The Night Has Been Unruly

J. C. Trewin, drama critic and theatre historian, has assembled some of the strange, exciting , and often comic occasions that have passed into stage record and become collectors' pieces . He begins with the so-called "Garrick Jubilee" in the mud at Stratford in 1769. This was the first Shakespeare festival, yet not a word by the poet was spoken. Then to the extraordinary performance of Ireland's bogus Shakespeare play, Vortigern, at Drury Lane; the attack upon Henry James on the first night of Guy Domville; and some post-war occasions including the triumph of Titus Andronicus, when the night, in various ways, has been unruly.