Mark Sheridan, a descendant of RB 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 unpaid '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 school days in Paris, visits to London and its theaters, 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; GE Moore and EM Forster; Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky; Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes; Vanessa and Virginia Stephen.
'Time And Place' is about the theater, the telling of truth through illusion, but it is also about the real world of sexuality and history on which the theater feeds. It is both picaresque novel, a sort of homosexual Tom Jones, and bildungsroman, a young man's attempt to account for his life.
