Peggy: Life of Margaret Ramsay, Play Agent

Peggy Ramsay (1908-1991) was the foremost play agent of her time. Her list of clients shows her to have been at the centre of British playwriting for several generations from the late 1950s on.

To her remarkable array of clients, her letter writing was notorious, marked by searing candour, both a wondrous motivation and an unforgiving scrutiny to be feared.

'Peggy judged by the most exalted standards and lashed her writers when they failed to meet them. Her force of personality made her well-nigh irresistible. The letters she wrote to her writers and to producers are extraordinary documents, filled with all these qualities, and indiscreet, blasphemous and saucy to boot.’ – Simon Callow

Often shifting "without warning from gadfly to nanny, from shepherdess to prophetic sphinx, from temptress to termagant," play agent Ramsay was a charismatic presence in British theater for 25 years. Her keen sense of literary talent was to influence the careers of such playwrights as Eugene Ionesco, Joe Orton, John Mortimer, David Hare and Caryl Churchill. She even played a minor role in the successes of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, neither of whom she represented. With Ramsay's approval, Chambers, literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company, interviewed more than 200 of her acquaintances and clients for this book but examined only cursorily her upbringing in South Africa, her early failed marriage to Norman Ramsay and her relationship with actor Bill Roderick, her longtime companion. Most of her private life is passed over quickly in favor of a tiresomely sequential account of Ramsay's involvement in the careers of her more illustrious clients--an account filled with name-dropping and flights of overblown language. This biography should interest anglophiles and those in the theater world, but its appeal could have been broadened with a deeper analysis of the progression of British theater in the 20th century and a more thorough examination of Ramsay's maddening character.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.