By Rosie Smith, Project Archivist
When we last left off, I had been through every box in the Forkbeard Fantasy Archive once and was beginning to infiltrate the digital archive.
Well, I got distracted.
January started with our annual closure week; a week in which the Theatre Collection is closed to the public to allow us to give the collection some TLC and do the jobs that we don’t normally have time for. It was suggested that while the reading room was empty, I should use the extra space to condition check and clean the Forkbeard objects.
Forkbeard Fantasy were known for their use of elaborate objects in their productions, many of which were later displayed in the Museum of Forkbeard. Objects were vital to Forkbeard’s work. Even their street theatre relied on large props. After all, what would The Great British Square Dance be without the Square Dance shoes? (For those unfamiliar with the production, The Great British Square Dance involved three members of Forkbeard and one unsuspecting member of the audience putting on shoes attached to a large wooden square and attempting to perform a series of dance moves.)
Storing the objects brings its own set of problems. Many of them are of unusual shapes and sizes, meaning they require custom-made boxes. No box will suffice for some of them. For example, the seven-foot-tall bunny costume, which has been separated into parts and wrapped in Tyvek. Miss Edwards is still causing us some trouble as she needs to be stored upright but is unable to support her own weight. At the Forkbeard Museum she was allowed to dangle from a rope attached to her head, but this is impractical in our setting. I’ll keep thinking…
As the objects were originally created for plays, they were rarely created to last. The spring shoe from Forkbeard’s first big production, The Rubber Gods Show, was only intended to last for a few months. Hence it was made from a cheap metal spring which has since become very rusty. Now that we hope to keep it in perpetuity, we are left with the challenge of preserving something that is already degrading. Another good example is Moth from On an Uncertain Insect made in 1978. Moth was designed to be held in front of a lamp and its shadow would appear on stage. To make the shadows appear gradated, some parts of moth were made from semi-transparent materials. The wings are made of parchment paper, while the body was made from jelly. Unsurprisingly, not much of the jelly from 1978 has survived and there is little guidance available on how to preserve food stuff in an archive.
Food is not the only material that can degrade. As part of a production of Frankenstein, Forkbeard made a model of Dr Frankenstein, Igor and the Monster. When a button on the front is pushed, they dance. I know that I’m not supposed to have favourites, but I do and it’s this. However, to make the models dance, it requires 3D batteries. Batteries can degrade and leak, which would then cause damage to the object. But without the batteries it doesn’t function. So should the batteries be kept? In this case, it was decided to keep the batteries separate from the object so that if they do leak, they won’t damage the model.
Then there are the questions of classification. Take Mammon, the God of Dosh from Invisible Bonfires. Mammon would sit on a custom-built table with a hole in the middle. An actor would then climb inside Mammon and operate his mouth and light up shoes from the inside. Does this make Mammon a puppet, and thus a prop? Or is he a costume? I’m still working out the best way to define him in the catalogue.
Despite their challenges, the objects are one of the highlights of the collection and really bring Forkbeard’s work to life. While we could only accept a selection of the objects that were housed in the Museum of Forkbeard, we did make a 3D scan of the whole museum, which can be accessed here. There are various ideas and plans for how to use this scan, so watch this space!