Bøker av John Lahr

A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights

A brilliant and feared critic, Kenneth Tynan was a nabob of the National Theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and he was also the daring impresario who created "Oh Calcutta". This work features his diaries that remind older readers of a man whose reputation as the greatest critic of the twentieth century is still unchallenged.

In these incisive, often moving portraits John Lahr charts the geography of fame with the gift of revealing both the art and the artist, uncovering how life and work intersect.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTIONThe definitive biography of America's most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren'Riveting ... masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the YearOn 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show's thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, 'like a farm boy in his Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams's work - blood hot and personal - pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American theatre.Tracing Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams's late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and 'mad' sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama.Including Williams's poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work - posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day - Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America's greatest dramatists. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

This text reconstructs the life and death of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic playwright, whose plays scandalised and delighted the public, and whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely death.

A reissue in hardback of critic John Lahr's famous 1982 study of Noel Coward's plays