John Golder

The publisher’s puff to actor Michael Craig’s autobiography, a ‘fascinating, wittily wicked memoir of his life in film, theatre and television’, is unfortunate: not only is its conventional hyperbole on this occasion a cruel overstatement, but it misleadingly suggests a meaningful structuring of the events of Craig’s long career – in three media on two continents – that is nowhere apparent. Craig himself calls it more modestly a ‘rambling discourse’.

Two of Kathleen Riley’s aims are clearly, if somewhat grandly, spelt out in her prologue: to redress the omission of Nigel Hawthorne ‘from theatre histories of the latter half of the twentieth century’; and to ‘present a new appraisal of post-war theatre by focusing on the personal journey of one of Britain’s finest […] actors’. Another, unspoken explicitly, is to articulate the ‘deep passion for the theatre’ aroused in her by Alan Bennett’s writing and Hawthorne’s portrayal of The Madness of George III. She manages in the first, fails (as anyone might) in the second, and succeeds only too well in the third. Riley’s book is little short of a 380-page fan letter, with all the substantial virtues and vices of such an exercise: undeniable zeal, energy, and commitment, but a lamentable lack of critical distance.