Category: Forkbeard Fantasy

By Rosie Smith, Project Archivist, Forkbeard Fantasy 

I have been tasked with cataloguing the Forkbeard Fantasy archive. Having learnt about the company, the next step was to find out what is actually in the archive.

There are 77 boxes, all of which I have now opened and investigated. I did no sorting or cataloguing; just looked at what’s inside. Thankfully I had been provided with a box list, so I knew whether to expect ‘production material’, ‘photos’ or ‘Penny’s designs.’ While a very helpful starting point, those titles do not do justice to the array of funny, joyful, and sometimes downright bizarre contents of the archive. 

When starting a new production, the Forkbeards would each purchase an A4 black notebook. In these notebooks they would scribble their thoughts and ideas, sometimes in words, sometimes in cartoon form, until slowly but surely a script emerged. Not only are their notebooks a fantastic insight into how Forkbeard developed productions, but they are also filled with Tim and Chris’s humour. One contains a drawing by Tim of himself as Alice in Wonderland, drawn to convince Chris that having him play Alice was a bad idea. Another contains a to do list that reads: ‘work out what to do and do it’ (very helpful advice). My favourite so far is a paragraph complaining about how hard it is to write a play but never mind because a new notebook will fix all the problems!  

The Forkbeards were all artists, meaning the archive is often very pretty. Penny’s hand painted set designs for The Little Match Girl are a particularly gorgeous example. Alongside Forkbeard Fantasy productions, Tim made animated videos, often about nature and history. These can be found on YouTube – just search Forkbeard Animations – but finding the original paintings brought me great joy. Again, it’s all infused with humour. Tim measures time in ‘grannies’ – 1 granny every 50 years – the only acceptable way to measure historical time in my mind.  

Rummaging through the Forkbeard archive revealed not only paper documents, but also some smaller objects. In one of the boxes was a small bottle of ‘fairy liquid,’ which I’m fairly certain was washing up liquid mixed with glitter. Currently sitting on my desk is a bottle of liquid film; a piece of film negative sitting in some sort of gloopy liquid. These were used as publicity for a production called The Fall of the House of the Usherettes, which revolved around a film hunter from the National Archives searching for the mysterious and illusive liquid film. Unlike the film hunter, I now have a bottle. Now to work out if it requires special storage conditions…

There’s been some less pleasant surprises too. The archive has been stored in a barn for the last few years, resulting in all sorts of odd bits of dirt making their way into the boxes. Coffee had been spilt on one notebook, which had then grown mouldy. We are pretty sure the mould is dead, but just to be sure, the notebook is having a little holiday in our quarantine room. 

I now have a very good overview of what is in the physical archive. But we live in a digital age, and the archive also contains 10 hard drives of various ages. Sadly, you can’t just take the lid off to open these. Cables must be sought, some of which haven’t been sold in years. Software must be downloaded so that old file formats can be opened.  I had to learn what a driver is. And that’s all before you get to the process of trying to create a system to let you open Mac files on a Windows computer…once I’ve managed all that, I’ll let you know what’s on the hard drives! 

By Rosie Smith

“The Theatre Collection has recently been given the archives of a theatre company called Forkbeard Fantasy. My job is to organize the archive, catalogue it, repackage it, and tell the world it exists.” 

This is how I have been describing my new job to family and friends. Most of the time, this is met with the response: “Gosh! Where do you even begin with a job like that?” 

You begin by getting to know the history of the company. One of the quirks of being an archivist is that as you move from project to project you quickly but briefly become an expert in a variety of niche topics. I have previously known a lot about Quaker boarding schools, Yorkshire parish magazines, and the Dutch National Ballet – not that I can remember much of it now. For the duration of this project, I will be an expert in all things Forkbeard Fantasy.

Forkbeard Fantasy was set up by brothers Chris and Tim Britton in 1974. Their first big show, “The Rubber Gods Show,” was performed in village halls across the country, and set the stage for their own brand of absurdist theatre dealing with serious topics. They were also advocates of using street theatre to reach a wider audience. The Great British Square Dance involved four performers (or sometimes three performers and one unsuspecting audience member) attaching their feet to long wooden poles and attempting to follow a serious of dance steps. Chaos inevitably ensued. Personally, I am intrigued by The Statue, which involved two ‘city officials’ placing a statue in a town square, only to have the statue move itself as soon as they were not looking. Again, chaos ensued.  

Forkbeard was also the home of Desmond and Dorothy Fairybreath, a pair of poets who travelled the country in a tiny car full of outlandish props. It took me far longer than it should have to realize that Desmond and Dorothy were Tim and Chris in costume. Later Chris and Tim adopted the personas of Chrissy and Timmy Brittonioni, two eccentric film producers accompanied by their long-suffering assistant, Mr. Jobling. Ed Jobling joined the group as a lighting technician but became a regular performer after being convinced to first appear onstage as a singing mushroom.  

Later in their work, Forkbeard became great advocates of what they called “Breaking the Celluloid Divide.” Characters on stage would interact with characters on film. Actors would “enter” the film by walking behind the screen and appearing on it. This required precise timing from the actors, who were often also playing multiple roles with multiple costume changes.  

Forkbeard were well-known for their use of elaborate props, most of which were created by Forkbeard’s third member, Penny Saunders. Notable props include: a seven-foot-high rabbit costume, an animatronic elderly lady who laughs manically when approached, and Mammon, the God of Money with light up shoes. Having previously lived at the Musuem of Forkbeard, these objects have now made their way to the Theatre Collection, where it falls to me to condition check, package and catalogue them. Wish me luck! 

The next step when approaching a new collection is to create a provisional cataloguing structure to decide how the archive will be arranged intellectually. Then the stage I am at now: opening every box to see what’s inside. If I find items that do not fit my catalogue, the catalogue structure gets amended. If I find things that are in the ‘wrong’ place physically, a note is made so they can be moved later. But mostly, as I go through the collection I laugh at long forgotten jokes and gape at the amazing cartoons and drawings. As I go through the collection in more detail, more stories will emerge and be shared here, so do come back soon to read about my progress!