Taking Stock, by Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark

What happens in the rehearsal room? Usually, directors and actors are shy about revealing what they do while preparing a show. Mistakes happen, risks are taken, egos get bruised and visionary ideas are smashed on the rock of limited talent. So these rehearsal diaries, in which the director Max Stafford-Clark shows what it was like to work on important plays of the post-war period, are welcome.

Stafford-Clark has an amazing track record, working with writers such as Hanif Kureishi, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and Mark Ravenhill. He was artistic director of the Royal Court in the 1980s, and led touring companies such as Joint Stock in the 1970s and Out of Joint in the 1990s.

The diaries kick off with his early career at the experimental Traverse Theatre, in Edinburgh, and move on to his period with Joint Stock. It was a different world: arguments about power at the collective company jostle with complaints about selling out to commercial audiences. Rehearsal tantrums mix with personal politics as the theatre-makers are caught up in the turmoil of a decade that saw the birth of modern feminism and the death of Trotskyism.

The most fascinating section in the Royal Court days is about Jim Allen's play Perdition, an account of the relationship between some Hungarian Zionists and the Nazis. Having got Ken Loach to direct, Stafford-Clark found that he himself didn't really believe in its central thesis, and it was withdrawn before it opened.

The book includes Stafford-Clark's painful but humorous experiences with the playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose life on a Bradford estate was so chaotic that she found it difficult to deliver Rita, Sue and Bob Too, and the inside story of plays such as Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

By pioneering the workshop method of rehearsal, where actors and director all contribute ideas before sending the playwright off to pen the text, Stafford-Clark made a major innovation in the evolution of British drama. He also survived numerous personal problems.

This is a tactful account of what went on behind the scenes during the making of political classics such as Hare's Fanshen, Churchill's Serious Money and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. With help from the academic Philip Roberts, Stafford-Clark tells a good story, although he misses out much of his private life - so the detail is more interesting to theatre buffs than gossip-mongers.

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