Leave your comfort zone: my last and lasting lesson from Richard Pilbrow

And so, it is done. The project I told you about in these very pages last November, the book that has sadly turned out to be the last by the lighting designer and theatre consultant Richard Pilbrow about the creation and history of the National Theatre – an organisation with which he was involved from the very beginning – has started landing on the doorsteps of those who helped support its creation. By the time you read this, A Sense of Theatre will be available in, as they used to say, all good bookshops – although I think we all know that now mainly means on Amazon.

This has been an exciting, challenging, fascinating, exhausting, wonderful and tragic six months. The tragic part is obvious: while Richard’s death wasn’t entirely unexpected, the speed at the end was much more rapid than we had expected. Cancer is the scourge of modern life; remarkable minds are working to find better treatments and maybe even cures. They can’t come soon enough.

The rest are all things you experience when doing something you’ve never done before, and a forceful reminder that we should all go out of our comfort zones at regular intervals. I recommend it. Here, the learning for me was about making a book – editing, proofreading, indexing, photo rights, proofreading, captioning, pricing, oh and did I mention proofreading? And doing so with the care that a project more than eight years in the making deserved.

And also, of course, paying for it. Books, if you do them properly, and particularly if they have the scale and ambition of this one, are not cheap things to make.

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