Time and Place

Mark Sheridan, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan's elder brother, is "stage-struck." Though his theatrical ambitions are thwarted by a slight stammer, he joins Beerbohm Tree's company as an umpaid "walk-on." He tells the story of his two years in the company and his relationship with Esmond, a young actor. Interspersed with this narrative are flashbacks to his earlier his childhood in China, his schooldays in Paris, visits to London and its theatres, his university days in Cambridge, eighteen months in St Petersburg, where he witnesses the beginning of the 1905 revolution. Famous names appear in these Bernhardt and Duse; Irving and Terry; Mahler and Massenet; Melba and Caruso; Gide and Proust; G.E. Moore and E.M. Forester; Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky; Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes; Vanessa and Virgina Stephen."Time and Place" is about the theatre, the telling of truth through illusion, but it is also about the real world of sexuality and history on which the theatre feeds. It is both picaresque novel, a sort of homosexual Tom Jones, and bildungsroman, a young man's attempt to account for his life.