to Woolf because her lover, Vita Sackville-West – a direct descendant of Clifford – had published Anne’s early diaries. Where Woolf regarded Anne as “practical and little educated”, “busied with all the cares of wealth and property”, Sackville-West praised her “sharp, vigorous mind”. In Targoff’s account, Anne – who lived to be 86 – emerges as determined and independent minded, her writing offering a vivid account of her personal battle to assert her rights after she was disinherited from her father’s estate.

Most striking is the way the women had to accommodate a world of male expectations and bend their way around it

Targoff’s other three subjects are equally fascinating. There’s Mary Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip and later Countess of Pembroke, whose translations of the Psalms were praised by her male contemporaries, including John Donne; Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian (possibly Jewish) immigrant musician, whose name may be more familiar since Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 hit play Emilia brought her to a new audience; and Elizabeth Cary, a child prodigy who went on to become the author of the first published play by a woman in English, despite having 11 children. These women and their writings are not unknown, but to see their individual and occasionally interwoven stories set out side by side is to understand with greater clarity that, while Woolf was not wrong about the obstacles faced by female writers, she was mistaken about the quality and reception of their work.

Most striking in Targoff’s account is the way the women had to accommodate a world of male expectations and bend their way around it in order to make their voices heard. Mary Sidney used her famous brother as a foil, slipping her own earliest work into print under cover of his name. When Elizabeth Cary was newly married and her husband, Henry, went abroad to fight in the Netherlands, Elizabeth’s mother had someone else write to Henry on his wife’s behalf, lest the evidence of Elizabeth’s ferocious intelligence put him off; Elizabeth’s play, The Tragedy of Mariam, was published with only her initials on the title page, to conceal her identity.

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PHYLLIS WHEELER: ‘SECRET OF THE LOST DRAGONS’–SELAH AWARD FINALIST! · Apr 10th

(from Phyllis Wheeler, friend of Marit Literary and Stage Voices)

In the news! Secret of the Lost Dragons, Book 2 of my Guardians of Time series, has been named a finalist in the prestigious Selah Awards for Christian Fiction, 2023. Book One, The Dog Snatcher, also received this distinction in the previous year.

Find Secret of the Lost Dragons in the Chapter Books category: https://www.facebook.com/TheSelahAwards/posts/pfbid02hA1Qpx5BxbHixGciQwgVP39r975hJzXXA7dD3HC6rdtWzjSxgtj2kLK5bfFdMrowl

Rejoice with Phyllis!

‘THE KALEVALA’ (LISTEN NOW ON BBC RADIO 4–IN OUR TIME–DISCUSSION PROGRAM) · Mar 30th

THE KALEVALA

Listen now

In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Finnish epic poem that first appeared in print in 1835 in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire and until recently part of Sweden. The compiler of this epic was a doctor, Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who had travelled the land to hear traditional poems about mythical heroes being sung in Finnish, the language of the peasantry, and writing them down in his own order to create this landmark work. In creating The Kalevala, Lönnrot helped the Finns realise they were a distinct people apart from Sweden and Russia, who deserved their own nation state and who came to demand independence, which they won in 1917. With Riitta Valijärvi Associate Professor in Finnish and Minority Languages at University College London Thomas Dubois The Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison And Daniel Abondolo Formerly Reader in Hungarian at University College

London Producer: Simon Tillotson