The Stage

Theatre Book Prize for Eyre’s National Service

Published Tuesday 13 April 2004 at 14:25 by Sally Bramley

Former artistic director of the National Theatre Richard Eyre has been awarded the 2003 Theatre Book Prize for his diaries covering his time at the South Bank venue.

National Service was selected out of a final shortlist of five, which included Oliver Ford Davies’s Playing Lear, Images of Beckett by John Haynes and James Knowlson, Are You There Crocodile - Inventing Anton Chekhov by Michael Pennington and David Wiles’ A Short History of Western Performance Space.

Describing the work, judge Susannah Clapp, theatre critic on The Observer, said: “This is my ideal theatre book, which is actually to say it is an ideal book. It has got a mixture of the consequential and the apparently insignificant and trivial. It has got a surprise encounter with a young fellow called Tony Blair, who is like a very agreeable academic until he smiles and looks like a politician.

“This book shows a really vital interconnection between the stage and life. It doesn’t co-opt the life onto the stage, it shows them both informing each other.”

The annual prize is presented by the Society for Theatre Research. Clapp was joined by fellow judges Corin Redgrave and the Rambert Dance Company and English National Ballet archivist Jane Pritchard. The award was presented at the Theatre Museum by the society’s president Timothy West.

Previous winners of the award have included Peter Brook’s Threads of Time and A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 by Christopher Morash.