The Time Traveller's Guide to British Theatre: The First Four Hundred Years

by Alex Sierz, Lia Ghilardi

British theatre is booming. But where do these beautiful buildings and exciting plays come from? And when did the story start? To find out we time travel back to the age of the first Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, four hundred years ago when there was not a single theatre in the land. In the company of a series of well-characterised fictional guides, the eight chapters of the book explore how British theatre began, grew up and developed from the 1550s to the 1950s.The Time-Traveller's Guide to British Theatre tells the story of the movers and shakers, the buildings, the playwrights, the plays and the audiences that make British theatre what it is today. It covers all the great names - from Shakespeare to Terence Rattigan, by way of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw - and the classic plays, many of which are still revived today, visits the venues and tells their dramatic stories. It is an accessible, journalistic account of this subject which, while based firmly on extensive research and historical accuracy, describes five centuries of British creativity in an interesting and relevant way. It is celebratory in tone, journalistic in style and accurate in content.

Genres: History

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 12, 2015

Reviews

[Karen Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining and easy read that takes you from British theatres' early days (replete with a different guide for each era) in Elizabethan times, to Jacobean, the lack of plays during the Interregnum, to the rebirth of theatre during the Restoration - also women's first time treading the boards. Then, there is Georgian times and so on up until the Twentieth Century. The reader is given a basic context for each period, introduced to the major players, playwrights, theatres, companies and any politics influencing them (and any other events happening - eg plague and fire) and thus given a fresh appreciation for the magic that occurs when the curtain is (or isn't) raised and the audience hush (or don't). Really enjoyable.

[John Geddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d recommend this to anyone with a interest in history or theatre. It contains a real deep dive into the history of theatre with a lot of information on plays and authors I’ve never heard of. There’s a lot of info so the conceit of in-person guides actually does make the whole journey a bit easier to consume.

The prose gets a little slow from place to place, but as a whole this is very interesting and entertaining.