Black Theatre Makers and Censorship Archives at the British Library
Since 2021, Professor Kate Dossett has been working with a team of Black theatre makers, the British Library, Wikimedia UK and Leeds Playhouse to bring the work of early twentieth century Black theatre makers back into the repertoire and canon of dramatic literature.
The collaboration grew out of an ISRF and British Library Eccles Institute funded research project begun by Kate Dossett in 2021 which centred on the British Library’s Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection. Kate explains more about the project here.
Pauline Henriques and Samuel Selvon reading a story during the weekly BBC Caribbean Service Caribbean Voices programme in 1952. Picture public domain via Wikipedia
Between 1737 and 1968 all new plays intended for professional production on the British stage had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for licensing prior to production. This created an archive of censorship, which holds unique manuscripts of plays by Black theatre makers including Una Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price. Many of these have since fallen into obscurity or been wrongly attributed solely to white playwrights.
As part of this project Black theatre makers, curators and researchers have been exploring new ways to identify and make visible work by Black theatre makers within the archive. Working with youth theatre educators, practitioners and with Wikimedia U.K, we are developing new ways of accessing, encountering and using these manuscripts so they might be studied, staged and interpreted by new audiences from schoolchildren to Artistic Directors of theatre companies. This has included stage readings of the plays, as well as digitisation of manuscripts and a Wikithon series dedicated to increasing the coverage of Black theatre makers on Wikipedia. We have also developed a ‘chatty reading’ room with colleagues at the British Library to create a supportive environment for archive-users to encounter and explore archival materials together.
Funding from Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures and Research and Innovation Service in spring 2024 gave us the time and space to pause, reflect upon and evaluate our collaboration with the British Library before developing the next iteration of the project. At a workshop hosted at the British Library in June 2024, our team met with different teams who have been working with us from across the British Library including Modern Archives and Manuscripts and the Caribbean Collections, as well as Learning Teams and the Research Department. BL partners shared what they had learned from the project including the challenges faced by archive-users in encountering discriminatory language in cataloguing and archive content, and the steps they were taking to address these challenges, while theatre practitioners reflected on the excitement and pain of using archives of censorship which inadvertently preserved, even as they undermined the work of Black theatre makers. We were excited to work for the first time with Wabriya King, a production dramatherapist, who supported us in discussing the challenges of engaging this unique censorship archive, and has helped us to develop plans to better prepare for the emotional charge of archival engagement in ways that have the potential to resist rather than reinscribe the racial hierarchies of the archive.
Looking forward, we are excited to develop our existing partnerships with the British Library, Wikimedia U.K and Leeds Playhouse and to grow the project through new partnerships with community groups in Leeds and Bradford and practitioners in the United States as part of our new project in development: Staging the Archive: Black Theatre Makers 1900-1968.
Read more
Professor Dossett explores the Lord Chamberlain Play’s Collection archive in ‘How British theatre censorship laws have inadvertently created a rich archive of Black history’, The Conversation (17 January, 2023)