referencebooks

The Actor's Survival Handbook

By Patrick Tucker and Christine Ozanne

Published by Routledge, 2005

This is a 5.5" by 8.5" clothbound book running to 330 pages, with no index, plus 26 pages of preferatory material. It is a well-manufactured book whose pages are printed with smallish margins.

Routledge is primarily an academic publisher. This book is unusual for them in that it is designed for use not by scholars but by actors who want to improve their acting and professionalism and advance their careers.

The book has 134 brief articles arranged alphabetically. Though the book lacks an index, a "family tree" classification of the entries is a help to finding relevant information where the article titles don't do it by themselves. Here is a list of the entries in the F, G, H, and I sequences:

• Fellow Actors
  
• Film versus Television
  
• Forgetting Lines
  
• Further Training
  
• Gear Changes
  
• Getting Work
  
• Good and Bad Taste
  
• Hierarchy
  
• Homework
  
• Illness
  
• Improvisation
  
• Instinct versus Intellect
  
• Interviews
  
• It's Not What It Used To Be
  

Opening the book at random, I'm looking at a single article running just over a page. The right-hand facing page is blank following the end of this article. The article is titled "Opposites" and is subtitled, "Always a useful device." It begins, "Acting opposites is a vital technique for producing the element of surprise for the audience." The article explains the usefulness and some technical issues involved in acting opposite emotions using clearly described hypothetical examples.

The book is fun and easy to read. It's clearly very useful for actors and a book that an actor would love to own. We have it in our reference section because it really works as a reference book, though it is not primarily about scholarship. For non-actors who are curious about acting it is an interesting read that provides a lot of insights.

The Oxford Dictionary of Plays

By Michael Patterson

Published by Oxford University Press, 2005

This is a 6" by 9", black clothbound book running to 523 pages including an index of characters and an index of playwrights, plus a classified list of included plays, a preface and a brief bibliography.

The preface begins, "This volume sets out to provide useful information and brief commentaries on the 1,000 most significant plays of world theatre." Plays from around the world are included, but it's the English speaking audience that's considered in determining what plays to include; the date of first translation into English is always included for plays in translation and plays from anglophone countries are given extra weight.

1,000 plays to represent world theatre from its beginning to the present is not many. The editor had to be a little brutal in deciding what to exclude. The result is a handy, compact volume that many will find incomplete.

For each included play, where relevant, entries provide a title; alternative titles when existent (mainly for different translations); date and place of first performance; date of first publication; date of translation into English; genre (with terms explained in the preface); setting and time of action; composition of cast; and a couple of paragraphs giving a synopsis and some commentary. Most entries are around a half a page long. They are arranged in alphabetical order by title and not divided into sections by time period or geography.

The synopses and commentary are light and fun to read for an OUP reference book, making me more interested in the plays they talk about.

This is a useful and entertaining reference book, good for readers and theatre lovers both.

The Ivan R. Dee Guide to Plays and Playwrights

By Trevor R. Griffiths

Published by Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Copyright held by the author.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback book running to 424 pages including the index.

This book has entries on over 500 playwrights, with listings and descriptions of their plays.

The very brief introduction begins:

"The The Ivan R. Dee Guide to Plays and Playwrights is a theatre reference book with a difference because it concentrates on the writers and the plays you are actually likely to be able to see now, rather than the writers who stay in theatre reference books because they have always been there, even though no one has staged their plays for generations. Its other unique feature is a cross-referencing system that allows you to find other plays or authors that have tackled similar topics, share similar interests or offer marked contrasts to the ones you started off from; and when you look at those further entries you will find more cross-references that can lead you on a sometimes surprising journey of discovery that could give added enjoyment to your appreciation and understanding of theatre."

This is actually the third edition of the Guide. It is updated from the last edition with 90 new playwrights and a new focus on writers over companies and generic ideas.

The book is organized into alphabetical entries by author, with their plays discussed within each entry and accessible from the index. For each playwright it states where they're from and the scope of their career (e.g. JOHNSON, Ben, English dramatist, poet and actor). It then lists the writer's plays and gives a paragraph or two of biographical information with brief discussion of their plays; then, sometimes, in the case of a very important playwright, followed by paragraph-long descriptions of one or more plays. The See also references are interesting in that they refer you to a play by a certain playwright and say why the reference is being given; for example, a see reference from Alfred Jarry's entry is "Apollinaire's Breasts of Tiresias; for wordplay and subversive invention."

The biographical descriptions of the playwrights and their careers are written to bring out what is interesting about these figures. They're enjoyably written and bring to light interesting facts about the playwrights' careers.

A useful and enjoyable book.

Who's Who in Contemporary World Theatre

2nd edition.

Edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

Published by Routledge, 2002.

This is a highly compact paperback of 342 pages, not including the list of contributors, preface and acknowledgements.

The book has "1,400 entries on currently active theatre artists from 68 countries worldwide," including actors, directors, designers and playwrights, and excluding artists who mainly work in performance art, musicals, operetta, opera and dance. Approximately 50 different people contributed to the entries.

Typical entries run to about 100 words and summarize the artist's career, mentioning places where they've worked and important productions they have been involved in, as well as talking a bit about their unique contributions in an artistic sense. There are frequently also mentions of theatre groups or organizations the artists are involved in, which makes finding out more about them, or actually finding them, easier.

The book is genuinely international, not particularly favoring the theatre worlds of the United States or Europe.

The only sequence of organization is the alphabetic sequence of entries by name; there is no geographic or topical or other index in the book. That means that the book's only major uses are looking up an artist by name and browsing, which is okay. As it is the book is an impressive compilation of information.

Fairchild's Dictionary of Fashion, 2nd Edition, Revised.

By Charlotte Mankey Calasibetta, Ph.D.

Published by Fairchild Books, 1998.

This is a paperback book of 685 pages in two columns.

It has thousands of entries on clothing terminology from both
historical and contemporary viewpoints. Typical entries are brief.
For example:

"pah-poosh   Velvet slippers with high heels, decorated
with embroidery and studded with jewels, worn indoors by Persian women."

Some entries are longer, and others are simply see references.

Additionally, there are a number of "categories" intermixed which have
entries under them. For example, under "hats" are entries for
different types of hats in a separate alphabetic sequence. This means
that if you want to look up a "pork-pie hat" you have to look up hats
first. To help solve this problem an index of these categories is
provided at the beginning of the book. (Some of the categories hiding
deeper entries are somewhat of a surprise: you have to look up "tops"
to find entries on different types of tops, and there are whole
catelgories for ponchos, oxfords and silhouettes. Maybe these would be
less of a surprise to someone who has knowledge of fashion and
clothing.)