Hello again, it’s been around a month since my last blog post and I’d like to update you with what’s been going on in my artist-in-residence placement with the Theatre Collection, because lots of amazing things have happened!
When we last left off, I spoke about the discovery of an incredible series of photographs taken by the photographer John Vickers. Upon finding them, I have undertaken extensive periods of research to specifically pinpoint the dates and locations of the work, all of which will serve as groundwork that I can build on artistically when creating my final public installation. Alongside this, I have been working closely with Assistant Keepers Jill Sullivan and Laura Dow, who have provided me with invaluable expertise in the world of archival research and analogue photography. Although carefully catalogued and stored within the safety of the John Vickers archive, the re-discovery of this glass plate series has caused quite a buzz in the Collection as the incredible details and colours of the mould-fill glass plate negatives have come back into the light.
After such an intense and well-needed exploration of the glass plates in the archive, I have now entered into my experimental phase: a period of time where I try out a range of ideas and concepts. In any project that I work on, this period of time is both incredibly exciting but also quite unnerving, especially working with such a wealth of source materials. My time in this placement has really allowed me to reflect on some of my own practices as an artist and to be critical about how I engage with elements like problem solving and generating ideas. It’s something that would not have been nearly as poignant to me if it wasn’t for this connection that I feel for the archival materials that inspire me.
Moving forward into a more hands-on production phase, I’m bringing in ideas and plans to encompass the world within this series of photographs. There are ideas of bold splashes of colour in the form of mould, once on the photographs and now going to be digitally presented in the installation to emphasis its beauty and incredible composition. I plan to bring in projections to display Vickers’ work in a much larger scale and, after careful curation from myself and the incredible video editing talent of another freelance artist, I will show this photography series in a completely new light.
Early concept art of the installation space. Image Credit: Bobby Joynes
I’m incredibly proud and excited of the work that has been going on recently to begin to tie everything on this project together and to reinvigorate glass plate negatives that are over 100 years old, so that you can also see the beautiful images that originally captivated me. I have every assurance that the big ideas that I am bringing to this project can be realised with the support of the incredible technical team in the Wickham Theatre, and the continued guidance from the Theatre Collection.
The last month hasn’t been without its twists and turns, but the journey has been really positive and productive, moving me ever closer towards curating a powerful installation that will be open to the public very soon.
In my last blog for this project, I will reflect on my placement and offer my final thoughts about my work with the Collection. But, in the meantime, I hope to see you at my installation in the near future!
DV or digital video tape is a format that was launched in 1995 and remained popular until the late 2000s. There are a few varieties of this type of tape but I want to discuss the consumer format known as MiniDV.
1 – VHS cassette and Mini DV cassette
DV technology brought a considerable jump in quality from previous camcorder formats such as VHS and Hi8 with more compact and relatively affordable equipment. This made MiniDV a popular choice for arts organisations to document their work so we have a lot of these tapes in our more contemporary theatre and live art collections.
During 2023/24 I worked on the preservation of the audiovisual material in the Rideout collection which includes around 150 MiniDV tapes. Rideout, subtitled Creative Arts for Rehabilitation was established in 1999 by Saul Hewish and Chris Johnston to develop innovative, arts-based approaches to working with prisoners and staff within UK prisons.
The condition of the tapes indicated that they had been stored fairly well with no signs of physical damage or mould which can often be a problem when tapes are stored in conditions with varying temperature and relative humidity.
The process of preserving the audiovisual material on DV tapes involves copying the digital information encoded on the tape to a digital file on a computer. This differs from the process for analogue tape such as VHS which requires a digitisation process i.e. analogue to digital conversion. Copying the data from tape gives the optimal audiovisual quality and also has the benefit of retaining metadata such as the time/date of the recording, camera settings used, and error information. The tape must be played back in a suitable DV playback machine aka “deck” or camcorder in real time and the digital information on the tape can be copied directly to a computer using a Firewire cable connection or IEEE 1394 to give its correct technical name.
2 – Firewire (IEEE 1394) cable
The first challenge is that Firewire technology is obsolete. It used to be a fairly standard interface, especially in Macintosh computers but now you need to install a Firewire card to your computer or use some kind of converter cable. We use the first option.
The second challenge is that playback decks or camcorders for DV tapes are no longer manufactured so second-hand units must be purchased. The price for professional decks is rising as the demand for preserving DV based material increases. We currently have four pro decks which all need occasional servicing to keep them running properly. Engineers familiar with this type of equipment are also getting harder to find.
3 – Sony DSR-1500P DVCAM deck
So we have our deck, firewire cable and computer – this is the basic equipment needed to copy DV tapes. I also use a video monitor, amplifier and speakers to monitor the off-tape signal directly during playback.
Another challenge I discovered with this particular collection of tapes was that a fair proportion of them had been recorded in long play (LP) mode. None of my four professional DV decks are long play compatible so it is not possible to make a good quality digital copy of those tapes with them. There are a couple of professional decks that will play long play tapes but they are extremely hard to find and are accordingly very expensive. The solution was straight forward – most Mini DV camcorders will play Long Play tapes back well and are still an affordable option (£100 or less on eBay).
One of our main challenges with the tapes themselves is that they are prone to errors caused by signal dropout of video and audio from dirty or damaged tape. DV uses a technique called error concealment to try to disguise this dropout – this can include replacing the affected area with the same corresponding pixels of the previous frame or next frame (most common). Sometimes this strategy works so well that it is not noticeable in the resulting file, especially with static frame shots that contain a high degree of visual similarity from one frame to the next. However, when there is lots of movement, error concealment can cause the image to appear glitchy or blocky.
4 – Error concealment causing blocking effect on person’s face
Audio errors can result in jarring clicks or loss of signal. Sometimes fast forwarding or rewinding a tape can remove errors, on other occasions manual cleaning of the video heads may be required. Even where the errors cannot be eliminated by these methods, tapes often don’t behave consistently when played back – they can display errors over certain sections and on subsequent plays fail to display the same errors or show errors in different sections of the tape. This behaviour can actually be used to our advantage in creating the best preservation copy possible which I will explain shortly.
In order to copy the information from the tapes to create our digital preservation files we need suitable software. Most Non-Linear Editing (NLE) software packages including Adobe’s popular Premiere Pro no longer support tape-based workflows. There are some older freeware options but these are no longer technically supported and can be unstable or unavailable for certain operating systems. Thankfully, the international community of video archivists and engineers has come to the rescue (literally) with a versatile free open-source solution called DVRescue. Open-Source means that end users and developers have the freedom to study, improve and redistribute the software.
5 – Detail of DVRescue capture interface
DVrescue supports many of the commonly used professional DV playback decks and its capture interface displays timecodes, time & date of recording as well as a real-time graph of errors detected during the capture. Once your tape capture is completed the software has an analysis tool that pinpoints the position and nature of each error so that you can examine the effect on the video/audio in your file. Finally, there is the option to package the captured raw DV stream into a suitable file container – we use Matroska which is an open standard media container commonly used in video archives.
There are additional features in DVRescue that can be accessed via the command line, most useful of these for me is the merge function. This allows you to take two or more separate passes of the capture and combine them. The process takes advantage of the inconsistency of error display on subsequent plays, mentioned earlier, to return one file containing the best frames from each pass. By capturing short sections of video over known error regions and merging these with your master capture you can create the optimal preservation file.
6 – DVRescue merge command
So far so good, we have a set-up that can optimise our DV captures and produce greatly improved results from previous workflows. However…remember those Long Play recordings I mentioned earlier? The ones we have to play back with a camcorder? Well the camcorder is not supported by DVRescue so we have to use an alternative capture software. I use a discontinued software called Scenalyzer for Windows, this doesn’t have any of the sophisticated error reporting or analysis tools present in DVRescue but it does allow us to capture the tape in AVI format and retain the recording’s metadata. The files can then be analysed using a standalone piece of open-source software called DVAnalyzer. Errors can be identified and located and further corrective tape passes can be made. The resulting files must be converted to a raw DV stream before they can be merged with DVRescue to produce a best quality master copy. This conversion is done using an open-source command line tool – FFMpeg. We can then merge the files as before and re-package the master to a Matroska container.
So we have our workflow for producing preservation copies of these digital tapes. This is all great as long as your tapes are behaving but amongst any collection of DV tapes you will inevitably find problems.
Tapes that are dirty. Playback may be improved by cleaning – I do this by using one of my decks that I can open up to access the tape path, I then hold a special cleaning swab lightly against the tape and fast forward and rewind it. This isn’t always successful but has definitely improved the performance of some tapes.
Tapes causing “head clogs” – within seconds of playback the picture and sound will drop out due to particles shedding from the tape. The deck will not play back any tape until the heads have been manually cleaned. Cleaning and sometimes “baking” i.e. heating the tape to 54°C for a few hours) can improve performance. Where the head clogs are severe, tapes will have to be captured in sections with manual cleaning of the heads in between – a laborious and time-consuming process.
Damaged cassettes – the cassette shell may be damaged and prevent it from playing back or even being accepted by a deck. For these, the tape reels can be removed and transferred into a replacement cassette shell to achieve playback. Due to the size of the tapes this can be a fiddly process.
All that remains after our digital preservation copies have been produced is to create access or viewing copies for each file. These are smaller, more manageable files suitable for easy playback or sharing. I create these using a Non-Linear Editing (NLE) Software e.g. Premiere Pro or Shotcut which allows me to make adjustments for optimal viewing before creating the access copy file. All the digital files are then securely copied to and stored on the university’s Research Data Storage Facility.
I’m happy to report that I’ve managed to produce digital preservation copies of every DV tape in the Rideout collection. Some are perfect with no errors whatsoever, the majority have a few minor errors which may or may not be noticeable and just one has substantial errors throughout, although most of the contents of the tape can still be viewed and listened to. A fair bit of painstaking work was carried out to preserve the collection but I believe the additional effort required to get the optimal results is well worth it. Overcoming the challenge of obsolescent technology to preserve and do justice to these unique cultural works and their creators brings its own rewards.
Nigel Bryant – Audiovisual Digitisation Officer, University of Bristol Theatre Collection
The Kevin Elyot Award is given annually to support a writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, where the archive of the playwright Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) is housed. 2024 is the tenth anniversary of Elyot’s death, and the thirtieth anniversary of My Night with Reg, his most famous play. In response to my time in the archive as the recipient of the 2023 Award, I have written a series of articles on Elyot’s six original plays. Here is the first, on his debut Coming Clean. (I have also written a general reflection on Elyot here.)
An actor writes a play
Kevin Elyot began his playwriting career at the Bush, London’s famous new-writing theatre, where as an actor he appeared in several productions between 1976 and 1984. Circa 1981, the Bush’s co-artistic director Simon Stokes suggested to Elyot that he write a play, which, Elyot told Plays and Players in March 1983, he did while
ill with hepatitis. I don’t know whether you’ve ever had it, but you just have to sit around until you get better. I had nothing much else to do, so I wrote the play.1
Entitled Cosy upon delivery, then Clean Living during its development at the Bush, this tale of infidelity in gay relationships premiered as Coming Clean on 3 November 1982.2 David Hayman’s production played to packed houses, though reviews were mixed: here polite, there homophobic. The New Statesman claimed that were the play’s all-male love triangle ‘translated into heterosexual terms,’ it would be ‘universally shrugged off as psychologically and theatrically humdrum.’ The Mail on Sunday prophesied that ‘in time, it will be recognised as the first mature play about homosexuality.’3
The text attracted the attention of the legendary play agent Peggy Ramsay, who subsequently represented Elyot for a short time, and it won the 1982 Samuel Beckett Award.4
Handbill for the original production (University of Bristol Theatre Collection, KE/3/5/4)
The play: monogamy v. open relationships
At the heart of Coming Clean is a ‘happily married’ gay couple in North London, Tony and Greg. They have an ‘open’ relationship:
TONY: […] infidelity is a fact of life. We both enjoy the occasional one-night stand. We don’t do it all the time, and we’d never bring anyone back if the other one was here. Perhaps it’s not ideal. But I think it’s realistic. I’d much rather have that than be deceitful to one another – pretending we were faithful when we weren’t.5
This arrangement is tested when Tony engages a cleaner named Robert. Greg and Robert have an affair, and after Tony walks in on them having sex, Greg announces to Tony that he loves Robert – and Tony. For Tony, ‘the whole point’ of their arrangement ‘is that we shouldn’t have to lie to each other’; but for Greg, ‘[t]he whole point is that we should stick together! And if that means we have to lie to each other, then that’s fine by me!’6
The central question is encapsulated in one of Elyot’s notebooks, held in his archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection:
[…] theory of an open relationship + the practice of it – the two don’t mix + leads to destruction.7
Ultimately, Tony admits to Greg that Greg is the only man he wants, but Greg can’t abide anything so ‘domestic’:
GREG: […] I still love you. I still want us to be together. But I’m not suddenly going to ask you to lay out my pipe and slippers. And I doubt that Robert will suddenly disappear into thin air.8
In the poignant final scene we gather that Tony has been unable to accept being one of Greg’s two objects of love. He has a heart-to-heart with Jürgen, a German pick-up – but neither speaks much of the other’s language. As Schubert plays on the stereo, Jürgen, himself hurt by some relationship, stammers, ‘Und … now … no more love … never!’ ‘You can’t say that,’ Tony cries, ‘I can see why you should but … no, you can’t say that.’9
Elyot’s casting ideas. Clive Mantle played Jürgen (not Jörgen) in the original production. (UBTC, KE/3/5/2, 4 of 5, p. 29)
Elyot’s voice
Like many first plays, Coming Clean feels autobiographical; Elyot admitted that he could not act in it because it ‘would have been too close to the bone.’10 Yet the play is a statement of intent. There is a sense of autobiography in all of Elyot’s writing, and his debut sounds the personal, Proustian notes of friendship, loneliness, sex, survival, music and memory that he will sound throughout his career. It has the delicate balance between comedy and tragedy seen in his later plays (he described his second play My Night with Reg as a ‘serious comedy’).11 Tony is the first in a series of guarded, obsessive, lovelorn and lonely gay protagonists. And, although not as formally inventive as Reg, The Day I Stood Still (1998) and Mouth to Mouth (2001) – with these plays Elyot became a master at the manipulation of stage time, in J.B. Priestley’s league – Coming Clean skilfully employs dramatic techniques that Elyot will utilise again and again. Take, for example, his use of music to complicate the central dramatic question.
At the opening, the audience hears something clichéd: the famous Adagio of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet. Before he learns of Greg’s affair with the cleaner, Tony confesses to his friend William that Greg has been distant. William tells Tony to prepare a ‘really romantic evening,’ and ‘when [Greg] walks in, have that piece of music playing – you know, the dreary piece, the one that you both call “our tune” … the Barbirolli …’ Tony corrects him: ‘Barber.’12
Lots of couples share an ‘our tune,’ and William’s inability to remember the composer, and his characterisation of the music as ‘dreary’, immediately destabilises Tony and Greg’s.
The next scene begins with Greg and the cleaner Robert having it off – while the Adagio plays on the stereo. ‘Our tune’ has ironically – cruelly – become the soundtrack to an affair. To intensify Greg’s betrayal – sex and music – and to foreshadow that Tony and Greg’s open relationship cannot survive it, Elyot then reveals that Greg hates the Barber: ‘Would you mind if I turned this off? It’s like a fucking funeral.’13
After Tony and Greg argue the play’s central question in the wake of Tony’s discovery of the affair, Tony goes to the record collection to find something to play. When he sees that the Barber he wants is already on the turntable, there is a moment between the doomed couple. ‘Obviously, a popular choice,’ Tony says, ruefully.14
‘Our tune’ is dead.
Elyot’s notebooks reveal just how dramaturgically calculated all this is; how alive he was, even at the beginning of his writing career, to the power of subtext and allusion. Tony’s sentimental attachment to, and Greg’s rejection of, the Barber symbolise the opposing positions in the play’s argument. Contrasting Barber with the more radical and tragic figure of Schubert (whose music accompanies the final scene), Elyot wrote, ‘Barber is a musical reactionary, which fits Tony’s position (esp. as Barber was gay).’ The play’s ‘archetypal clash’ between ‘a socialist theory’ (represented by Greg, advocate of the open relationship) and a ‘reactionary lifestyle’ (represented by Tony, who cannot curb a desire for monogamy – a conservatism ‘EMBODIED IN HIRING A CLEANER FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!!)’ is reflected by the couple’s attitudes towards the Barber – by the ways the play interrogates the Barber as a cliché.15
It’s not the point that an audience should be conscious of such layering, but that the layering should work upon the audience’s unconscious, and deepen the somewhat shallow scenario. Elyot started as he meant to go on: such attention to detail, such allusions to musical and literary worlds beyond the world of play, are hallmarks of his writing.
Coming Clean published by Faber (1984) and Nick Hern Books (2017)
Critical homophobia
Where Coming Clean stands on the clash between lifestyles – the ‘scene’ of clubs and one-night stands on the one hand and monogamy on the other – is unclear. Elyot himself said that ‘there’s no positive answer’ to the clash, and Tony, the play’s most sympathetic character, is a fascinatingly ambiguous protagonist: Elyot’s descriptor for him as ‘reactionary’ is hardly complimentary.16 The clash is Elyot’s dramatic provocation, his specifically queer question – though many of the original reviewers were incapable of seeing this.
Irving Wardle in The Times is worth quoting at length:
My test for homosexual plots is to see how they respond to heterosexual conversion. You can get three possible results: either the story will ring as true with women as with men; or it will be so specifically homosexual as to resist the change; or it may be unmasked as a parasitic copy of a heterosexual model.
So far as plotting is concerned, Coming Clean belongs to the third category; and I resent the force of the Gay Lib movement in getting stage space for plays that would stand no chance whatever if they featured triangles of debs and stockbrokers. Mr Elyot’s chart of ‘contemporary sexual mores’ takes you straight back to the world of commercially packaged sex comedy.17
Putting aside the sexism (no such thing as gay women in Wardle’s World, or gay stockbrokers, or female stockbrokers), as well as the telling choice of the word ‘conversion,’ Wardle of course put the play into the wrong category of his three. So far as plotting and everything else about Coming Clean are concerned, it belongs to his second category, because this play by a gay playwright about gay men explores the ‘conflict between theory and practice’ in open relationships as a gay conflict.18 It doesn’t mean the play isn’t universal: Elyot recognised that his theme is explored in AMidsummer Night’s Dream, which, he wrote, ‘beautifully expresses the argument between ideal + actual, love + lust, the appeal of marriage v. the appeal of promiscuity.’19
But to put Coming Clean into his second category would have required Wardle to remove heterosexual spectacles, to do something we now take for granted: give a queer play a queer reading. He would have had to interrogate the cruising in the play (‘I just popped into the cottage for a tea-time quickie’) as gay.20 The music (Barber, Village People, Voggue) as gay. The queer-bashing (William is assaulted by ‘a bit of rough trade’) as gay.21 The sex (sodomy, blow jobs, rimming) as gay. William’s hilariously camp diction (‘Loose? I expected to find half of London up there [a man’s arse]. Do you want a jammy doughnut?’) as gay.22 Tony’s inability to reconcile his feelings with Greg’s world-view, and his characterisation of parts of the gay scene as ‘disgusting, unamusing, unentertaining, mindless, sexist, repressive drivel’, as politically charged gay disputes.23
In fact, Elyot resisted the term ‘gay writer’. He told the journalist David Benedict at the time of The Day I Stood Still, ‘Of course I am a writer, and I am gay, but that kind of characterisation is a way of belittling the writing.’25 To Time Out, he said he wanted The Day I Stood Still to be judged as a play, not a gay play:
I think that sort of categorisation is very restricting. I don’t want to be compared to other gay writers, I want to be compared to other writers. I’ve noticed recently that the ‘gay writer’ nomenclature has tended to disappear – I know this sounds terribly politically incorrect – but I find that a bit of a relief, not because I’m not proud of being gay, but I think one is taken more seriously.26
Perhaps reviews like Wardle’s still smarted – even if, in 1983, he had fought back rather magnificently:
If he had thought it through it would have been an even more radical play if it had been about a heterosexual couple – because I’ve not seen a straight play where you have the partners sleeping around, then a third person coming along and the husband saying, well, not only am I going to continue sleeping around but you’ve also got to accept that I’m in love with this other woman and I also want to continue my marriage with you. What you get in straight plays is a third person breaking it up and then an ensuing fidelity with the new person, which is not what my play was about.27
Bush programme (UBTC, KE/3/5/4)
A remarkable letter
Wardle’s review is, of course, little more than tedious bigotry, and in the archive is a response to Coming Clean of much greater interest to any student of Elyot, or of the history of British playwriting.
In his Introduction to a collection of his plays, Elyot says that Peggy Ramsay, the famous play agent who read countless first plays over her career, was in tears at the Bush when she saw the final scene between Tony and Jürgen: ‘That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.’28
What Elyot does not mention is a remarkable letter Ramsay wrote to him before she visited the Bush but after she’d read the play, in which she acknowledged his competence as a playwright, and the sexual frankness in his writing, but reproached him for a ‘holding back over exactly how people behave in these circumstances.’ She saw in Elyot a restraint, a cowardice, and in a handwritten addendum, eulogised Thomas Mann for his preparedness, presumably in Death in Venice,
to plunge into the abyss of filth & deviation, & the result was a kind of purity, since NOTHING IS DISGUSTING – the only disgusting thing is NOT to face the truth; right down to the lowest depths! This takes great courage, & you need to explore it.
Ramsay did not think Coming Clean a good play, did not think it art. Her letter, entirely encouraging, was a cri de cœur to the first-time playwright: ‘if you write another Play about homosexuality I beg you to make it deeper.’29
How to survive a plague
In the 254th edition of Gay News, dated 25 November 1982, there is a review by Roger Baker of Coming Clean that takes a similar line to Ramsay. Baker praises Elyot for his plotting and characterisations, and condemns Wardle for missing the point:
the handling and resolution of the crisis are expressed in terms which are uniquely gay. Debs and stockbrokers, on or off stage do not, indeed cannot, talk, act, think or see their lives as Greg and Tony do.
But Baker says that ‘ultimately [Coming Clean] is slight, lacks weight.’ Like Ramsay, he encourages the first-time playwright ‘to extend his undoubted ability and vision next time.’30
In the 255th edition of Gay News, dated 9 December 1982, there is an article titled ‘DISEASE FEARS HIT UK: Prepare for shocks in ’83’:
BRITISH GAY MEN had better prepare themselves for some major shocks in the months ahead. They will be under a double-edged attack from both disease and media coverage if recent American experience is repeated here.31
It would take Elyot twelve years to write his second play My Night with Reg. It was finally produced in 1994, and though it shares many qualities with Coming Clean, it is a much more sophisticated play. In it, Elyot faces the truth and extends his vision, just as Ramsay and Gay News had hoped he would. But its subject is tragic: the lives and deaths of gay men during the age of Aids.
In 2004, Elyot looked back on the final scene of Coming Clean and said, ‘it has an elegiac quality – in retrospect, almost a sense of foreboding.’32 There were no revivals during the worst of the Aids years, or during Elyot’s lifetime, though at a 1997 gala to celebrate 25 years of the Bush (at which I was present) a scene was performed by the original cast. ‘I was pleased to discover that it still packs a punch,’ Elyot said in 1998, even if it felt to him ‘a sort of period piece’.33
In 2017, the play was successfully revived at the King’s Head Theatre, London, and as I write this, there is a revival at Turbine Theatre, London. Of the King’s Head revival, Exeunt Magazine found the play’s central question – ‘Can you ever really have your cake and fuck it (and the rest of the bakery)’ – ‘as current now as it was 35 years ago.’34
An autobiographical first play that announced a major talent – a play about gay sex and infidelity that premiered before everything changed for gay men – had survived both critical homophobia and Aids, and its pre-Aids question had become pertinent again.
This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
1 Kevin Elyot, Introduction to Four Plays (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), pp. ix-x; Elyot to Christopher Edwards, ‘More Promising Playwrights’, Plays and Players, March 1983, pp. 23-4 (p. 24), University of Bristol Theatre Collection (UBTC), KE/3/5/15.
24 Intriguingly, Wardle wrote in 1973 a play called The Houseboy with a scenario not dissimilar to Elyot’s; its television adaptation was broadcast a few months before Coming Clean’s premiere.
25 Elyot to David Benedict, ‘National debut? Time to put the record, er, straight’, Independent, 14 January 1998.
26 Elyot to Jane Edwardes, ‘Life after Reg’, Time Out [n.d.: interview at the time of The Day I Stood Still, 1988], UBTC, KE/3/23/5.
Hello, my name is Bobby and I’m a third year joint honours student in the Department of Theatre and Performance, and the Department of Film and TV here at the University of Bristol. As a part of my final semester with the University, I have chosen to work on a unit called ‘professional development in theatre and performance’; a unit that is designed for students to connect with organisations outside of the academic context of the course, and to learn to develop soft skills relevant to working in industry as an artist and creative. After conversing with the brilliant staff at the Theatre Collection, I chose to work as a Artist-in-Residence with them. The project aims to create a performative installation work at the end of an archive-based research and experimentation period.
As a third year Theatre and Film student, I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to the archive in previous units and have gained an understanding for both how their systems work, but also the process of thought required to interrogate material and to carefully piece together the histories of productions, projects and people. A previous project titled ‘Awaiting its Fate’ was performed last year at the Bristol Old Vic and was designed by myself. Aimed at blurring the history of the theatre into the buildings’ foundations, I worked closely with archival materials to inform a soundscape of an auction for the building in 1942 and the final performance allowed audiences to imagine that they were listening through the walls of the BOV at events that happened in the 40s. It was the first time where I had found the value and interest of the cross section between archival materials and technology; the blurred lines and creative possibilities that it holds as a way of reinvigorating once forgotten material, but also showcasing to others the capabilities that the archive itself holds.
Production image of Awaiting its Fate. Image Credit: Bobby Joynes
My own passion in theatre is rooted in set and AV design. I have experimented with technologically mediated spaces and performances that utilised elements like projection and three dimensional audial soundscapes as a way of world building but also informing creative choices to highlights relationships, themes and motifs. I strongly feel that a playful perspective on bringing technology into performance is a brilliantly versatile way of doing this, while also allowing that traditional ‘magic’ held at the theatre to continue.
Before I pursue a postgraduate degree in performance design, I’m taking time to broaden my understanding of how we can use the past as a way of informing our future artistic expressions, and how archives such as the theatre collection aren’t just valuable for researchers, but also for active and freelance artists. During the first few months on my placement, I have taken time to dig deep into materials otherwise unknown to me.
Beginning with an interest and past experience in analogue photography, I began there, exploring key individuals that may have led lives as photographers. This is where I discovered John Vickers, an experimentalist photographer right from the age of 12 when he picked up his first ever camera at a church jumble sale.
John Vickers, self-portrait. Image credit: University of Bristol Theatre Collection (JV/1/6/2/127)
The life and work of Vickers is extensive, and the Theatre Collection’s archive of his prints and negatives drew a kind of curiosity out of me, and led to my choice to centre my installation around his work. Namely, there is a fascinating collection of glass print negatives from early in his life that left me speechless when they were uncovered. Described in the Theatre Collection catalogue as 27 monochromatic exposures, what I discovered was something far more amazing. As I begin my experimentation process with these prints, I’m excited to not be able to see what unique twists and turns are in my creation process. It’s a brilliant example as to why rabbit holes in the archive aren’t so bad after all, in fact they can sometimes be quite the opposite and find you somewhere you would never expect.
Keep checking the Theatre Collection’s blog page for updates about this exciting project!
Lucy Allen, Archive Assistant at the Theatre Collection, discusses two recent professional visits to Bristol heritage institutions.
In the four months since Joanna Gauld and I have joined the team as Archive Assistants, we have already been extremely lucky to be invited on two visits: the first, to the Conservation Department of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, and the second, to the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection (BECC) at Bristol Archives.
Conservation at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
In December we were kindly invited by Eleanor Hasler, paper conservator at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, to a tour of the museum’s conservation department. This was a fascinating insight into the world of conservation, as we visited labs dedicated to objects, paintings and paper conservation, and were able to peek at the projects underway in each.
Of particular interest was a project to conserve an enormous album of building plans belonging to Bristol Archives – one of more than 300 in the collection – dating from 1911-1912. The album included plans for many well-known Bristol buildings, among them plans for the Bristol Hippodrome designed by Frank Matcham. We listened to a talk from Aina Berenguer, the conservator who had been working on the project, explaining the four months of work she had put into the project – documenting, cleaning, flattening and repairing the plans.
Aina Berenguer, the conservator of the building plans. Photograph credit: Daly, R., 2023, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.
Other highlights we saw were a number of Japanese woodcut prints, with Eleanor Hasler providing some insight into the creation of these artworks, their historical context and how they came to be at the museum. Eleanor explained how at the time of production, the durability of the woodcuts meant they could be reused to make countless cheap prints. These now highly valuable prints were once worth about the same as a bowl of rice!
A final treat was a trip down to the art store beneath the museum, where we witnessed the hundreds of paintings, sculptures and other artworks held there by the museum when they are not on display. It was fascinating to how the museum ensures that these artworks are stored responsibly, and protects them for a future date when they will be brought back into the public eye.
British Empire and Commonwealth Collection
Our second trip followed in early February, when alongside colleagues from Special Collections, we were invited by archivist Jayne Pucknell to visit the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection at Bristol Archives.
Jayne explained the background to the collection, and how it came to be held by Bristol Archives after the closure of the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in 2008. She had selected a few key items from the collection for us to view, and explained to us the history behind these pieces. These included a selection of photographs taken by J A Green (Jonathan Adagogo Green), born in the late 19th century and believed to be the first professional photographer of Nigerian birth. Jayne pointed out Green’s strategic use of initials in his business proceedings, which obscured his Nigerian identity and played a large part in his ability to work with both colonial and indigenous clientele.
Palm nut cracking, New Calabar by J. A. Green, c.1900 (ref: 2003/174/1/24). Photograph credit: Bristol Archives: British Empire & Commonwealth Collection.
Whilst the J. A. Green photographs are an invaluable insight into life in colonial Nigeria from an indigenous perspective, many items in the collection depict life from the standpoint of the coloniser. For example, we also saw a late 19th century album of photos taken by a plantation owner in Jamaica. Many of these photographs depicted local Jamaicans in posed scenes, and often drew upon reductive stereotypes in order to appeal to a colonial audience.
Eight boys in a field eating watermelons, c.1860 (ref: 2005/001/151/1). Photograph credit: Bristol Archives: British Empire & Commonwealth Collection.
We also viewed a 20th century album of paintings by a woman living in a Prisoner of War camp under Japanese rule in China. These scenes gave the misleading impression of a pleasant environment and of positive relationships between prisoners and guards. The reason for this became clear to us when Jayne pointed out that, had the paintings instead depicted the harsh realities of prisoner life, they would undoubtedly have been confiscated. Photography within the camp was forbidden; sketching and painting were the only options available to record the experience, even if they must be done from a falsely cheery perspective. One sketch, depicting a guard from the camp, hinted at the harsher reality, reading: “pestered me to do his portrait, was advised to do so less something bad might happen to me”.
Final thoughts
These visits were both wonderful experiences as they allowed us to gain insight into the collections, work environments and roles of our colleagues within the heritage industry. It’s always such a treat to see “behind the scenes” and to hear about collections directly from the people who work so closely with them. We are extremely thankful to Eleanor Hasler, Jayne Pucknell, and the teams at Bristol Museums and Bristol Archives for generously inviting us to visit their sites and engage with their collections.
