Jackie Harvey and Tim Kelleher’s book Stage Managing Chaos: A Diary of the Old Vic Production of Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria has won the Theatre Book Prize, for books published in 2016 beating some stiff competition. The winner was announced on 2 May by previous winner Sir Richard Eyre at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Juggling Trajectories: Gandini Juggling MXMXCI ­ MMXV
by Thomas J M Wilson (Gandini Press)

London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880-1920
by Catherine Hindson (University of Iowa Press)

Nobody Knows but Everyone Remembers
by Mark Long (People Show)

Shakespeare in Ten Acts
by Gordon McMullan & Zoe Wilcox (British Library Publications)

Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage
by Sean McEvoy (Routledge)

Harvey’s book is about her time stage managing the National Theatre production, where a director was never there (he was moonlighting as director for The Maids elsewhere) and Anthony Hopkins and Jim Dale were driven to despair as Sir Laurence Olivier did everything he could to distance himself from the disaster.

For details of the short listed and long listed books please go to the Soviety for Theatre Research’s website http://str.org.uk/events/bookprize/index.html