From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FIVE BEST
Drama Kings
These biographies of theater luminaries outshine the rest.
1. "Shakespeare" by Park Honan (Oxford, 1998).
The most admired of all English-speaking playwrights is also one about whom comparatively little is known. As a result, too many Shakespeare biographers blithely dish up a mulligan stew of hard historical data, more or less informed speculation, and wildly wishful thinking. Not so Park Honan, the Joe Friday of Shakespeare scholars, whose lucidly written just-the-facts biography seeks (in his words) "to show in an accurate narrative all that can be known of Shakespeare's life, at present, and to offer some account of his writing in relation to his life. . ..Imaginative reconstructions and elaborate psychological theories about him can be amusing; but, for me, they strain credulity." I agree, which is why this is the book I invariably recommend to anyone interested in learning about Shakespeare and his world.
2. "Bernard Shaw" by Michael Holroyd (Norton, 1997).
Unlike Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw left behind so voluminous a factual record of his long, prolific life that more than a few would-be chroniclers have drowned in it. While Michael Holroyd managed to stay afloat in his staggeringly detailed four-volume biography of the author of "Pygmalion," many readers found it too much of a good thing, so he prepared this skillful abridgement, trimming away the fat (and footnotes) to create a one-volume version meant to be read "in a matter of weeks or days." At 833 closely packed pages, "Bernard Shaw" remains a daunting proposition, but Holroyd's lively prose helps to keep things brisk. Shaw's consuming interests in theater and politics are given equal time, and his senile infatuation with Stalinism, which his latter-day hagiographers prefer to paper over, is treated forthrightly.
3. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu" by Simon Callow (Viking, 1996).
Long before the director of "Citizen Kane" degenerated into the monstrously fat self-caricature who paid the rent by hawking Paul Masson wine on TV, Orson Welles was the wonder boy of American theater, a director of near-genius. His high-concept productions of "Macbeth" (transplanted from Scotland to Haiti) and "Julius Caesar" (which Welles turned into an up-to-the-minute parable of fascism ascendant) put him on the cover of Time magazine at the unripe age of 22. Most of "The Road to Xanadu," the first installment of a three-volume biography-in-progress, is devoted to a frank yet fundamentally sympathetic account of the spectacular stage career that preceded Welles's fateful decision to abandon Broadway for Hollywood. Simon Callow, a distinguished English character actor ("Four Weddings and a Funeral"), describes Welles's larger-than-life escapades with the penetrating insight of a theatrical insider who knows the difference between reputation and reality.
4. "Act One" by Moss Hart (Random House, 1959).
"Act One" is the best known and best loved of all theatrical biographies, the rags-to-riches story of a stage-struck Bronx boy who grew up to be a world-famous playwright ("The Man Who Came to Dinner," "You Can't Take It With You"), screenwriter ("A Star Is Born") and stage director ("My Fair Lady"). Like most celebrity memoirists, Hart simplified and sanitized the tale of his climb to fame, tiptoeing around the long-unprintable subject of his bisexuality. Even so, his anecdote-laden autobiography, a best seller in 1959, remains readable to this day, not least for its affectionate portrait of George S. Kaufman, the sardonic Algonquinite with whom Hart collaborated on his best plays. "Act One" is to theater what H.L. Mencken's "Newspaper Days" is to journalism.
5. "Prick Up Your Ears" by John Lahr (Knopf, 1978).
In 1967, just three years after the London premiere of his first play, 34-year-old Joe Orton was murdered by his lover, who bashed his skull in with a hammer. The young writer left behind only three full-length plays, "Entertaining Mr. Sloane," "Loot" and "What the Butler Saw." Yet these ice-cold, fathomlessly black comedies of sexual manners were brilliant enough to win him a permanent place in the history of modern English drama. John Lahr, now the drama critic of the New Yorker, made a name for himself a quarter-century ago with this superb Orton biography, in which the playwright's scandalous backstage life is recounted with unsalacious candor.
Mr. Teachout, The Wall Street Journal's drama critic, is writing "Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong."
