"Why do we go on doing it?" asks Bernard Miles in the opening sentence of this glorious book on the theatre. "What keeps us going through the crises, the anxieties, the grinding circuit of agents and auditions and one night stands?" In this book, he and John Trewin have brought together the strolling players, the actors and actresses, the singers, the playwrights, the audiences, the managers, the stage-hands, who share the world of the theatre. They are set before us in all their exuberance, their jealousies, their ill-temper, their stubborn devotion to a profession that is 'love in action'. Linked by Bernard Miles's reminiscences of his own experiences as actor, manager, director and author, and by John Trewin's scholarship (fruit of a long career as critic and historian), Curtain Calls is alive with laughter, affection and surprise. It illuminates from first to last the belief that "the whole human story is a kind of play, a tragi-comedy in many episodes with script still being written in the wings, the mammoth cast under-rehearsed, imperfectly made up, unsure of their cues and dressed in the wrong clothes; the stage-management either very inexperienced, inebriated or blatantly incompetent; and the Great Director tearing his hair in the stalls."
