“History. It’s just one thing after another…”
- Rudge, The History Boys
The world consists of a rich tapestry of connections; people, events and stories melting together to form one big boiling pot of history. Not least in the world of theatre. From the oldest amphitheatres in Greece to the present day West End of London, everything and everyone involved in this beautiful, mammoth machine of an industry is intrinsically linked in some way.
Whether I’m delving into script writing textbooks or a souvenir brochure, the complex multitude of connections forms one of the most enduring and interesting aspects of my time researching our magical world.
An example cropped up just last month. It was the 22nd May – Laurence Olivier’s Birthday - and I was knee-deep in work for the episode breakdown of my sitcom. Something wasn’t clicking – ideas not quite falling into place - so I decided to move onto reading a biography of Olivier to celebrate his birth.
And there it was, on page 16 – a magical sentence representing the heart of my sitcom: “You can’t have comedy without pain, and painful though the accidents were, he could always rise above them with defiant laughter”.
That’s it: my lead character in a nutshell. Suddenly, the book I’d decided to read for the afternoon formed a connection to my sitcom in itself. The highlighting pens came out, my Word document re-opened and my imagination re-fuelled.
This is the moment I live for; the reason I get out of bed every day and immediately hop into my archive. My passion mirrors the interest my Mum and Granddad shared for researching connected lives and ideas.
The ‘connection’ theme has become a recurring motif I return to throughout my studies. These exciting links and innate associations form a pin-point for all theatrical research. It’s what threads my work – whether for my career as a playwright, stage manager or archivist – seamlessly together.
When curating my first two exhibitions, (‘Discovering Shakespeare Piece by Piece and A Life from the Wings) it was essential to find a theme within the deep pool of information in which to anchor the displays. Finding a coherent narrative for the 'story' of my collection proved to be a challenging and exciting process. I decided to focus primarily on the aspects of theatre history which I felt brought everything in my collection together. This turned out to be the great director Sir Peter Hall and the National Theatre itself.
He was the key in both exhibitions; every strand of research I aimed to present stemmed from his legacy and connections.
His influence on the Shakespearean world is clear both from his time at the National and as the leader of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon. His Son, Edward enabled me to ease the exhibition naturally into the subject of my work on West End musical ‘Sunny Afternoon’, which Edward Hall directed. My time working alongside the stage management department during my Drama School studies was an incredible, formative experience, again providing another link in which to thread these historical narratives together.
‘Connections’ is also the title of the National Theatre’s initiative for young theatre companies. Their website reads:
“Each year the National Theatre commissions ten new plays for young people to perform, bringing together some of the UK's most exciting writers with the theatre-makers of tomorrow.”
Perhaps the title is a clear reference to one of the most important aspects of the theatrical world. After all, it’s the things which connect us – life, stories, experiences and heritage – that we as theatre makers strive to present to an audience.
I write this blog post almost as a prelude to the rest of my life studying the art-form. With the theme of ‘connections’ so beneficial to my inaugural exhibitions, it’s a topic that I’ll always carry with me through my career.
It’s incredibly exciting to know that the entirety of theatre history and its future will inevitably be linked in some form. I can’t wait to continue my journey.
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