The Worst It Can Be Is A Disaster - The Life Story Of Braham Murray And The Royal Exchange Theatre

The Worst It Can Be Is a Disaster is the autobiography of Braham Murray, founding artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and a man who spent his working life persuading actors, designers, administrators, audiences and funding bodies that the show must go on, even when several of them would plainly have preferred it not to.

Born into a Jewish family that expected him to enter the reassuring world of commerce, Murray instead chose the theatre, where the hours are worse, the finances are imaginary and success depends upon persuading emotionally volatile people to stand in exactly the right place while pretending to be somebody else. By the age of twenty-two he had become the country’s youngest artistic director, thereby achieving responsibility long before acquiring the good sense to avoid it.

His story passes through student theatre, the Century Theatre and the 69 Theatre Company before arriving at the wonderfully improbable creation of the Royal Exchange. Murray and his collaborators—including Michael Elliott, Caspar Wrede, Richard Negri and James Maxwell—placed a futuristic seven-sided theatre module inside Manchester’s vast former cotton exchange. The result looked rather like a spacecraft that had landed among the columns and balconies of Victorian capitalism and decided to put on Chekhov.

Opened in 1976, the Royal Exchange became one of Britain’s most distinctive and important theatres. Its in-the-round design placed actors within alarming proximity of the audience, removing both the comforting picture frame of the conventional stage and much of the opportunity to conceal a weak performance behind the furniture. Shakespeare, new writing, comedy, tragedy and musicals all followed, together with the usual theatrical assortment of triumphs, disasters and productions whose true artistic value became clearer only after the reviews had been safely forgotten.

Murray writes candidly about the celebrated actors, directors and writers who crossed his path, including Tom Courtenay, Mia Farrow and Robert Lindsay. He recalls successes and failures with the detailed memory of a director who has spent decades remembering precisely who missed which entrance and why. Backstage alliances, artistic disagreements, opening-night nerves and personal relationships receive the same frank treatment as the productions themselves. This is not an autobiography in which the author emerges faultless while everybody else behaves mysteriously badly.

The title expresses the useful theatrical philosophy that the worst possible outcome is merely disaster. Once this has been accepted, there is no reason not to proceed with the impossible production, inadequate budget or potentially ruinous new theatre. Sometimes the disaster is metaphorical—a critical mauling, a failed show or an actor discovering a profound new interpretation during the interval. At other times it is distressingly literal.

In 1996, an IRA bomb devastated Manchester city centre and seriously damaged the Royal Exchange building. The theatre company continued working while its home underwent an enormous reconstruction, returning to a restored venue in 1998. Most organisations regard being bombed as a reasonable excuse for delay; the Royal Exchange treated it as a particularly severe technical rehearsal.

Murray also explores the influence of his Jewish upbringing, his private life and the fierce personal loyalties that sustained his career. His account is passionate, indiscreet and sometimes painfully honest, full of amorous complications as well as theatrical ones. The dividing line between life and theatre becomes understandably blurred when one has spent decades surrounded by people professionally trained to make every emotion audible at the back of the balcony.

With a foreword by Sir Tom Courtenay, this is both a personal memoir and a lively history of the Royal Exchange Theatre. It offers an insider’s account of how a major regional theatre is created and kept alive—not by serene cultural vision alone, but through obsession, argument, improvisation, friendship, fundraising and the repeated discovery that the scenery will not fit through the door.

An excellent book for readers interested in theatre, Manchester, directing, cultural history and lives lived at unnecessary levels of intensity. It may also reassure anyone facing a difficult day at work: unless the building has exploded, the leading actor has vanished and the Arts Council has telephoned, matters may still be considered broadly manageable.

This copy is in As New condition, appearing remarkably untouched for a book devoted to theatrical chaos. The binding is firm, the pages are clean and no one has written hostile reviews in the margins. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where the curtain rises eventually, the audience is asked to overlook the storage boxes and the worst it can be is another sale.

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