Containing over a hundred interviews conducted over the last fifteen years with leading directors, actors and writers at the National Theatre, Buzz Buzz! is a fantastic compendium that offers unrivalled insight into the work and practice of the best theatre talent. In these illuminating interviews playwrights such as Michael Frayn, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, David Hare, Pam Gems and Tony Kushner and many others talk about the roots of their work, their methods of research, and how they collaborate with their directors, while actors from Fiona Shaw to Kenneth Branagh, and directors from Peter Hall to Marianne Elliott, contribute fascinating insights into their ideas and ways of working. The book covers plays by the Greeks and Shakespeare, English and European classics, and the best of modern English, Irish and American drama. Theatre writer and commentator Jonathan Croall draws on the vast wealth of interviews he's conducted at the National Theatre in this fascinating and wide-ranging book....

"I would rather have been a pianist than anything," Sybil Thorndike said late in her life, but posterity would never know her as anything other than a majestic actress of stage and screen, whether alongside Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, or, most famously, as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.

In this authorized biography, written with unique access to the Thorndike family archive and using hundreds of her unpublished letters, Jonathan Croall has written an engaging, sympathetic, yet critical account of one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. As a young actress, Thorndike spent three years traveling around America, playing over a hundred Shakespearean parts.

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