The former artistic director of the RSC picks his favourites. He will be talking about his book “My Shakespeare” at Jewish Book Week on 2 March in London.
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol, 1842
Preparing for rehearsals for “The Government Inspector”, at Chichester Festival Theatre, I finally pulled down the great Ukrainian novelist’s masterwork “Dead Souls”. It has to take the prize for the funniest book with the gloomiest title I have ever read.
The Outcry
Henry James, 1911
The novels of Henry James are great read out loud in the bath. My latest is his last, “The Outcry”, which is about artworks flooding across the Atlantic during the Gilded Age. I obsessively tracked the diaspora of Shakespeare’s First Folio around the world recently. Nearly two-thirds of the extant 229 copies now grace the shelves of American libraries. I have so far seen 204.
The Dream Factory
Daniel Swift, 2025
My new favourite book isn’t out yet. It is published next month. Daniel Swift’s “The Dream Factory” is a thrilling account of Shakespeare’s apprenticeship in the first public theatre in London. It’s a story I thought I knew but didn’t. Swift brightly illuminates that raucous, scrappy, litigious world.
The Great Passion
James Runcie, 2022
Since I lost my husband (actor Antony Sher) three years ago, I have looked for work that might help articulate the process of grieving. Each journey through this dark narrow valley is different, so I have tended to avoid books which aim to record individual experience. But “The Great Passion”, surprised and moved me. It tells the story of the composition of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and with eloquent beauty describes the unpredictability of grief.
Modern Nature
Derek Jarman, 1991
The most life-enhancing meditation on death I know is “Modern Nature”, the filmmaker’s journal of the nourishment he derived from the garden he built on the coast of Dungeness as he faced his approaching death from HIV. Poetical and mischievously elegiac.