Max Beerbohm
Around Theatres.
London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953. First edition as single volume. xvi/583 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately , is bound in green cloth, with gilt-lettered red oval compartment. Book is in fine condition. Binding is firm. Previous owner's inscription appears on front flyleaf. Interior is otherwise clean and bright. This work is illustrated with a black and white frontispiece portrait. Intact dust jacket, with price 30s. of front flap, shows light shelfwear, with sunning to spine panel, and minor closed tear to lower inside corner of rear panel. Very minor spotting is visible. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"In 1898 Max Beerbohm succeeded George Bernard Shaw as dramatic critic of the Saturday Review, where his contributions appeared week after week for the next twelve years. When the limited edition of his collected works was published in 1924, Max selected enough of those old essays of the theatre to fill two stout volumes, of which the present book is an exact reprint. This is the first time that his work has been available to the British public.
More than a decade of the London theatre comes to life again to those witty and engaging pages -- and a vey lively decade too. The playwrights include Show, Rostand, Ibsen, Barrie, Yeats, Synge, Wilde and Henry James; the producers Gordon Craig, William Poel and Granville Barker; the actresses Bernhardt, Duse, Rejane, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Ellen Terry and Yvette Guilbert; the actors, Coquelin, Forbes-Robertson, George Alexander, Dan Leon, Lewis Waller and Charles Hawtrey.
Here is Max at the first night of "Peter Pan," of "Justice," of "The passing of the Third Floor Back." Here he is at the music hall, the pantomime, the ballet, the Grand Guignol. Now he is reviewing the latest books on the theatre, now delighting us with dexterous essays on First Nights, on Last Acts, on Soliloquies. All the world knows and loves Max the essayist, the caricaturist, the brilliant writer of stories and parodies, the incomparable broadcaster. "Around Theatres" shows that Max the dramatic critic is in every way their equal."