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Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays and Fiction ed. by Catherine Wynne (review)

emulate Miss Horniman’s enterprise at The Gaiety in Manchester and Alfred Wareing’s in Glasgow. Opening extracts from supporting statements from such early advocates as Basil Dean, the Playhouse’s first director, and the playwright John Galsworthy, set the tone for most of what follows: an account of the birth, rise, and development of rep at one of the country’s leading regional theatres. But these testimonies remind us, too, often in intensely felt terms, what a struggle keeping a regional theatre afloat has always been. Even the exciting years of “the Gang of Four” (when the theatre was run, 1981-84, by that extraordinary quartet of writers, Chris Bond, Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell and Bill Morrison) were not enough to stabilise the theatre’s finances; and just two years later, the then-current director, Jules Wright, tendered her resignation, finding the tensions between artistic director and the new breed of career administrator no longer bearable. Again, the echoes here of similar battles waged in Cheltenham and dozens of other reps through the 1980s and ’90s resonate loudly. Following a three year closure from 1997 to 2000 the Playhouse reopened as a joint venture with the (other) Everyman Theatre across the city – a brave move to find imaginative solutions to a deepening crisis in regional theatre. The book’s format mostly works well, and the snapshots provide some genuine insight into the struggles that occurred both backstage and in the wider, political world of arts funding. But there are places where it would have benefitted from a fuller fleshing-out of the chronological detail; and there is a surprising absence of information about the sources of the more recent and current quotations – I can only guess they were drawn from interviews conducted specially for the book which is a strength surely worth flagging up. These handsome volumes will make for enjoyable browsing. They do not, and really do not pretend to, provide detailed, probing analysis, but both in their own ways arouse curiosity to know more, and manage to capture moments of the passion, indeed the revolutionary zeal, that lay behind the original pioneering campaigns and the recurring battles to revive and breathe new life into live theatre in the regions.