Exit Left. "See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave", by Julian Meyrick. [review]

Abstract

It is snatching some kind of victory out of defeat to write a PhD thesis about the rise and fall of a theatre company, and Julian Meyrick has successfully transformed thesis into book. This has been achieved mainly through very good writing; lively, intelligent and uncluttered by jargon. The formal paraphernalia of the thesis — notes, appendices, statistics, bibliography and index — are not only useful in themselves, but crucial evidence for the argument. "See How It Runs" provides a cool analysis of a complex process of entropy. Nevertheless, while it is the scholarly and frequently self-reflexive methodology that constrains, authorial opinion has a welcome presence in the form of refreshingly decided perspectives and vivid descriptive powers.