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From Gods to Bad Boys examines the history of theatre from cave paintings to the swinging-sixties through the lives of some of its leading practitioners. Putting plays into their historical context Giles Ramsay rifles through the lives of playwrights such as Aeschylus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Behn, Wilde, Rattigan and Orton. The worlds they lived in generated the plays they wrote.

Reviews

I loved this – an enormously stimulating, informative, and enjoyable overview of the history of theatre. Not only is it a thorough primer for people who want to know more about the development of the stage from Ancient Greece to the West End, but Ramsay’s detours into one or two less well-known lives, coupled with his witty and engaging writing style, mean that even seasoned theatre-goers will get a lot out of it too.

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Happily, the typos referenced in an older review seem now to have been corrected. So my one small criticism is that – with just a couple of exceptions – the book’s purview doesn’t really extend beyond the UK. Fingers crossed there might be another highly entertaining volume to look forward to …

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This is a wonderful history of theatre from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, looking at various milestones on the way. The author describes it as refresher to what most people already know; however there is a lot I didn’t know, or had forgotten. It is written in an entertaining and anecdotal style. There is no bibliography – I would have liked to be able to look more deeply into some aspects and so must resort to a search engine to do so.

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I have given it 4 stars because of the book’s one failing for me. Being “Printed by Amazon” I assume it is self-published, and it would have benefited from the author’s reading it through one more time or giving to an editor or proofreader to read before uploading it. Perhaps the theatre critic whose puff appears on the cover read it in manuscript. The pages are littered with inconsistent spellings and misspellings (sometimes of names), unreliable syntax, punctuation and apostrophes, but above all a plethora of end-of-line hyphens splitting words, sometimes in consecutive lines or every other line, that frustratingly slows down comprehension. I wish he had turned off auto-hyphenation.
That said, it is worth the effort. Tidied up and uploaded again it would earn five stars from me.

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Having seen the author during a recent cruise, the book did not disappoint in the slightest. Very informative yet also amusing narrative about the beginnings and growth of theatre in this country and around the world. Essential read for any advocate of Drama, English Literature etc al..

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Ramsay is a dream of a writer. His knowledge and experience shine through in this theatrical panorama. His wit and wisdom ooze from every page. The twelve lives he’s chosen give you a wonderful sense of the whole from the various parts. They show how playwrights and their plays reflect and also influence their zeitgeist – a particularly interesting leitmotif is how they can capture changing times before most people have even noticed that they were. If anyone is still in any doubt about how important the arts are to our lives – to all of our lives – buy them this book.