Time and Place

by Alan Sheridan

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 life: 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 pages: 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.

Genres: Fiction, Gay Fiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2003

About the author

Born Alan Mark Sheridan-Smith, Sheridan read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge before spending 5 years in Paris as English assistant at Lycée Henri IV and Lycée Condorcet.[1] Returning to London, he briefly worked in publishing before becoming a freelance translator. He has translated works of fiction, history, philosophy, literary criticism, biography and psychoanalysis by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget and many others. He was the first to publish a book in English on Foucault's work and has also written a biography of André Gide, plus two novels.

Reviews

[Sandra (folded.between.pages.of.books) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, though the writing style is not totally my cup of tea...

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel qua biography and an artistic charmer in the gayest sense of the word. The protagonist, young Mark Sheridan, is precocious both intellectually and sexually with an ability to charm most of the men he meets in this book that seemed longer than it in fact was.


The story is narrated in the first person as though told by young Mark himself; with a diary-like form relating his experiences both in the acting world and earlier, as the son of a diplomat based in China and Russia in the late nineteenth century. Much of the book is set in Peking, St Petersburg, Paris, and London with travelogue-style descriptions of the cities, as well as lengthy but slightly less orthodox descriptions of Mark’s many encounters with men. These encounters were usually brief and when he did develop a relationship they seemed somewhat flat and not as well-developed as the settings in which they occurred. His essays on the usefulness of public conveniences as pick-up joints at a time when homosexuality was still expressly forbidden across most of Europe are quite frank!


The sense of place, then, was beautifully suggested. I felt I knew the avenues of Paris, the gardens, canals, and underground toilets of St Petersburg, and the compounds and back streets of Peking. It was if I was there with Mark as he explored, rutted, and trod the boards.


One difficulty I had with the book was with Sheridan’s handling of the time-scales involved. It opens in the early twentieth century with Mark as a fully fledged actor but soon flashes back to China and Russia of the 1890s when he was still a child, and from then on it progresses or regresses from the 1920s to the 1900s to the 1890s in a seemingly endless series of flashbacks. Each section was complete in itself and each one nicely presented the time in which it was set, but I soon felt that the continuity of narrative was confused at best.


Overall, however, I found the book rather enjoyable; written well enough to encourage the journey through the flashbacks. The beautiful locations also helped, but I would hesitate to recommend this book to an impatient reader.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young gentleman of leisure recounts the experiences of his youth covering roughly the period from 1890 to 1907. Well travelled and with a great interest in the Arts, especially the theatre, our protagonist in this extensively researched novel expounds on matters of literature, the theatre and music as he moves in the circles populated by many of the prominent in the Arts of the time. In between he relates his experiences as he pursues his private interest in the young men he encounters, including the more enduring relationship he enjoys with a young actor.
A wonderfully engrossing read full of surprising encounters with those of renown, or those who were later to attain that status.