Staging the Archive

Start date: 1 September 2021
End date: 31 December 9999
Funder: Independent Social Research Foundation; British Library Eccles Institute Fellowship; Internal funding
Primary investigator: Professor Kate Dossett
External co-investigators: Dr Dermot Daly (Leeds Conservatoire and Leeds Beckett University); Lorna French (playwright and researcher), Eleanor Manners (director and voice coach), Pauline Walker (producer)

Description

Staging the Archive addresses the invisibility of Black theatre-makers within archives and develops new methodologies for finding and making accessible this rich body of work.

Beginning with Kate Dossett’s archival research in British Library collections and developed through partnerships with theatre-makers, researchers and educators Dermot Daly, Eleanor Manners, Lorna French, and Pauline Walker, Staging the Archive has involved a series of collaborative projects with the British Library, Leeds Playhouse and Wikimedia U.K. Together we have worked to identify and stage work by Black theatre-makers working in early twentieth century Britain and held in the British Library’s largest single manuscript collection, the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection.

Our activities include: a playreading group for young people at Leeds Playhouse (2020-1); performances of historic manuscripts at Leeds Playhouse (2022) which you can watch in the video below; a Wikithon series (2022) as well as an Archive Workshop Series at the British Library (2022-24) bringing together theatre-makers, historians and curators to interpret the work and to develop emotionally sensitive methods of archive encounter.

Research Background

Staging the Archive grew out of a research project begun by Professor Kate Dossett in collaboration with the British Library in 2021. It centres on the Library’s unique censorship archive, the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection.

Between 1737 and 1968 all new plays intended for professional production had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for licensing prior to production. This archive of censorship contains plays written and developed by Black theatre makers such as Una Marson’s At What a Price (1932) which was staged at London’s Scala theatre in 1934 and the American Negro Theatre’s Anna Lucasta (1944) which had a long run at His Majesty’s Theatre in the West End (1947-1948) before touring extensively around Britain.

These plays have since fallen into obscurity or been wrongly attributed solely to white playwrights. Dossett’s conceptualisation of Black Performance Communities has opened new ways to identify work by Black British drama by looking to the networks and troupes of Black theatre-makers who made and performed the work rather than to individuals whose privileged position within the theatre industry historically allowed them to claim authorship. (Dossett 2020, 2022, 2024).

In 2022 Black theatre makers, archivists, curators and researchers gathered at a series of workshops at the British Library to encounter these manuscripts and to consider how they might be staged by theatre practitioners and studied by educators and researchers and some of the challenges in staging and teaching this work today. These conversations led to staged readings of several of the plays at Leeds Playhouse Black Theatre Making and Censorship in the Archive, which you can watch in the video above. The workshop series also inspired the Developing Healthy Engagement Project at the University of Leeds which brought together artists, curators, archivists, researchers, and research enablers to develop methods for embedding emotional preparedness in archival encounters and produced Emotionally Engaged: A Toolkit for your Archive Journey.

Research and Outputs

Dermot Daly, ‘At What A Price: The Benefits of the Unearthing of Una Marson’s Unpublished Play’, Teaching Artist Journal, 21, 1–14.
Kate Dossett, ‘How British Theatre Censorship Laws Have Inadvertently Created a Rich Archive of Black History’, in The Conversation, 17 January 2023.
Kate Dossett, ‘“A Place Where Freedom of Mind and Spirit Was Possible”: Black Theatre Makers and Censorship in Britain, 1900–1948’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship, ed, by A. Etienne and G. Saunders (Palgrave Macmimllan, 2024), pp. 415-35.
Jessica Gregory, ‘Black Theatre Makers: Una Marson’, British Library Americas Blog.
Lucy Hinnie, ‘A year in Three Wikithons’, British Library Digital Scholarship Blog.
Black Theatre Making and Censorship in the Archive: staged reading of In Dahomey, 1903 (Dir. Eleanor Manners) and Una Marson’s At What a Price, 1932 (Dir. Dermot Daly), and Daly and Manners in converstation with Amanda Huxtable at Leeds Playhouse, November 2022.
Una Marson: Race & Censorship in 1930s Theatre: Kate Dossett and Alex Lock discuss censorship of Black theatre makers in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection.