Synopses & Reviews
Mark Sheridan, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan's elder brother, is "stage-struck". Though his theatrical ambitions are thwarted by a slight stammer, he joins Beerbohm Tree's company as an umpaid "walk-on". He tells the story of his two years in the company and his relationship with Esmond, a young actor. Interspersed with this narrative are flashbacks to his earlier life: his childhood in China, his schooldays in Paris, visits to London and its theatres, his university days in Cambridge, eighteen months in St Petersburg, where he witnesses the beginning of the 1905 revolution. Famous names appear in these pages: Bernhardt and Duse; Irving and Terry; Mahler and Massenet; Melba and Caruso; Gide and Proust; G.E. Moore and E.M. Forester; Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky; Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes; Vanessa and Virgina Stephen.
Time and Place is about the theatre, the telling of truth through illusion, but it is also about the real world of sexuality and history on which the theatre feeds. It is both picaresque novel, a sort of homosexual Tom Jones, and bildungsroman, a young man's attempt to account for his life.
Review
Times Literary Supplement[An] impressively researched and vividly conjured life.
Review
Ian McKellen
The people, the events and the setting of this tale are utterly convincing...a wonderful read.
Review
Sunday TelegrathThis elegant, if somewhat eccentric novel, so stylishly understated, blends high art with low sex. The book achieves real poignancy.
Synopsis
The narrator of this extraordinary narrative is Mark Sheridan. Born into the theatrical family of his uncle, R.B Sheridan, he recounts his years with a traveling theatre company, and his turbulent love affair with Edmond, a young actor. Interwoven are flashbacks to his turbulent earlier life and a pre-war world long vanished, his childhood in China, his schooldays in Paris, the months in St Petersburg at the beginning of the 1905 revolution; threading through them all, his awakening sexuality.For men such as he, these were dangerous times. Ruin and imprisonment were their oft companions. TIME AND PLACE is the author's desire to reclaim their lives, to write the book that Marcel Proust and E.M. Forster were unable to.