As if by Chance

‘Heartfelt, inspirational and evocative.’

'Lan’s writing glows with his humanity and skill, with his literal worldliness, as he patches together into one narrative all the many lives he has led . . . arranged in delightful disorder and written with the playwright’s flair for dialogue. Memories are not narrated so much as displayed through reconstructed conversation, as if Ivy Compton-Burnett had written a memoir: everything is shown, nothing is told. Lan’s ear for different modes of speech is brilliant. To read the book is to swim in someone else’s memory, unsure what is real, and what has been damaged or retinted by the passage of time, and by the memoirist’s ability to dramatise . . . Lan is linking memory with theatre, and theatre with life.'

'A zigzagging meditation on the peculiar knottiness of theatre and the processes by which it is made ... Switching between dreamy impressionism and a fierce specificity, it's a searching account of a varied life.'

'It is a classic, deeply enjoyable and honest account of how ground-breaking international hits are brokered and how theatre in England gave a gay, South African, Jewish exile a home-base.'