Guthrie, Tyrone, 1900-1971

Rise Above! : Letters from Tyrone Guthrie / edited by Christopher Fitz-Simon. - Dublin, Ireland : The Lilliput Press Ltd, 2017. - 471 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (page [461]) and index.

Here, in a stunning volume of letters, we are offered a glimpse into the vision of this extraordinary impresario as well as a view of the intimacies of his relationships with his mother, wife and friends.During the 1940s and 1950s Guthrie was renowned for liberating the plays of Shakespeare from declamatory delivery and excessive staging. His most enduring legacy was in inspiring the creation of modern theatre buildings where the plays of antiquity could be brought closer to the audience - such as at Stratford, Canada, and the theatre that bears his name in Minneapolis, USA. Of Scots-Irish parentage, he identified most closely with his mother's home at Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan, which he made his professional headquarters after her death, hosting producers, designers, playwrights and composers there while planning worldwide productions. On the advice of his sister Peggy and her husband, Hubert Butler, he left this house to the Irish nation as a workplace for writers and artists.Faced with often seemingly insurmountable financial and personal disaster, his celebrated mantra 'Rise above!' was testament to a life lived in on the wings of an operatic opening night or a Shakespearean tragedy. Guthrie's vivid descriptions of places visited are matched by the observational skills of his remarks on the people he worked with, among them well-known actors from Orson Welles to Alec Guinness. Family members come in for as many amused comments as do the famous and distinguished: Cousin Molly is no more spared than Winston Churchill. Fitz-Simon has gathered an important, and entrancing, collection of TyroneGuthrie's letters, raising a curtain on the life of Ireland's leading theatre director of the twentieth-century.

9781843517184 : (hbk)


Guthrie, Tyrone, 1900-1971 --Correspondence.


Theatrical producers and directors--Correspondence.

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