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Off-Centre Stages: Fringe Theatre at the Open Space and the Round House 1968-1983 (review)

How accurate or reliable is the newspaper theatre review as source in historical research? Taken as a whole, it may be argued, the reviews, written to offer guidance to the contemporary newspaper reader, provide a useful picture of the performances observed. In her meticulous and scholarly account of the histories of two ground-breaking theatres – the Open Space and the Round House, between the years 1968 and 1983 – Jennie Schiele makes regular use of the newspaper theatre critics of the time, often quoting a phrase or sentence from their columns as the principal means by which an impression of the experience for the audience of seeing the work is given. These round-ups of the critical reception of the work are accompanied by a wealth of source material, generated within the theatres – much of it gleaned from the archives of the two theatres, which the author had the ‘‘good fortune to ‘discover.’ ’’(xi). These archives have now been placed in the care of the Theatre Museum, where they are in the process of being catalogued. Moving smoothly back and forth through these brimming archives, the author succeeds in creating lively portraits of two epoch-making theatres at a time of great innovation and change. As Charles Marowitz, the founder of the Open Space theatre, prophetically announced in 1972: