A good night out ... Chekhov with members of the Moscow Art Theatre during a reading of his play in 1899. Photograph: Corbis
Yesterday the Society for Theatre Research announced the winner of its annual Theatre Book Prize. The award went to the Guardian's very own Michael Billington for his vast survey of post-war political theatre, State of the Nation. In many ways the result is hardly surprising. Looking down the shortlist, it stands out as the only book urgent enough to put it on the must-read list of anyone interested in contemporary theatre, even if it is only to disagree with the thesis.
What's more interesting is the way that the shortlist, and indeed longlist - over 80 titles were submitted by publishers for consideration - highlights the sorts of books that are published about theatre. Howard Loxton introducing yesterday's prize-giving noted: "The prize does cover an enormous range, from histories of theatres and companies to pictorial production-records, discussions of new kinds of performance to studies of past practices, every form of theatre from puppetry to opera, personal memoirs to academic analyses."
However, in the main, books on theatre do tend largely to be written by academics and are pitched predominantly at other academics. Given the limited marketing budgets of academic imprints, it is unsurprising that few of these books ever really get read by those with an interest in theatre. That said, such books are not aimed at the general reader, and frequently concentrate on dizzyingly recondite minutiae. Moreover, they are often written in language that pretty much defies comprehension - or, at least, in language that requires the reader to be thoroughly conversant with a very specific set of conventions that few people retain beyond university. It seems a shame, though, that a valuable additional source of discourse gets overlooked by a vast majority of its potential readership.
As a result, it often seems that the books about theatre that come to be regarded as seminal are almost exclusively written by either practitioners or journalists. Prior to State of the Nation, the most talked-about book on theatre was either theatre critic Aleks Sierz's survey of 90s new writing In-Yer-Face Theatre or director Dominic Dromgoole's anecdotal look at contemporary theatre writers The Full Room. Other seminal mainstays include John McGrath's A Good Night Out, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed and Howard Barker's Arguments for a Theatre. Again, it is notable that none of the above were written by or for academics - although Sierz was subsequently awarded a PhD through publication for In-Yer-Face and McGrath's Good Night Out began its life as a series of lectures given at Cambridge when McGrath was the visiting Judith E Wilson fellow in 1978, pointing to a meeting point between the academy and the general reader.
Of course, another reason for theatre publishing being so dominated by academics is that they are the only people whose job it is to write such books. After all, advances for books on the theatre tend to be somewhat on the small side. Presented with the option of writing, say, three long pieces for the Sunday Times maybe running to 4,500 words or being paid the same (or less) for something 120,000 words long, a lot of people will make quick calculations and email a features editor. So it is perhaps worth remembering that while we may occasionally bemoan the small range of great, readable books on theatre, those that we do have are most likely labours of love and small miracles of time management.
