Old Stragers

Pat Rogers

• The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the 18 th Century by Allardyce Nicoll
  Manchester, 192 pp, £14.50, April 1980, ISBN 0 7190 0768 2
• The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage by Linda Kelly
  Bodley Head, 221 pp, £8.50, April 1980, ISBN 0 370 10455 2
• Early English Stages 1300 to 1660: Vol. 3: Plays and their Makers to 1576 by Glynne Wickham
  Routledge, 357 pp, £14.50, April 1981, ISBN 0 7100 0218 1

Is stage-history much use finally? Finally, that is, beyond all this fiddle over plans and parterres and side-boxes, the cost of nails and packthread, the greenroom gossip? I concede straight away that if you are mounting a performance, as they say, ‘in period’, then you need the basic historical dimensions and data, just as when you are playing ‘authentic’ baroque music you have to tune your strings to the right pitch. And if you are reconstructing the second Globe in Detroit, or for that matter re-erecting the Holborn Empire in Holborn, you cannot allow much latitude to guesswork. But those are special requirements, and most readers of these books will be calling up theatrical history for a broader range of in-sights. Their hopes will be only partially fulfilled.