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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.
About the author
David Lan was born in Cape Town. He has lived in London since 1972. His plays have been produced by the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the RSC and the Almeida. He has published an ethnography Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. He was writer in residence at the Royal Court 1995 to 1997 and artistic director of the Young Vic 2000 to 2018. In 2018 he received the Laurence Olivier Special Award, the Critics' Circle Special Award and the RAI 'Anthropology in the World' award. He is Theatre Associate at BAM in New York.
Summary
Rich, warm and sparkling.' Peter Brook'He is the Chagall of theatre, hurtling over his colourful life and the world, his shirt flying, dreaming on behalf of humanity.' Fiona Shaw'Sincere, passionate, vulnerable, open, serious, loving.
