New Theatre Department course – Researching the Bristol Old Vic Young Company

By Dr Jan Wozniak, Senior Lecturer, Department of Theatre, University of Bristol.

 

What do you remember about Youth Theatre?

Did you attend theatre sessions at Bristol Old Vic when you were younger? Or did you run sessions as a practitioner? Do you know anyone who did?

Bristol Old Vic Young Company is 30 years old this year! As part of the celebrations, we want to hear from anyone who has had any involvement with the Young Company since 1994.

This autumn, I will be working with around 25 final year undergraduate students, Lucy Hunt from the Bristol Old Vic and colleagues in the Theatre Collection to build an oral history of the Young Company. We’ll be exploring the Young Company holdings in the Bristol Old Vic Archive at the Theatre Collection and sharing our findings here.

Third year students in the Theatre Collection at the start of the unit, 25 September 2024.

We’ll then be interviewing former participants of the Young Company to hear what they remember about their time at Bristol Old Vic and whether this experience still plays a part in their lives today. We’ll make an initial analysis of these interviews, which will then be made available in the Theatre Collection for future researchers.

“All art is quite useless” Oscar Wilde

Do you agree with Wilde? Or do you think that art is important for all?

Theatre for and by young people is rightly valued by those involved. But it’s difficult to prove! And how long does that value last? With a renewed interest in the value of art and culture in the new government, this is a great time to conduct research I have wanted to do for a long time.

I became aware of the great work done by the Young Company through my daughter’s involvement around 2010-2012. And the Young Company has a great track record in producing a great range of theatre makers, not least the Wardrobe Ensemble.

Not just luvvies!

We’ll be hoping to interview the Wardrobe Ensemble, and other theatre makers, to find out how their time in the Young Company has influenced their work. But it’s not just those who have gone on to work in theatre or the arts that we are interested in – we want to hear from YOU!

We’re really keen to hear from anyone who was in the Young Company and to find out what effect it had for you in the long-term. Do you remember particular productions? Did it give you the confidence to try things later in life? Did you hate it so much, you swore never to inflict extra-curricular theatre activities on your own kids!? We want to hear from anyone, whatever their memories.

If you’re interested, you could fill out this form

It’s not ALL hard work

Students will be working hard exploring the archives, interviewing and writing blog posts over the coming weeks to chart the project, so do check back in!

But we’re hoping they will also have fun at a couple of events we’re planning.

Firstly, there will be a public access event in the Theatre Collection where you’ll be able to see some of the Young Company records, that we’ve been exploring.

There will also be a celebration event at the Bristol Old Vic. We will confirm dates of both of these soon, so keep your eyes peeled

And do get in touch with us if you have your own memorabilia you’d like to share – we’d love to hear from you!

The Liberation of France: 80 Years of objets de mémoire

With thanks to Arts Matter for their consent to republish piece first posted in August 2024.

By Damien McManus, Professor Martin Hurcombe, Dr Charlotte Faucher, Dr Federico Testa, Louisiane Bigot 

August 2024 marks 80 years since the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation in the summer of 1944, a decisive and highly symbolic moment in World War II. In celebration, the School of Modern Languages and Library Services, with support from the University’s Theatre Collection, the French Government’s Mission Libération, and AUPHF+, held an event in June to commemorate the D-Day landings and the importance of objets de mémoire (objects of memory) as powerful reminders of the struggle against oppression.

French Forces of the Interior (FFI) barricade, the liberation of Paris, World War II, 1944.
French Forces of the Interior (FFI) barricade, the liberation of Paris, World War II, 1944.

This event was held to mark the 80th anniversary of Operation Overlord, the landings in Normandy which took place in June 1944, and the subsequent liberation of France that year. Supported by the French Government’s Mission Libération, it comprised an exhibition of photographic images and original documents selected from the University Library and the Theatre Collection; and a series of short presentations and discussions around the intellectual and cultural context and legacy of resistance to the Nazi occupation of France 1940-44. Material for the exhibition was chosen from two areas of the collections: the University of Westminster War and Culture Studies Archive which is now housed at the University’s Library Services, and the Irving Family Archivelocated in the Theatre Collection, also at Bristol.

A number of themes provided the focus of the exhibition and traced aspects of the French experience of the warThe first of these reflected attempts to bolster morale during the early days of the Occupation and included representations of life for French people in exile in the UK. Others reflected how keenly the French in exile in the UK anticipated Liberation, before the exhibition moved on to the aftermath of the Normandy landings, and the gradual lifting of the Nazi Occupation.

A major source for texts and images around these themes was La France libre [Free France], which was published first in London, then Paris, from November 1940 to December 1946, and which sought to fight against the acceptance of defeat, and advocate resistance and the restoration of freedom to France. Among the writings and images selected were satirical pieces depicting occupying forces as brutal simpletons in contrast to the more erudite French population; and intriguing adverts for a range of products from quintessentially French brands such as Michelin tyres to less well known and possibly more controversial items, to the French at least, such as Marmite. Photographs taken on the day of the liberation of Paris and of celebrating civilians in Normandy and the capital served to remind viewers of the relief felt at the end of the Occupation.

Image courtesy of the Irving Family Archive. Courseulles-sur-Mer is a coastal town in Normandy, known for its proximity to Juno Beach, one of the D-Day landing sites during World War II.
Image courtesy of the Irving Family Archive. Courseulles-sur-Mer is a coastal town in Normandy, known for its proximity to Juno Beach, one of the D-Day landing sites during World War II.

The Irving Family Archive provided some fascinating images of the planning and execution of the landings at Normandy. Laurence Irving, a prominent Hollywood set designer and Intelligence Officer with the Royal Air Force, specialised in the analysis of low-level reconnaissance photographssome of which were displayed, marked up with vital information about coastal defences. Other images provided impressions of the destructiveness of war and powerful portraits of captured German equipment and vehicles.

Presentations and a panel discussion rounded off the day’s proceedings. Dr Federico Testa provided an account of the tensions between the ideas of pacifism and justice, and in particular the moral and ethical dilemmas facing the French during World War II. Professor Martin Hurcombe spoke about Les Amants d’Avignon (The Lovers of Avignon] written by Elsa Triolet and published clandestinely under the pseudonym of Laurent Daniel, and focused on the roles of women in the Resistance, which have very often been overlooked. Dr Charlotte Faucher framed her talk around a photograph of Résistantes from the BBC Yearbook 1945, taken when the impression among some British people was of well-fed French civilians at a time of rationing in the UK, and outlined her interviews with former female resistance fighters who firmly countered that view. Lastly, Professor Debra Kelly (emerita, University of Westminsterwho kindly organised the donation of the War and Culture Studies Archivediscussed the 1946 novel, Siege of London written by (Mrs)Robert Henrey (sic), real name Madeleine Gall, a member of the French community in London.

Professor Martin Hurcombe provides historical context to visitors at the exhibition.
Professor Martin Hurcombe provides historical context to visitors at the exhibition.

This was a hugely enjoyable exhibition to organise, and the presentations and discussions were fascinating, enlightening and full of debate. Perhaps the most rewarding aspect was the range of people who came to see the exhibition and to attend the discussions, from members of the public to groups of sixth formers from Bristol and Cardiff who were evidently very engaged with the collections, especially as they were directly connected to their A-Level studies.

With thanks to Damien McManus, Library Services, Professor Martin HurcombeDr Charlotte Faucher and Dr Federico Testa in the Department of French, and PhD candidate Louisiane Bigot in the School of Modern Languages. To find out more about the University of Westminster War and Culture Studies Archive, visit Library ServicesTo find out more about the Irving Family Archive, visit the Theatre Collection.

Performing the Constitution: 19th Century Productions of Shakespeare’s King John, by Ruth Houghton (Newcastle Law School)

Researcher Ruth Houghton visited the Theatre Collection in 2023 to examine the Herbert Beerbohm Tree Business Archive. This blog highlights her reading room discoveries around Tree’s 1899-1900 production of King John, which have led to her 2024 article, published in the journal Law and Humanities (full details below).

 

King John is probably best known for sealing Magna Carta in 1215. Yet, this significant event in the constitutional history of Great Britain does not feature in Shakespeare’s play The Life and Death of King John; a fact that has preoccupied both literary and historical scholars. In contrast, 19th century productions of the play were littered with references to the Charter. From discussions in the programmes of the events at Runnymede to insertions into the very text of the play about the rights and liberties protected by Magna Carta, theatre producers across the century were reimagining the role of the Charter within the play.

No-one does this more spectacularly than Herbert Beerbohm Tree. In his 1899 production of King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London (which incidentally would go on to be the first filmed recording of a Shakespeare production), Beerbohm Tree staged a magnificent tableau – or living picture – depicting ‘The Granting of Magna Charta’.

HBT/40/1 Souvenir programme for King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 20 September 1899.

The tableau is often assumed to be silent, a ‘dumb-show’, which scholars have argued facilitated an a-political representation of Magna Carta as it allowed Beerbohm Tree to display the historical moment of the sealing of the Charter without praise or blame. (source: J. M. Lander and J. J. M. Tobin (eds) The Arden Shakespeare: King John (3rd edn, Bloomsbury 2018), p.102.)

However, documents in the Herbert Beerbohm Tree Business Archive give insight into the specific sounds and movements that accompanied the scene.

In the Stage [rehearsal] Notes of the tableau from the 13th September 1899, it states:

‘Super is holding document, puts it on table in front of JOHN, points to it for JOHN’S signature. After John has put his hand to the seal – inspiring music – then shout from everyone onstage.’

HBT/40/44 Stage Notes for King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre 1899-1900.

However, the Property Plot (undated but presumably created separately on a different day), details minor alterations that give an alternative approach to the scene:

‘Document is on table – Mr Tree [as King John] enters, goes towards table, man takes up document, gives it to Mr Tree, who reads it, looks round at Nobles, puts down the document, looks around again, then puts finger on paper – Music changes to ‘joyous rainbow’ strain – Mr Tree gives paper back to man – Loud cheers.’

HBT/40/13 Property Plot for King John at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1899-1900.

The archive here uncovers a more complicated representation of the constitutional significance of the Charter. On 13th September, the pointing for a signature could be constructed as a visual representation of John being asked to submit, reluctantly, to the demand of the barons. In contrast, the longer stage direction of HBT/40/13 has the additional ‘gives paper back’, which is evocative of the idea that John gives the charter (almost magnanimously) to the people. Indeed, the ‘cheers’ in this rehearsal happen when the people are in possession of the Charter.

These two versions of the tableau found in the archives present distinct constitutional readings. Whilst one exaggerates the symbolism of the Charter as an act of holding a sovereign to account, the other places emphasis on the idea that the people now possess rights and liberties. These notes therefore offer a fascinating insight into how representations of Magna Carta in 19th century productions of King John can shed light on the perception and development of the Charter’s constitutional status during this period.

The Herbert Beerbohm Tree Business Archive is housed in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

This research has been published in Houghton, R. (2024). ‘Performing a constitution: a history of Magna Carta in Shakespeare’s King John’. Law and Humanities, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2024.2370673.

 

Kevin Elyot’s Archive and Mouth to Mouth (2001) by Samuel Adamson

As a writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, I’ve spent time researching the papers of the playwright and screenwriter Kevin Elyot (1951-2014).  Here is my fifth article in response to Elyot’s archive, in which I discuss his fourth play Mouth to Mouth.  A general reflection on Elyot is here. I’ve also written about Coming Clean (1982), My Night with Reg (1994), and The Day I Stood Still (1998).

My year with Kev: moral questions

Two moral questions arose for me during my time in the playwright Kevin Elyot’s archive as the recipient of the 2023 Kevin Elyot Award.

My stated aim to the award’s panel was to write about Elyot – but I’m a playwright, not a biographer, and the first question was, simply, is this right?

Elyot was guarded about himself in interviews, and, as his agent Sebastian Born told me, did not share early ideas or drafts with others:

Kevin’s plays always arrived fully formed. He was superstitious about saying anything about what he was working on, so every once in a while I would receive a brown envelope containing his latest play. Such a thrill for an agent.1

Not unexpectedly, the archive reveals things Elyot withheld from journalists, as well as the hard work – pages of notes, multiple drafts – behind those ‘fully formed’ plays. With his notebooks, letters, research materials, press cuttings, and photographs, I was privy to some of Elyot’s innermost fears, tastes, resentments, pains, joys – and some of his personal opinions on friends and collaborators.

I was able to quell my unease about this strange intimacy with Elyot fairly quickly. I assumed that had he not wanted people to make discoveries about his life and practice, he’d have destroyed his papers. Besides, the yearly award – funded by an endowment given to the University of Bristol by members of Elyot’s family – exists to inspire writers in their own practice. It asks them to consider not only Elyot’s published and produced work, but the life and work behind that work. The materials are there to be read, and I began to understand the award as an act of artistic serial reciprocity, a tip of Elyot’s cap to succeeding generations.

The second moral question was how relevant are Elyot’s papers to my understanding of his performed and published work?

It’s obvious that Elyot drew from personal experience to write his plays, and there’s a lot in his notes about what he intended the plays to do. So it’s tempting to disregard the biographical and intentional fallacies – those (in my view) sound and helpful twentieth-century critical theories – and read the work via the life. Elyot argued in a column in The Telegraph in 2001 that if art reflects the artist, ‘this is only part of the story,’ yet at the same admitted,

Whether a play is about a schoolboy love affair or a satire on the power of the multinationals, it will only work if the writer taps an emotional core and thus, to some degree, reveals himself.2

The central character in Elyot’s fourth original play Mouth to Mouth is a playwright called Frank. When asked by the journalist Heather Neill at the time of the play’s premiere in 2001, ‘does Frank equal Kevin?’, Elyot could not quite deny it:

That’s a difficult one. Everything I write is a bit autobiographical, but I’m in all the characters.3

His piercingly honest, funny, moving and often troubling plays simply have the feel of being personal.

In the end, I decided to make myself comfortable on the fence. Sometimes Elyot’s papers elucidate the work, but the work stands on its own. On the one hand, I prefer to look at texts as texts – on the other, these articles are the reflections of a playwright, not academic research papers, so I don’t have to take any notice of the biographical and intentional fallacies.

All I’ve been able to do, as someone who admires Elyot’s writing, is reread his published plays, immerse myself in his papers, and call it as I see it.

As I see it, his archive reveals two key things about Elyot.

‘The usual’: undisclosed emotion, frustrated desire

The first is that his notes are not dissimilar from his six original plays, in that there is a steady repetition of ideas. As I’ve written elsewhere, Elyot was a hedgehog of a playwright, a Proustian obsessed with the same themes: the recovery of the past, repressed desire, the Forsterian need to connect, music, betrayal, guilt, mortality. In an early notebook for The Day I Stood Still, he wrote:

A tragedy interrupted by life’s vulgar comedy.

Show inhumanity bleeding.

Painful.

Undisclosed emotion.

Frustrated desire.

The usual!4

Because he was preoccupied with ‘the usual,’ his projects intersected, and some notebooks resist the archivist’s ex post facto categorisation. Elyot’s method, in his own words at the time of Mouth to Mouth, was ‘to make lots of notes over a long period. Hopefully something emerges that I can fashion into a play.’5 He discussed this process more expansively with Harriet Devine in 2005:

DEVINE:  […] how does it happen that an idea for a play comes along? Is it always the same process? Does something happen that sparks it off?

ELYOT:  It might be a moment that intrigues me, or – it can start off in the oddest way. And really it makes me sound a bit capricious and maybe rather shallow because, while some playwrights might sit down to write a play about Guantanamo, or the Health Service, I tend to write a play because I want to see two people doing a tango, or want to hear a piece of music in juxtaposition to something else. And then gradually you put pieces together over a length of time, and shape something out of it.6

Elyot’s reworking of the same themes – not ‘shallow’ themes, yet not overtly political ones – combined with his process of starting with ‘fragments’ (Devine’s word), meant that plays developed concurrently. In a notebook assigned by the Theatre Collection to The Day I Stood Still, he wrote in capitals, ‘WRITE TWO PLAYS!’, and although the play he developed in this book is indeed The Day I Stood Still, many of its ‘fragments’ form the basis for his next play.7 Early on he wrote, ‘Wife: Lindsay’ – a reference to his friend the actor Lindsay Duncan, for whom he created the part of Laura in that play, eventually called Mouth to Mouth.8 A few pages later, he wrote:

THE STORY:

X. falls for son of friends (wife + hubby). Starts rel. underage. So X. is having son. Wife’s having affair.9

Here, Elyot discovered the essential plot of Mouth to Mouth – the secret betrayal by her gay best friend of a wife who has her own secret – as he shaped The Day I Stood Still.

Ticket stub for Mouth to mouth Press night
Press night ticket, West End transfer, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/26/5

Vulnerable playwright

The second key thing Elyot’s papers reveal is his self-doubt, an insecurity slightly at odds with the acerbic persona he projected in interviews (and which friends and colleagues have written about since his death) though not necessarily with characters like Guy in My Night with Reg, Horace in The Day I Stood Still and Frank in Mouth to Mouth, who all struggle with diffidence, and whose unexpressed secrets fuel the plays’ plots.10

Elyot was, I think, self-conscious about ‘the usual,’ aware that to plough the same territory over and over was to risk not discovering new story treasures, and to risk being criticised for repeating himself.

In a Day I Stood Still notebook he wrote, ‘Squash all opposition with some big, assured laughs + bold dramatic strokes’ – his apprehension about ‘opposition’ is revealing.11

A galvanising message to himself in a Mouth to Mouth notebook is wise, and inspiring to anyone who reads it. But there is a poignancy to it; in my view, only a vulnerable artist could have written it:

FORGET FASHION, what’s expected, comedy per se, rivals – WRITE what’s true, what’s true to you, ignore EVERYBODY, write a TRAGEDY, reach for the truth of life, aim high, write a masterpiece. Amaze + surprise them.12

Mouth to Mouth: a moral question

Wonderfully, Elyot, a gay, HIV-positive playwright, a waspish and quick-witted Proustian who was nevertheless insecure about his writing and worried about repeating himself, harnessed his insecurity and experience of chronic illness to write a masterpiece about – I want to groan, and yet! – a gay, witty, insecure, HIV-positive and Proustian playwright, who, suffering from writer’s block, laments to Laura (his best friend, that ‘Wife’ in the The Day I Stood Still notebook) that he is ‘always being accused of writing about the same thing.’13

I suggest that any blocked and/or insecure writer reading this should refrain from taking heart from it: surely no one should write dramas about not being able to write. Yet somehow, with Mouth to Mouth, Elyot produced a stylish, droll and deeply disturbing meditation on a moral question: should writers draw from real life? Can they, if it involves betrayal of loved ones? Can writing only ever be a sharp practice?

The play has a palindromic structure and begins with a scene in which we glean that something terrible has happened – ‘unimaginably tragic’ as Frank says later – and that Frank has things he needs to confess to Laura.14 We flash back, then forward, to discover what these things are – and that everyone, not just Frank, has his or her own guilts and secrets.

In the final scene we return, according to a palindrome, to the first scene, and climactically get the answer to the question we have seen Frank grappling with throughout: should I use my life, the things that have happened to me and that I have made happen, to create my art?

In one reading, the answer is no: Frank will not plunder his life, and will not exacerbate the trauma of his best friend Laura, whose son, we now know, has died in a dreadful accident.

But human beings are complex creatures, and though he says he wants to, Frank never confesses his secrets/sins to Laura, perhaps in part because without her knowledge he discovers the secret of her affair. Typically for Elyot, there is more than one reading.

For a late draft of My Night with Reg, Elyot used two epigraphs: a passage from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s posthumous novel The Leopard, which survived into Reg’s published edition; and a passage from Patrick White’s 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves:

‘… Would you not say that life is a series of blunders rather than any clear design, from which we may come out whole if we are lucky?’15

Elyot dropped the White from Reg’s rehearsal draft onwards, but it was a very interesting idea, because the play and all of Elyot’s subsequent plays including Mouth to Mouth are scrupulously well-designed, yet peopled by characters blundering through life, barely coming out whole. The design of art can (should?) be elegant, but, first-rate playwright that he was, Elyot was utterly fearless when it came to the messy ‘truth of life’ for the characters inside his design – Truth as Hilary Mantel sees it in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost:

Truth isn’t pretty […] and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind.16

Mouth to Mouth’s epigraph is from the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.17

and this lesson becomes a lifeline for the dying playwright Frank, who’s known, if he’s known at all, for a play about Proust called ‘A Piece of Cake’:

What happened [to Laura’s son] – was just awful – unimaginably tragic. It’s haunted me for a year. And the point is – I think it’d make quite a good play. You see, I’m coming round to the opinion that I have to use whatever’s thrown at me.18

Showing how it goes

Elyot was not Frank. As he said to Neill, ‘I’m in all the characters,’ and as he said to Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, playwriting is about making things up:

I don’t lead a life full enough to be able to write several plays about. I don’t do that much, and my daily routine is pretty boring, so I can’t be writing about that. It would be very dull to sit in a theatre watching it unfold. The key is to try and enter the world of the imagination.19

Yet the anxieties Elyot expressed in his notebooks about repeating himself with ‘the usual’ and running out of ideas, and even the point he made to Aragay and Zozaya about his uninteresting life, turn up in Mouth to Mouth:

FRANK: I’m finding it [writing] pretty difficult, to be honest. I can’t put my finger on why exactly –

LAURA: No ideas.

FRANK: That could be it. But no, I’m having quite a hard time. I’m always being accused of writing about the same thing.

LAURA: And what would that be?

FRANK: Well, me, as it happens, which simply isn’t true. They say it’s a sign of creative bankruptcy.

LAURA: I’d have thought personal experience was the only thing worth writing about.

FRANK: But my life isn’t that interesting, and if it were, I wouldn’t have the time to write about it.

LAURA: Oh, I do wish tonight weren’t happening!

FRANK: Yes, well … Nice olives.20

In a lesser writer’s hands, these writerly anxieties might bore or irritate, seem like so much authorial moaning. But Frank is more complex than he appears – and I love how, as in Chekhov, his complexity is conveyed partly by the hilarious indifference with which he is treated by others. The exchange ‘Oh, I do wish tonight weren’t happening’ and ‘Yes, well … Nice olives’ is typical: we know there’s a world of torment and doubt inside Frank because Laura doesn’t really care and Frank must turn to the subject of olives.

All of Elyot’s dialogue is like this: crisp, funny and, most importantly, full of subtext. It is never self-righteous, but it demands its audience interrogate knotty moral questions and not-pretty truths about human beings:

We lie.

We are duplicitous.

And the artists among us are impelled by nature to use whatever treasures they find in their territory to create their art.

‘I wouldn’t dream of preaching,’ Elyot said, ‘I just show how it goes.’21


This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

1 Sebastian Born, email to me, 7 March 2024.
2 Kevin Elyot, ‘Whose life is on stage, anyway?’, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2001, p. A7, University of Bristol Theatre Collection (UBTC), KE/3/26/5.
3 Elyot to Heather Neill, The Times, 2 February 2001, UBTC, KE/3/26/5.
4 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 36.
5 Elyot to Neill.
6 Elyot to Harriet Devine in Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court 1956-2006 (London: Faber, 2006), p. 111.
7 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 88.
8 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 28.
9 UBTC, KE/3/23/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 34.
10 See, for example, Roger Michell and Robert Hastie in ‘Remembering Kevin,’ Introduction to My Night with Reg (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994, repr. 2013), pp. 8-10.
11 UBTC, KE/3/21/1, Book 1 of 3, p. 42.
12 UBTC, KE/3/26/1, Book 2 of 3, p. 58.
13 Elyot, Mouth to Mouth (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), p. 20.
14 Ibid, p. 52.
15 UBTC, KE/3/19/2, Book 3 of 3 (My Night with Reg 31/3/94 draft).
16 Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost: a Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2003; repr. 2013), p. 151.
17 Elyot, Mouth to Mouth, p. 5.
18 Ibid, pp. 27, 52. Elyot wrote a short ‘extract from “A Piece of Cake”’ in a notebook. Brilliantly, Proust does not get his memory-triggering madeleine, because a Young Man, replacing the indisposed waitress Clotilde (who ‘thinks she ate a suspect prawn for luncheon’), remembers his rosehip infusion but not his cake. When Proust realises the Young Man is English, he declares, ‘I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye,’ and the extract finishes. UBTC, KE/3/26/1, Book 3 of 3, pp. 3-4.
19 Elyot to Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, in British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. by Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, Zozaya (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 70.
20 Elyot, Mouth to Mouth, pp. 20-1.
21 Elyot to Carole Woddis, ‘An afternoon with Kevin’, Capital Gay, 22 April 1994, p. 16, UBTC, KE/3/19/7, 5 of 5.

Artist-in-Residence Placement – Where The Bonnie Heather Grows : A retrospective

Hello again, sadly for the last time. Here we are, at the end of my time with the University of Bristol Theatre Collection and on the other side of my installation which showcased my artist-in-residence work in the Wickham Theatre back in early June.

The installation poster featuring original work from the John Vickers series of glass plate negatives.
Image credit: John Vickers / Bobby Joynes

Looking back on this project, I am met with both immense fondness and sadness now that it has come to an end. The Where The Bonnie Heather Grows installation was my last practical installation in the university that I have called home for the last three years, as well as being the end point of my artistic-orientated research. I spent the best part of four solid days working very closely with the University of Bristol Theatre Department technicians to fully rig the space, construct from scratch the structure which had been in my mind’s eye for so long, and to calibrate the projected videos to perform in their intended way. After such a gruelling and physically exerting process, the installation was complete and finally ready to open to members of the public.

Throughout this project, I have personally reflected on the relationship that artists share with archives in the creation of new work. However, this period of time highlighted something which I feel needs drawing particular attention to: the relationship effected by archives on artists. More specifically, how artists serve as a conduit which connects the archive and its need for precision and accuracy with the pragmatic nature of technicians, producers and those who may work on a project like this one in some capacity but, having not done the research directly, might not understand the need of the artist for things to be done in certain ways.

Artist-in-residence Bobby Joynes pictured with lead
UOB Drama Department technician James Lisk. Image credit: Tommy Tang

For others who walk a similarly intertwined path between these two elements, don’t underestimate the need for clarity and the distinction of open communication with those who you are working with.

The installation itself comprised two central elements: the projected space and a scrapbook which featured a response photographic series taken by me, which, when combined, asked its audiences if the destruction of something was more artistically beautiful than something which has been preserved.

The scrapbook. Image credit: Tommy Tang

Each of the elements had been directly extracted from my detailed research in the archive. The projected images, now turned into videos to accentuate their decay, were high resolution scans from John Vickers’ original 1920s glass plate negatives. The series of photographs taken by me were all initially monochromatic until double exposed with replicas of the mould-infested structures from the same series by Vickers. Each of these elements, interwoven together, served as a thought-provoking site for my question and for the exploration of my overall interest during the course of this placement: the relationship between the artist and the archive.

Audiences taking in the 360 degree projected space. Image credit: Tommy Tang

On entering the curated space, audiences were met with work that one visitor described as a “stunning use of the archive”, but which also served as “an extra dimension to the preservation and decay interrogation” (audience comments book). For me as the creator, it was really encouraging and enlightening to see people coming up to me with questions and becoming genuinely engaged and enthused by the materials in such similar ways to how I was first drawn to the series in the archive. I felt incredibly proud of what I had created, of course, but also an added sense of pride that I was able to bring John Vickers and his work from out of the depths of the archives again, after so many years, and to breathe new life into it again; for his photos to hold and similarly captivate as they did during his lifetime.

Discussions between Artist-in-residence Bobby Joynes & Dr Kirsty Sedgman about the space.
Image Credit: Tommy Tang

Beginning this process of learning, I felt lucky to have had prior experiences with using archives. At the end of this artist-in-residence placement, I feel a great privilege to have been taught the value of the archive even more so, but to a point where I feel I have formed a working relationship with John Vickers. I’ve learnt that age and time really are just constructs in this kind of work, and that incredible work may just simply be another shelf away, wrapped neatly with archival tape, in an unsuspecting box.

Audiences were initially greeted with an exhibition outline which provided them with contextual information and the installation’s question. Image credit: Tommy Tang

On a final note, I would like to say a massive thank you to Jill Sullivan, Laura Dow, Nigel Bryant, Julian Warren and all the other members of staff at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection for welcoming me into your organisation and being some of the most well versed and knowledgeable people I have had the pleasure of working with. A massive thank you to Dr Kirsty Sedgman, James Lisk and Beth Bransome from the University of Bristol Theatre Department; without your attention, support and incredible capabilities, none of this would have been possible. Thank you to Becky Coster, Ines Sallis, Tommy Tang, Athena Gibson-Diamond and Jesse Prince for volunteering on this project, your support has meant the world, you’re all very dear to me. Finally, I wanted to say thank you to all those who managed to make it to the installation space! It was my pleasure to welcome you and the responses I collected will stay with me for the rest of my professional career.

Bobby

If you want to learn more about this process, or view the materials related to this project, all my physical and digital exhibition work has been donated to the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.