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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
