A footnote to the above mention of Semi-Monde; I've predated it so that this appears below it.
One of the odd jewels of my book collection is something I came upon almost by accident – where was it, I wonder? – in the old days working in the Gifts & Exchange section of the Smithsonian Libraries, where many volumes that were hopelessly inappropriate for even their many branches appeared, and we were allowed to take them before they went off to the Library of Congress slush pile; or perhaps in a San Francisco, or a Los Angeles book shop....
In any case, it's extremely oversized, so it is weird that I would manage to keep it over the years – here, I will measure it for you: it is 16-1/2" x 10-1/2", a bizarre and very large size for a book. (Perhaps that's 'folio?' I have a lot of scores of around this size at the office, but they aren't at home of course.)
In fact, the special bookshelves I had made in Hong Kong in unusual sizes – ugly and clunky but solid, thoroughly amateurish but they do the job (I shouldn't have asked a British emigré to make them; imagine what kind of workmanship I might have had if I'd been smart enough to ask a Chinese woodworker) – were made to fit this book and everything smaller. And somehow this oversized, impossible book, only half an inch thick, has made it with me, not particularly damaged.
It is simply a book of photographs of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre; all black and white, all different productions, all incredibly beautiful. No date, no copyright (the librarian in my tuts at these lacks), but it must have been around 1983-4, as those are the last festival dates listed. Big, big pictures, which is why the book is so wonderful; and the plays they chose to do – famous antiques, things I've never heard of, and various half avant-garde masterpieces that you would think were impossible to pull off successfully.
It's a book of desires, at least for me: I would so very, very much have wanted to see some of these productions – to see, in person, how they somehow made Karl Kraus' insanely long, insanely awkward The Last Days of Mankind work; that they did amazing things with Woyzeck, with Sartre, with Chekhov; how they did weird transforms of Shakespeare, Brecht, Genet; to see their love of artifice, of heavily emphasizing the masks and artificiality of Goldoni, Hofmannsthal, Coward, and playing with it, stripping it piece by piece....
Comments