David Lan's evocative, fast-paced memoir takes us all over the globe,
introducing us to an extraordinary cast of characters, places and
experiences both on stage and off.
A family day at the beach. There's a song, an argument, a dash across
the white sand and into the high rolling waves. We're in Cape Town and
David Lan is ten years old.
Cut to 1969 and, visiting London fresh out of high school, he interviews
theatre luminaries Sybil Thorndike, Tom Stoppard, Trevor Nunn, Paul
Schofield before heading home to join the South African army.
Now it's 1999. We're at the Young Vic where David is interviewed to be
artistic director, a job he'd do for eighteen years, ensuring its
flowering into a great world theatre. There's a redesign to be imagined,
money to be raised, shows to be staged. And when the doors reopen in
2006 we meet the extraordinary artists he draws in: Ivo Van Hove, Jude
Law, Richard Jones, Gillian Anderson, Patrice Chereau, Katie Mitchell,
Stephen Daldry, the Isango Ensemble, Yerma, The Jungle, The Inheritance.
We travel to Peter Brook's Paris, to Iceland in pursuit of a circus
Romeo and Juliet, to Lithuania in search of his great grandparents, to a
refugee camp in Congo with Joe Wright and Chiwetel Ejiofor, to Broadway
for the Tony Awards. There's spirit mediums in the Zambezi Valley,
Chekhov's Yalta, Luc Bondy's Vienna, making a BBC film in Angola,
rehearsing a new play in Israel/Palestine.
Along the way, memories constantly rise to the surface: the Royal Court
in the 70s and 90s, school plays, his parents' complicated marriage.
Woven through it all is his decades long relationship with playwright
Nicholas Wright.
At times hilarious and always deeply felt, David Lan's deft travels
evoke a wildly varied life in theatre as well as a unique theatre of
life.
