This academic year we have welcomed two 3rd year Theatre students to the Theatre Collection. They have each been researching in the archives in order to create an original script. This latest blog is by Madalena, who has been researching the letters of the Bourke family in the nineteenth century.
Hello! Since my last blog post I have spent most of my time making my way through the Bourke letters, specifically boxes BTC80/2 and BTC80/3. Within these is a treasure trove of letters from the 1860s and 70s from Annie Bourke’s admirers, friends, family, costumiers, photographers and more. The collection is described as containing letters addressed to Annie, her sister Jessie and their cousin Eva, however, all three of the five boxes I have explored so far have only been addressed to Annie, with Jessie and Eva occasionally mentioned. I have loved delving into Annie’s life and learning about her from the perspective of other people. It is so interesting to learn about a person’s life without seeing things from their own perspective, it’s like trying to piece together a puzzle without knowing the picture you’re creating.
The narrative of her life reveals itself bit by bit with every new letter I read. She worked as a burlesque* actress at the New Royalty Theatre in Soho while living in Kentish Town, London, but spent plenty of time touring the country and working in many theatres including at Bristol, Plymouth, Durham, Dublin, Lancashire and more. She often met with her admirers at the stage door after a show, and they frequently took her out for meals. She grieved the death of her friend and fellow actress Nellie, who is listed in newspaper advertisements alongside her; she helped raise money for the Royal General Theatrical Fund, and in the 1870s she lived in Vienna with her husband.
I started to build a loose narrative for my screenplay including all these elements, thinking I would focus on her time meeting with admirers in London, when an exciting discovery was made. I finally found one letter written by Annie herself. After reading so many letters addressed to her, reading one written by her felt like hearing from a friend for the first time in years. Though, what was even more interesting was the content of the letter. Addressed to her husband, the letter expressed disappointment and hurt towards him for leaving and not contacting her for a month, including lines such as ‘for the last fortnight I have made myself ill with wondering what could have happened to you’ and ‘I do hope you have not got tired of me, and wish yourself free of me’. Suddenly there is a new interesting narrative to follow involving issues with her husband in the 1870s, and my storyline became less clear.
There are many affectionate letters from one particular admirer, Henry Benson Stuart, who seemed to feel very intensely towards Annie, even describing his dreams about her and in many of his letters mentioning something about buying her nice new shoes and kissing her feet. The archive box contents then later jumped to the 1870s, with letters from her husband, which were often difficult to read and seemed irrelevant to all the correspondence she had had with admirers in the 1860s. However, in one exciting moment, it became clear that Henry Benson Stuart was her husband! These two men in the narrative I had been piecing together suddenly became the same person, giving all of his affectionate letters to her an entirely new meaning, and a connecting theme for a potential storyline.
I have absolutely loved looking through this collection so far, and it pains me to say that I will not have the time within my placement to make it through the final two boxes. I will have to create my storyline using what I have uncovered in the first three boxes, though I will long to know what other events and scandals remain to be discovered in the final two.
*Victorian burlesques were light-hearted satirical versions of well-known operas and plays.