We are currently undertaking a project to find and support significant theatre & live art records placed at risk due to COVID-19. We are looking to help individuals and organisations that have been affected by the pandemic and need help with caring for their archives. If you are concerned about your records or know of any records that are at risk, please have a look at our Records at Risk page and get in touch with Siân Williams, Project Archivist: sian.a.williams@bristol.ac.uk
With the Theatre and Live Art Records at Risk project well underway, our Project Archivist, Sian Williams reflects on the project so far and the conversations we’ve had with funding bodies, organisations within the theatre sector and other collecting institutions.
The theatre sector has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. The effects of the pandemic continue to be felt and are still not fully realised, but it is clear that this period will have a lasting impact on the industry.
The Cultural Recovery Fund and furlough scheme have only recently come to an end, and there continue to be uncertainties over future additional financial support. As well as ongoing restrictions, there are other issues to contend with, including audience confidence, reduced performances, whether group bookings will be revived, insurance costs and cover for COVID disruption, and what audiences want to see during and following these challenging times. There are many factors that will affect recovery and whether or not the theatre industry can and even should be returning to pre-pandemic models.
During the pandemic, there were conversations within the industry about how the theatre sector was going to recover and ‘build back better’. The voice of the freelance workforce was more loudly heard with the formation of Freelancers Make Theatre Work and their subsequent Big Freelancer Report highlighting the ‘inequities deep rooted throughout the industry’. The desperate situation many freelancers found themselves in during the pandemic shone a spotlight not only on the immediate need for financial assistance, but the need to confront and remedy the core problems faced by the freelancer workforce that were growing long before the pandemic. As the Big Freelancer Report states, ‘for freelancers in the performing arts, COVID-19 has acted as a force multiplier on an employment system that was already under strain… The theatre workforce do not want to return to an already broken system, therefore the income crisis need to be addressed’ (2021, p.129). With the ESRC-funded Freelancers in the Dark research project soon to be published, which investigated the social, cultural, and economic consequences of COVID19 on independent arts workers across the UK, it can hopefully help to inform plans to support the sector as it rebuilds.
It seems that the pandemic was not exclusively the reason, but an accelerating factor forcing some theatres to permanently close and some professionals to leave the industry. The financial impact of the pandemic meant theatres that were already facing financial insecurity closed or transferred ownership. But the pandemic also offered the opportunity – or forced people – to re-evaluate their situations. People reconsidered the hours they worked, their working conditions and their worth.
Over 70% of the theatre workforce are freelancers, and many were unable to claim financial assistance from emergency funding or financial schemes during the pandemic. It is not known how many people have already left the industry due to financial insecurity or if they plan to return. The film and TV industry was able to restart production much sooner than the theatre industry, offering some freelancers the opportunity to return to work. But what impact will this have long-term? Now theatres have reopened, there are reports of a ‘hiring crisis’, with productions unable to fill vacancies. A recent article highlighted that it is roles requiring skills transferable to other industries which are proving difficult to fill.
Many of the problems that were once backstage and less apparent to audiences have now been revealed and brought to the foreground. For the Theatre Collection, this project has highlighted how important it is for us, as a collecting institution of theatre and live art material, to understand the theatre industry in the present, so that we can better prepare for sustainable collecting in the future and try to prevent the loss of vulnerable collections that are vital to the cultural history of Britain. As a collecting institution that has seen an increase in donations of archival material since the start of the pandemic, we must plan for potential donations, but also raise awareness of the Theatre Collection and other collecting institutions within the industry, so we can provide support and advice to those currently looking after their own records.
The Kevin Elyot Award was established in 2016 as an annual award of £3,000 given to support a writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. It is given in memory of Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) – an alumnus of the University of Bristol Drama Department – and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts. The award has been generously funded by an endowment given to the University by members of Kevin’s family.
The current winner of the Kevin Elyot award is Lucy Bell, a Devon-based playwright who writes funny, unflinching plays about British society, and the often-epic dilemmas of caring. Further information is available here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/theatre-collection/news/2020/kevin-elyot-award-2020.html
I was delighted to start my residency at Bristol University Theatre Archive this autumn, as part of the Kevin Elyot Award. When Jo Elsworth rang to say I had won the award by unanimous decision of the panel, it was the highpoint of a troubling lockdown summer. In fact I was convinced she was ringing to either reject or interview me. I kept politely asking her to postpone the interview whilst she kept trying to explain that no interview was required. We got there in the end.
The idea I pitched was to do with the timeless time-sensitivity of women’s lives; how societal norms impose a ticking clock on women, the threat of “withering on the stem” (whether we want those norms or not). Ask yourself, would the US countenance a female president who was 78? They wouldn’t countenance a female president full stop. Many of us women feel explosively, joyfully released from those fertility-linked pressures at menopause, finally free to be the people we want to be, only to find our actual available time is decimated by the people we are now responsible for.
This is perhaps becoming less true, but it was certainly true for my generation, my mother’s generation and my grandmother’s generation. Kevin Elyot had a very different kind of life, but it seems this ticking clock was heard by him too. His characters are often gay men running after permanence in their relationships, constantly aware that the appeal of monogamy will soon reach its sell by date. And of course there is the lit fuse of HIV waiting in the wings. In his West End hit, My Night With Reg, a character dies between each scene.
ERIC. Got a light?
JOHN (giving him a light). I didn’t think you smoked.
ERIC. I don’t, but everyone I know who doesn’t is dead.
Although Elyot doesn’t have the profile his ready wit deserves, his writing seems especially relevant in a year where we’ve all been forced to engage with mortality.
Leafing through Kevin Elyot’s archive has been an encounter with time in other ways too. On my first visit, I was struck by the sensation that this other writer, who I’d never met, who might not like me one bit if he’d ever met me, was extending a supportive hand, a hug even, across time.
Everyone knows that rejections are a constant and bruising part of being a writer. It was weirdly reassuring to read through bundles of letters rejecting the plays of such a successful and prolific playwright. A couple of times I laughed out loud at stock phrases I’d been sent myself. (At least 2020 has made gatekeepers choose their words more carefully!) In his print interviews I could hear his voice questioning why writing remains a compulsion, despite its many pitfalls, protesting against his works being siloed as a “gay plays” for gay theatres and festivals.
His plays are tangibly about love, loss, and the pursuit of the sublime. They also happen to include, rather than exclude, gay perspectives. I thought about how things are now, how the pressure to trade on characteristics has got stronger and how that can feel frustrating when you want to express your personal, rather than tribal, experience of life, and be allowed to speak to universal themes.
It was thrilling to feel time contract, as I found mutual points of contact across the decades. Peggy Ramsay was Kevin Elyot’s first agent, and her charitable trust has supported me, in my particular circumstances, to find time to write.
Elyot entered the George Devine Prize. The judges on his rejection letter included John Burgess who was a director at The Royal Court, where Elyot’s last play, Forty Winks, was staged. John’s the person who taught me to write plays through his free-to-access writing group at Nuffield Theatre, he separately supported the director I happen to be working with right now. It reassured me to think that, while our theatre buildings are imperiled, wonderful individuals like John and Peggy Ramsay are a flexing, unbreakable spine through the decades, touching so many creative lives.
Lastly, time is a key driver of Kevin Elyot’s play structures. Often time is looping backwards and forwards. You are pulled forward by the desire to see the scene that came before or in between. The character’s brains are looping backwards to a moment in adolescence when they experienced unadulterated love. I am hoping to tap into Elyot’s manipulation of time in the piece I write, as it relates to three generations of women marked by the same accident. I hope I can learn from Elyot to make it equally hard to put down.
There are, of course, some ways in which Elyot’s work seems of its time and not ours. There are casual references to incest and sex with minors which would never arise as throwaway dialogue today. His characters, men in their twenties, thirties and forties, rarely check their privilege in terms of the amount of time and freedom they have to do what they like.
As a mother and carer, I initially found this slightly alienating. Then I realized it was symptomatic of something profoundly unfair, and possibly the reason his characters look backwards instead of forwards. Elyot died in 2014, the year that gay marriage became possible. In his heyday, gay couples with children were an anomaly. I’ll never know what Elyot wanted or needed from his personal life, but Coming Clean, My Night with Reg, and Forty Winks read as tragedies about characters in search of an anchor. This makes Elyot’s timing seem very hard indeed.
Each year the Theatre Collection co-leads a MA unit for the History of Art Department. ‘Curating the Collection’ is an Independent Study Unit, for which students work as a team to research and curate an exhibition based on the Theatre Collection holdings. To start the process, there may be an overarching theme, a new acquisition to showcase, or an event to tie in with (for example Shakespeare 400 in 2016 or the Old Vic Bicentenary in 2018). But within these themes, the students are free to explore the collections, interpret and devise their own exhibition. The unit teaches them a range of curatorial skills, from original research to mounting and framing, writing display texts and organising publicity and a private viewing. The unit provides essential experience for those students wishing to pursue a career in museums and galleries.
For the 2020 exhibition,we wanted to showcase twentieth-century set and costume designers, and an introductory session with the students looked at a range of items that included art college notebooks as well as finished designs for major productions. The students became really engaged with the idea of the creative genesis of a designer and how they developed their ideas. In particular, the work of Julia Trevelyan Oman, Ralph Adron and Yolanda Sonnabend.
The students were especially interested in the idea of translating fantasy and fairy tale into workable sets and costumes, looking at examples of design from ballet and children’s theatre.
The students formed a strong collaborative team at their first session and were exploring all kinds of possibilities for their exhibition. This year we had planned for the exhibition to be staged in the Theatre Collection reading room and library. Past exhibitions there had worked well, with items framed and hung on the walls of these rooms. The MA students however had additional ideas for installations, to recreate a designer’s desk and utilise the surrounding bookshelves.
‘Looking through Yolanda Sonnabend’s uncatalogued archive was an interesting process and inspired a lot of different ideas within our group. We admired all the work she put into each design and the various forms of inspiration taken to make them. Her studio was a big part of her identity as everyone who talked about her always mentioned it, and so it became important for us to exhibit it in some form.’ (Adriana, MA student)
We were all very excited by the potential of these ideas. This was in February.
Due to the rapidly developing situation around COVID-19, the University took the decision to close on Wednesday 18 March and move the remainder of the teaching term online. We put out a call to the History of Art students who arrived on Tuesday 17th and undertook a herculean amount of image scanning and last-minute research in our library. Enough material was gathered but we had to make the decision and break it to the students that the eventual exhibition would be virtual and not in a physical space. There would be no private view but potentially an even wider online audience for their work. Plans had to be changed or even discarded, but the ideas continued to flow, with regular classes and group discussions online.
‘Once we agreed that our exhibition would be moved online we began to reconsider the shortlist and the objects we originally intended on displaying. We asked ourselves the questions, how does a digitised version of an object affect its interpretation? We realised that, unfortunately, many of the large set design drawings by David Walker that we’d been considering, would not translate due to their size and we decided to leave these out of the exhibition entirely. We had also planned to stage a desk installation as a way to recreate the studio space of Yolanda Sonnabend, to show the chaotic yet productive environment in which she worked. We adapted this idea to a digital platform by presenting objects that showcased Sonnabend’s design inspirations and her design process by displaying personal artefacts and early draft work for various productions.’ (Rebecca, MA student)
As museums and galleries across the world found ways to attract new audiences through online exhibitions, our students were learning new skills that would be very relevant in the ‘new normal’ of planning and staging exhibitions. And it enabled them to think about their audiences and how people can access and understand an exhibition without a physical gallery framework.
‘All of the designers made the most of constraints. The move to an online exhibition has resulted in sharper text and clearly articulated curatorial positions, as there was less space for writing and the items included were reduced. However, this sharpness comes at the expense of physically attending the exhibition. It is not just the scale of individual works that becomes less clear in an online world; it is also the scale of the designers’ archives as a reflection of their talents that becomes less obvious too.’ (Ewan, MA student)
The exhibitionDream Designers: Staging Fantasy celebrates the work of the chosen designers by focusing on their work processes and influences. The first section in particular focuses on children’s theatre and the Ralph Adron designs for Unicorn Theatre’s Lizzie Dripping and the Witch and The Blue Monster. The second section of the exhibition looks at how all three designers approached the ballet of The Nutcracker.
‘Co-curating this exhibition has left me with a deep respect for theatre design. Researching the careers of our chosen designers has made me realise that theatre design is more than realising an aesthetic vision; theatre designers are charged with creating magic.’ (Annie, MA student)
With a final flourish of inventiveness, the students got in touch with Ralph Adron and, through email conversations with him, were able to learn more about his ideas and the challenges that designing for the stage can raise. The exhibition therefore also includes explanatory quotes that add yet another dimension to the works.
‘We were incredibly fortunate that Ralph Adron, one of the designers upon whose work we had created the exhibition was available to answer our questions. Ralph (we quickly became on first name terms in email) reminisced not only about the productions of his we had focused on, Lizzie Dripping and The Witch, The Blue Monster and The Nutcracker but also the processes, working practices and experience of working as a stage designer in his heyday. The insights provided were invaluable in contextualising the decisions made in respect of staging, costume and set designs and the inspirations behind the creative process of a designer.
Some of the correspondence reminded Ralph of elements that he had designed but not remembered or thought about for over 40 years. I was glad that he could see that we were interested in his works and he was also interested in our ideas, themes and inspirations for the exhibition. A wonderful source of enriching information for our exhibition but also a warm and generous person who is still providing delight through his artistry and creativity.’ Lyndon (MA student)
‘One of my favourite design tasks was arranging Ralph Adron’s mice on the title page, as though they were hanging [the title] up themselves! The theme of the exhibition was all about bringing fantasy alive, further, it brought an element of fun to welcome the online visitors into viewing the rest of the curated collection.’ Alicia (MA student)
The exhibition can be seen here and celebrates not just the creativity of the three designers but also the hard work and dynamic adaptability of the MA students. It’s been a privilege to work with them and we wish them every success in their careers.
Thomas Manson and George Meredith are playwrights with a particular interest in history and the archive. In 2019 they undertook a residency at the Theatre Collection to explore questions surrounding adaptation and the creative potential of the archive, which culminated in two creative writing workshops. This second blog charts their response to findings in the Julia Trevelyan Oman Archive.
The Julia Trevelyan Oman Archive is one of the most detailed and extensive in the Theatre Collection. Julia – a celebrated theatre, opera, ballet and television designer – kept everything from her art college days onwards. And everything means everything. There are over two and half thousand entries in her online catalogue. The reference numbers which categorise her materials span JTO/1 through to JTO/429. There are boxes full of letters and notes and hurried scribblings. Vast stage plans and intricate sketches. Papier mâché birds delicately wrapped in tissue paper. All the scrappy detritus of a creative life, bound and boxed and labelled in the brimming store rooms of the Collection.
For not only did Julia keep everything, but she also ordered it all properly, and took steps to preserve the incredible wealth of materials she accumulated over the course of her career. As a result, this sprawling collection offers not only a fascinating insight into Julia’s life and work, but also into the act of archive-making itself.
There is a palpable tension in all archives – but particularly this one – between order and disorder. Archives are places of organisation and careful curation, and yet the materials they contain are so often the remains of disordered and unpredictable lives. Take the snippet of autobiographical writing, written quickly in pencil on the back of an art exhibition flyer, that describes a young Julia discovering her passion for creation:
The fascination with gardens grew. From creating imaginative palaces & gardens on the floor from children’s boxes of wooden building bricks, using mirrors for lakes & candlesticks for columns. Magic cities grew and fell as the floor was (JTO/237).
The note ends abruptly, mid-sentence. Julia was disturbed perhaps, or distracted or pulled away by the urgency of some other work. The thought is left unfinished and the paper is left to one side, most likely among the countless other papers in what Sir Roy Strong described as the ‘orderly confusion’ (JTO/112) of Julia’s studio, and this momentary centre of Julia’s creative attention becomes a trace, a relic to be codified and brought into a system of logic unbefitting of such disordered thoughts.
What are we to make of this now in the hush of the Theatre Collection’s reading room? What relation is there between this unfinished thought from some distracted afternoon and the systems of order that define its existence now? And how might a writer exploit this tension? What is the creative potential of introducing, or perhaps it would be better to say re-introducing, disorder to the archive?
Down the Rabbit Hole
We were considering these questions as we came across Julia’s work on Jonathan Miller’s 1966 television adaptation of Alice in Wonderland – a project that crackles with the tension between order and disorder.
As a designer, Julia was renowned for her tyrannous eye for detail and quite obsessive sense of historical accuracy. Her style harks back to the 19th century, with its cluttered, complex, realistic sets. The intricacy and social realism of her designs are actually remarkable given that she was working at a time when most designers of the period were turning towards minimalism in their work. Julia’s work on Alice is no exception. The collection is full of her intricate designs and exacting instructions. There are detailed plans, sections, elevations and drawings. Nothing escapes her eye for detail, and her research and reports cover everything from the placement of the furniture to the patterns on the curtains. Even the flies that will buzz around the Mad Hatter’s tea party are subject to strict controls:
They will live for about a week. Must be kept cool and in the shade. They should be fed on a pasty mixture of sugar and water. We cannot replace them if they are lost. Please return the container. (JTO/6/2).
Such stringent attention to detail seems strangely at odds with the anarchic world it is in aid of. Carroll’s wonderland is a dream landscape, where objects morph and change and disobey the rules of the world as we know them. Invisible cats float in mid-air and babies turn into pigs. Time stops and the Mad Hatter is trapped in an indefinite tea time, while the scones spoil around him. Julia’s geometrical certainties seem unlikely bedfellows with such a topsy turvy unreality.
Location shot from Alice in Wonderland (1966). Julia Trevelyan Oman Archive, JTO/6/5. University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
And yet, in another sense, this cocktail of order and disorder is a perfect reflection of Carroll’s vision. Wonderland is not a world of abject chaos. Order exists, it is simply a displaced form of order that answers to an abstract logic. Eating and drinking in Wonderland has an unexpected effect on one’s size, but Alice soon learns the system and uses it to negotiate her new surroundings. Similarly, the Caucus Race appears to have no rules at all but the creatures participating in it seem to understand the logic, and so Alice plays along:
Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could (p.27).
The apparent disorder of Carroll’s Wonderland is in fact a satire of the arbitrary systems of order that define adult life in the real world – systems that we blindly inherit and accept without question. For Carroll, these real-world systems are just as arbitrary and bizarre as any to be found in Wonderland.
It struck us that there was a lesson here for approaching archives. Archives are ordered by systems that seem natural and yet are entirely artificial. There is nothing inevitable about the organising principles of archives, and one might just as easily categorise materials by shape or colour. Perhaps by introducing new systems of order and, like Alice, working within the logic of those systems, we can disrupt the dynamics of the archive and find new meanings and creative possibilities.
But what systems? And how can we apply them to our writing?
CURIOUSER and Curiouser
Traversing this precarious boundary between order and disorder, some refuge can be found with the French author Georges Perec and the OuLiPo movement he joined in the 1960s – around the same time that Julia and Miller were making Alice. The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) was founded in 1960 by writers and mathematicians experimenting with constraints and seeking different systems of logic for their writing.
Not to be confused with the earlier Surrealist movement, the OuLiPo rejected chance and exalted the imposition of rules. For example, some wrote ‘snowball’ poetry in which each word had to be one letter longer than the last; others forbade the use of letters with ascenders or descenders which hung below or above the line – such as ‘d’ or ‘g’ or ‘y’. These constraints, far from being restrictive, were catalysts for creativity. As Alison James writes: “…the OuLiPo is intrigued by such apparent points of convergence between order and disorder, law and its absence, chance and necessity.” (p.131). Indeed, one of OuLiPo’s founding members Raymond Queneau viewed writing without rules as a form of slavery.
The Oulipo Ambigram. Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons. Basile Morin / CC BY-SA. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
Unsurprisingly, the OuLiPo were great admirers of Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is full of instances where language and images are disordered and reordered, forming a sort of textual fabric that is open to manipulation and mutation, as if it were a lump of play-dough. Take for example the Mouse’s “long sad tale”, the words of which take the shape of a mouse’s tail on the page. Similarly, the Doormouse’s story about three sisters who drew only things beginning with ‘M’ could be something straight out of the OuLiPo playbook. No wonder the movement described Carroll as an ‘anticipatory plagiarist’ who had been cribbing their techniques long before they had even thought of them!
Carroll’s playful use of linguistic rules and constraints is a great example of the humorous potential of the OuLiPo approach. However, these techniques can also be used for far more profound ends than Carroll’s Victorian nonsense. A famous novel by Perec epitomises how the slippages between order and disorder can prove fertile creative ground to explore even the most serious of themes. La Disparition (literally meaning ‘The Disappearance’) takes the form of a lipogram, prohibiting the use of the letter ‘e’, the most prominent letter in the French language. It is important to note that Perec’s mother died in the Holocaust and his father died fighting in the Second World War. In light of this, Warren Motte points out that “Perec cannot say the words père, mère, parents, famille in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec.” As in Alice, language acquires a material characteristic here, as if it were a fabric to be torn. The destruction of the Holocaust is visited on the materiality of the written word, and the voids at the heart of the family and the self are forcefully evoked through their imposed absence on the page.
The materiality of the written word takes us back to the material archive; a collection of objects arranged by its own system of logic, by order and disorder, with its own gaps, holes and tears. Perhaps if we follow the lead of the OuLiPo, we can challenge its systems and create new orders of our own.
Magic cities
Coming full circle then, we were interested in how we might apply some of these thoughts when directly interacting with archive materials. At the culmination of our residency at the Theatre Collection, we hosted a writing workshop where we explored a number of OuLiPo techniques, one of which is known as larding. Beginning with two sentences (sentences 1 and 3), the writer composes a middle sentence (sentence 2). The writer then adds two more sentences, one between sentences 1 and 2 and another between sentences 2 and 3. The writer continues to lard the sentences until the two sentences have become a paragraph, and that paragraph a page.
This exercise takes the original material and imbues it with renewed meaning; a palimpsestic layering which reanimates the once ossified artefact, ramifying and seeking new connections. We can use this technique, to quote art critic Hal Foster, to turn archival “‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites’”, and build new connections from forgotten material (p.60).
For our own larding exercise, we returned to Julia’s archive:
The fascination with gardens grew.
From creating imaginative palaces & gardens on the floor from children’s boxes of wooden building bricks, using mirrors for lakes & candlesticks for columns.
Magic cities grew and fell as the floor was
Using this fragment as a starting point, we built on top of it, adding more and more between the lines until Julia’s unfinished thought became a new and complete piece of writing. And in so doing, we liberated it from the pacifying systems of the archive and re-injected the creative impetus that first prompted it on that distracted afternoon of decades before.
After our workshop, we returned to a small exhibit we had fashioned from Julia’s archive. We placed the items carefully back in their boxes. Sketch books. Photographs. Newspaper clippings. JTO/1 through to JTO/429. Reference numbers and crisp white folders. A trick of the eye, disguising the gaps and chaos and strange syncretism of a life lived somewhere in between order and disorder. Like Alice, and like the OuLiPo after her, we sought to navigate this in between. That fertile, hybrid space where objects look different and magic cities are built.
Works cited
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. 1865. Oxford World Classics, 2009.
Foster, Hal. Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. Verso Books, 2015.
James, Alison. Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo. Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Motte, Warren. “Reading Georges Perec.” CONTEXT, vol. 11,
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/reading-georges-perec/
Items from the archive
‘Magic cities’ from a handwritten note recording the development of Julia’s passion for gardens. Catalogue reference JTO/237.
‘Orderly disorder’ from ‘Spotlight’ article by Roy Strong about Julia, Vogue, February 1971. Catalogue reference JTO/112.
Note about flies from prop list and notes for the 1966 BBC production of Alice in Wonderland. Catalogue reference JTO/6/2.
Jill Sullivan, Assistant Keeper: User Services has written a guide to the Theatre Collection resources available to users online. There is a separate blog for students who want to use the Theatre Collection for assignments and dissertations.
The Theatre Collection is one of the world’s largest collections of British theatre history and live art. It includes over 140 named collections and archives, comprising artworks, audio-visual material, costumes, designs, set models, playbills, prompt scripts, production notes and programmes.
The size of the Collection can be daunting and due to the current COVID-19 situation you can’t visit us, but here is a brief guide to help you access some of the holdings remotely, as well as some recommended sites to help with your research.
Then use our guides listed under Explore to find out more about the different collections:
THEATRE
This section is useful for browsing biographical information and finding out more about what each collection holds. It’s organized by theme: Academics, Actors, Collectors, Designers, Directors, Organisations, Writers, and Photographers, as well as ‘Off-stage’ which covers a range of theatre creatives such as producers, managers, critics, agents, and wardrobe staff.
TOP TIP: If a person had many strings to their bow, we’ve listed them by each (for example, Joyce Grenfell was an actor, but also a writer, so she can be found under both headings).
LIVE ART
Live Art is notoriously difficult to categorise. The Live Art Development Agency suggests thinking of live art as a strategy, rather than a category – their ‘What is Live Art?’ web pages are a good place to start. Within the Live Art Archives you can find items relating to performance, art, dance, music, experimental and alternative theatre, poetry, and much more, including a lot of audio-visual documentation. Catalogue records for many of these items are available on the Theatre Collection’s online catalogue, so if you know what you are looking for you can head straight there, but if not a list of individual collections within the Live Art Archives with short, introductory descriptions is also available.
LIBRARY
The library catalogue has a link to the main University of Bristol library catalogue and to a list of our journal holdings. At the moment you won’t be able to access the books at the Theatre Collection, but the University library site will have information and links to electronic books and articles, databases and – NEW – free access to many additional online resources at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/library/find/free/ There are also some excellent newspaper archive websites that I’ll talk about later.
