Bookend
Publishing plays has become a full-scale industry. A yard of plays, perhaps sixty or seventy titles in all, came in to The Spectator in the first six months in this year. They are produced in hardback, paperback, acting editions, reading editions, educational editions, with and without staging instructions and a preface by the playwright. Many of the new theatres are providing facilities for selling plays and theatre magazines. It seems clear that more and more people are turning to play scripts as a complement to the stage performance or perhaps as a substitute for it.
There has always been a book market for the ' classic ' play which can be taught in schools, gutted of its working parts, and displayed to the young as a staple of our literary history. But modern play publishing started to all intents and purposes in 1957, when Faber published a reading text of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Methuen began their Modern Plays series in 1959 with Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey; and these two firms are still in the vanguard of play publishing. Faber have since published the plays of, among others, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton and Peter Nichols, and early next year are bringing out the new fulllength John Osborne play West of Suez which is coming on at the Royal Court this autumn. Methuen spread their net wider to include European playwrights—Brecht, Anouilh, Frisch and Sartre as well as John Arden, Harold Pinter and John Mortimer whose A Voyage Round My Father they are bringing out later this year.
The economics of play publishing are not hard to follow, as a Methuen editor explains. "With novels, you hope that bookshops will have ordered on subscription half of your first printing before publication day, and if you haven't sold most of your copies within the first three months, you're in trouble. Plays on the other hand have a steady, long-term sale, at least concomitant with the stage run in the West End and the provinces. Occasionally a successful play will become accepted as part of the general repertoire. It will get studied in schools, and make enough of a profit to cover losses on the less successful ones. Pinter's The Caretaker, for example, has sold 130,000 copies to date, and Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, 80,000. Commercially this is a logical approach if we maintain a large enough list: we are publishing sixteen new titles this year in the Modern Plays series."
Faber looks on play publishing in much the same light. The pattern, as one of their editors describes it, is for theatre reviews to provide the same 'kind of publicity as extensive book reviews. "Most of our plays don't get bought ' by people who want to act them. The greater part of our sales are to people who can't get to the theatre in London and yet want to keep up — your provincial grammar school master perhaps. But the important thing is for a play to be good in performance. Simon Gray's Dutch Uncle read very well but sold only poorly after moderate reviews. Exactly the opposite is true of Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg which is now in its third reprinting."
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