Theatre Archive Project Blog

Binkie Beaumont & West End Theatre

2008-05-28T20:06:14+01:00

Binkie Beaumont was just one of the great characters, and there is always the thing about… you say, ‘I’m going to see Binkie Beaumont’ or go up into the office because you saw him as well for some part or something at the West End and you had to get into this lift. You had to get into this tiny lift, and quite often… well, I’m not sure we should say all this really, it might sound homophobic or something but it isn’t. […] Sometimes you got squeezed into this tiny lift with someone you didn’t particularly want to… Do you remember the film The Producers? […] There is a wonderful scene in that when the terribly gay producer and his minion has to go down and pick them up and they have to go up in this tiny lift and it all gets… I was quite a young actor then, and you had to be quite careful because you often ended up with hands on your knees and all that sort of stuff. You were a prey to some nice charming chaps in the business and when I first went I was quite innocent - ‘Oh aren’t they so nice and friendly’ but you start to realise quite soon, ‘This is not quite right.’ You just ignored all that, but it was quite tricky. So Binkie Beaumont was just famous [for this sort of thing], and, of course Terence Rattigan the great writer, there was a sort of coat room… but they were fabulous people, I mean, they loved theatre, that was thing: they loved theatre and they ran it really well and were beautiful people because they cared about the theatre.

(An edited extract from an interview with Anthony Verner on 19 April 2007, conducted by Eleanor Carter)

- How far does Binkie Beaumont's sexuality impact on our understanding of the theatre in the 1950s?

Harold Pinter's Archive

2007-12-17T13:46:50+00:00

The British Library has bought Harold Pinter's archive, of over 150 boxes full of material, for £1.1 million. This collection includes correspondence between the Nobel Prize winning playwright and other leading figures in Post-War literature, such as Noel Coward, David Mamet, Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett.

The collection has been on loan to the British Library since 1993, but this acquisition has ended speculation that Pinter's archive could follow David Hare and Tom Stoppard's to the University of Texas in Austin, which has been briskly purchasing collections form Post-War literary figures. Jamie Andrews, head of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library said, "There are issues around some archives going to American institutions and we have been working very hard to fly the flag and encourage British writers to leave their archives in this country."

The archive spands Pinter's lengthy career, from photos of his appearances in school productions of Shakespeare and the unpublished autobiography of his youth, The Queen of all the Faeries, through to a draft of the poem he read out on his collection of the Nobel Prize in 2005. The collection is in the process of being catalgoued by the British Library and should be accessible early in 2008. An exhibition of scripts, sound recordings and letters will go on display at the British Library from January 11th.

Carol Souet, the Director of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, who contributed over £200,000 to the archive's acquisition, said, "Harold Pinter is already an integral part of our dramatic and literary heritage. The National Heritage Memorial Fund grant is particularly special as it is the first time we have helped save works of a living artist. This unique collection is now safe for future generations to enjoy and learn from."

Noel Coward & Angry Young Men

2007-12-04T11:19:15+00:00

7th May 1959

I went with Doycie to A Taste of Honey, a squalid little piece about squalid and unattractive people. It has been written by an angry young Lady of nineteen and is a great success. Personally I found it fairly dull.

The high and low spot of my London visit was the opening night of John Osborne’s musical Paul Slickey at the Palace. I went with Blackie Mills and never in all my theatrical experience have I seen anything so appalling. Appalling from every point of view. Bad lyrics, dull music, idiotic, would-be-daring dialogue – interminable long-winded scenes about nothing and above all the amateurishness and ineptitude, such bad taste that one wanted to hide one’s head… I fear Mr John Osborne is not so talented as he had been made out to be. Look Back in Anger had vitality and too much invective. George Dillon, his first play, written in collaboration with someone else, was his best and even that had a week last act. The Entertainer was verbose, unreal and pretentious and this is unspeakable… destructive vituperation is too easy. I cannot believe that this writer, the first of all the ‘Angry Young Men,’ was ever really angry at all. Dissatisfied perhaps and certainly envious and, to a degree, talented, but no more than that. No leader of thought and ideas, a conceited, calculating young man blowing a little trumpet.

(Noel Coward, Journals, original manuscript)

'Lost' Ayckbourn Play Discovered

2007-10-29T15:24:48+00:00

The final 'lost' Alan Ayckbourn play, thought destroyed more than 40 years ago, has been found. Love After All, the playwright's second play, has been found through the efforts of the Stephen Joseph Theatre's Archive and curators from the British Library Department of Manuscripts. The discovery is highly significant as, following several other discoveries during the past year, Ayckbourn's 70 play collection is now complete for the first time.

Simon Murgatroyd, archivist of The Bob Watson Archive at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, said the significant find highlighted the importance of the work of theatre archives. "Many of the early Ayckbourn plays were not kept and were lost, presumed destroyed, leaving significant gaps in the play canon. During the past year, The Bob Watson Archive has made several exciting discoveries but there was never an expectation of finding the final play, Love After All. Now thanks to the efforts of the Theatre Archive Project, the Ayckbourn play canon has been restored."

Love After All was discovered as part of research by the Theatre Archive Project to investigate the archives of the Lord Chamberlain. The play had been listed under Ayckbourn's early pseudonym 'Roland Allen'. The play is loosely based on The Barber Of Seville and features a father trying to marry off his daughter to a rich heir. Despite succeeding in his plot, true love overcomes the setback to prevail in the end.

Jamie Andrews, Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, comments: 'It is thrilling to have uncovered this early playof Alan Ayckbourn, which illustrates the richness of the Lord Chamberlain's archive, and suggests how much more there still remains to be uncovered within the vast collection. We're delighted to have been able to provide a digital copy to complete the collection in Scarborough, and to be able to make the original accessible as part of our wonderful collection of living dramatists' archives at the British Library'.

For further information or images please call Catriona Finlayson on 0207 412 7115 or email catriona.finlayson@bl.uk

Stephen Joseph Theatre Press Office: Lizzie Glazier on 01723 370540 or
e-mail press@sjt.uk.com

Notes

1. Love After All premiered at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1959. As with all plays until 1968, it had to be submitted for approval to the Lord Chamberlain's office but no-one believed that copy had been kept

2. The discovery comes on the back of a rewarding year for The Bob Watson Archive following several other discoveries. Alan's fifth play Christmas V Mastermind was returned to the archive after being found in a Scarborough loft, the original scripts for Relatively Speaking and Family Circles were returned by private collectors and the Archive discovered a long-forgotten revue celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee hidden away in the back of a filing cabinet.

3. Alan Ayckbourn has written 70 plays since he began playwriting in 1959 and Love After All is one of six of the original eight plays which were never published or performed again. As a result of thisfind, The Bob Watson Archive is the only place in the world to hold a complete collection of all 70 of Alan Ayckbourn's plays alongside his
revues, children's plays and other writing.

4. The pseudonym Roland Allen, derived from Ayckbourn's first name and the surname of his first wife

5. The British Library holds the archives of the Lord Chamberlain, comprising every play submitted to the theatre censor from 1824-1968. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world's greatest research libraries. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and
scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation. It
includes: books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Further information is available on the Library's website at www.bl.uk

5. The Theatre Archive project (2003-2008) aims to reinvestigate British theatre history during the period 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both the theatregoer and the practitioner. The Project Team includes staff from the British Library and the University of Sheffield, and the Project is also sponsored by the Arts andHumanities Research Council (AHRC).

Camus and co

2007-10-23T17:06:34+01:00

An interesting revival yesterday afternoon–in a new, free translation- of Albert Camus’s ‘Les Justes’ (translated as ‘The Just’), at the White Bear Pub Theatre, Kennington. Howls of despair rising from the bar next door (Lewis Hamilton’s quest for the F1 title seemed to be going in the same direction as our rugby team in Paris on Saturday) mingled with cries of anguish on-stage, as we follow a cell of Socialist Revolutionary terrorists planning for –and assuming the consequences of –the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch (uncle of Tsar Nicholas II) in Moscow in 1905. The play was first staged in Paris in 1949 at the Théâtre Hébertot, and in London in May 1956 at the Tower Theatre, Canonbury.

By my count, this is the second Camus to be staged in London in as many months, and it follows from the excellent- and acutely relevant- ‘Morts sans sépulture’ (‘Men without Shadows’, by Sartre, first performed in Paris in 1946, and in the UK a year later) at the Finborough in June. Could it be that the surge of politically committed, realist post-WWII French plays – of which J-PS and Camus are the epitome- were not swept away for good – as once supposed- by the overwhelming (and contradictory) currents of the absurdist and Brechtian models?

Well, yes, most of them in fact were. Very few of the writers who packed French theatres in the 40s and 50s are still performed, or even discussed, in France, let alone in England. For sure, the odd survivor clings on: The Gate produced another excellent revival of ‘Les Justes’ in 2001, David Greig’s version of ‘Caligula’ found favour with audiences and Evening Standard judges at the Donmar in 2003, and Richard Eyre’s first project after leaving the NT was ‘Les Mains Sales’ (translated by Eyre as ‘The Novice’, aka ‘Dirty Hands’ or ‘Crime Passionel’) at the Almeida. But many others have been less fortunate. J-PS is rarely performed, ‘Huis Clos’ excepted, much of Camus remains forgotten, as does work of many once in-demand writers such as Armand Salacrou. Last year I translated a play by the Communist writer Georges Soria, placing his ‘La Peur’ (‘Fear and Silence’, 1954) in the context of (then) contemporary films such as ‘Good Night & Good Luck’, of the unquestioning conformity being demanded by the Bush administration in the name of ‘Patriotism’ as part of the War on Terror, and its recycling of redundant images and arguments from the Cold War. I may have gone a bit far in making claims for Soria as the French Arthur Miller (a concept as silly as imagining there could ever be, say, an American Sacha Guitry); but in working on the play, I found the force of its arguments still compelling, even if the means of its expression now seems naive.

Soria is a fine example of a writer whose theatrical aesthetic was seen to have lagged behind his philosophical and political assumptions (assuming such a distinction can be conceived). Already, in the mid-1950s, critic Morvan Lebesque bemoaned the fact that:

Although a revolutionary author politically, Georges Soria is a bourgeois from the artistic point-of-view (artistiquement parlant un bourgeois)

The unimaginative, conservative nature of Soria’s ‘théâtre dialogué’, the classical tautness and austerity of Camus’s ‘clash of wills’, began to seem irrelevant in an age of Ionesco and Brecht, and their aesthetic was flattened, -along, perhaps, with their political ambition –by the sound and the fury of the charge of Ionesco’s rhinos.

Time does funny things for accepted chronologies and idées reccues. Today, the Royal Court’s ‘Rhinoceros’ sits happily in the London theatre schedules next to the White Bear’s ‘The Just’, both in any case squeezed by the latest innovations in commercial musicals, Ronan Keating in a musical setting of ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’, or whatever the latest star vehicle is. Both speak forcefully to questions of conformity and action in extreme situations, and both provide scope for memorable theatrical set-pieces (the heavy, blank stares of the rhinos; Dora’s dehumanized determination to throw the next bomb). But I’m not sure that Camus’s exploration of limits in oppositional action, his claim for of essential truths in what seem like extreme existential situations, don’t in fact speak more clearly to the current contesting of questions of freedom, resistance, terror…just as J-PS’s depiction of torturing occupying powers in ‘Men without Shadows’ rang uncomfortably true at the Finborough. (Incidentally, on this question of relevance, I’m not sure how Camus’s thesis in ‘The Just’ of a life given for a life taken sits in the age of the suicide bomber). And, regarding Camus’s supposed un-theatricality, can anyone think of a more dynamic and dramatically fruitful core opposition than the construction: Antigone is right, but Creon isn’t wrong?

Finally, the White Bear’s ‘The Just’ is billed as a world premiere of a new translation of the play, one which takes an uninhibited approach to the original text. I noted some differences, especially the absence of one character, Foka, and his demotic idiom and proletarian social reality- though it seems this was less the text, than the back injury suffered by the actor playing the role (the off-Fringe is not the land of understudies). But some editing and rearrangement of the text had clearly taken place to heighten the contemporary implications, and –thanks to the British Library’s invaluable collection of Modern Playscripts - a record of every play performed post-1968 (the year of the demise of the Lord Chamberlain), I look forward to comparing my original, battered, Gallimard text with this new version.

Theatre Workshop

2007-07-24T13:50:30+01:00

To mark the AHRC British Library and University of Sheffield Theatre Archive Project's latest event, 'Hidden Theatre?': Theatre Workshop - Recollections of British Theatre from 1945 to 1968 on Tuesday 9th October 2007, we are asking for people to leave posts on the statement below. Free tickets are available from the British Library.

'The Royal Court Theatre had proved far more influential than the work of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop.' Discuss.

Harold Pinter

2006-11-07T12:36:09+00:00

'At the Crucible, rookie main house director Jamie Lloyd proves his mettle with a production that seems grounded in the everyday and is yet also edged with weirdness.' (Lynn Gardner, The Guardian). Harold Pinter's plays are being revived with spectacular regularity. Does the Sheffield Crucible's production of 'The Caretaker' help you to understand why?'

Bertolt Brecht

2006-10-22T20:35:22+01:00

What effect did the visit of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble to London in August and September 1956 have on the subsequent development of British theatre? Does Epic Theatre still still have an influence today?

Theatre Workshop

2006-10-20T12:12:21+01:00

What aspects of A Taste of Honey make it quite clearly a play that originated from Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop?

Ionesco & Beckett

2006-10-05T16:33:43+01:00

Ionesco's 'The Lesson' and 'Waiting for Godot' were both premiered in London in 1955. What grounds do they have for being the plays that changed the way that people viewed what constituted theatre? Also, Harold Hobson described 'Waiting for Godot' as being as unique as a four-leaf clover or a black tulip. Do you agree?