An Invaluable Collection
When the National Theatre's inaugural season opened at the Old Vic in October 1963, with Peter O'Toole directed by Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, the news travelled around the globe. The Mombassa Times, The Trinidad Guardian, The Calcutta Statesman and The Times of Brazil were among the papers to cover the story, and you don't need much Portuguese to understand this October 1963 headline from the Lisbon Daily News: "Peter O'Toole interpreton o Príncipe da Dinamarca."
We know about the National's international impact because the original clippings, now yellowed and brittle, are pasted down in thick black folders at the NT Archive – an invaluable collection of documents, artwork and recordings, open to students, scholars and other interested parties.
The archive is about the size of a large classroom and shares ground-floor premises with the National's prop and costume store in Salisbury House, a large office complex on Brixton Road, a short walk from Oval tube station. There are tables for researchers, and monitors on which they can watch videos of NT productions (every show since 1995 has been filmed with a locked-off camera), but around two thirds of the room is occupied by a set of floor-to-ceiling shelving bays, fitted on caterpillar tracks that allow archivist Gavin Clarke to wheel open or shut the bay to which he or a visitor needs access.
The Archive Research Room
Walk up and down these bays and you are confronted by almost every conceivable aspect of the National's work over the last 40 years, from Annual Reports to Education packs, Platform talks to press releases. Row upon row of lever arch files contain the 'bible' for each of the 530 NT productions: prompt scripts (with details of actors' gestures, entrances and exits), seating plans, set designs. Also ring-bound into history are the stage management team's prop lists – evocative inventories that would be a wonderful source for quiz masters. "Your starter for ten. From the National's 1997 repertoire, can you identify the new play that required the crew to bring on a lap-dance chair, a camera stool and a computer table?" (The answer is at the end of this article.
IIn another bay are hundreds of boxes (made of acid-free cardboard to preserve the paperwork) dedicated to individual productions, in which you will find photographs, programmes, costume and poster designs and, sometimes, confidential or personal information (such as an actor's salary or waist measurement) which is removed by Clarke before he hands the box to a researcher.
The archive opened in 1993, when it was agreed that the ad hoc storage of material in cupboards or filing cabinets at the South Bank building was no longer an acceptable way to safeguard the National's history. "Nobody had thought to include an archive room in Denys Lasdun's original plans for the building," explains Clarke, a laid-back young Irishman who took up his post earlier this year. "Individual departments would hold on to their material for years, but there were no rules on what should or should not be kept for archive purposes.
"The NT Board has recently approved a Records Management Policy for each department, indicating retention periods – usually 2 to 5 years – for different types of material, after which it is destroyed or sent to the archive. We want to ensure that the archive does not get material it does not need – because we're already running out of space."
Clarke's current priorities are to complete the archive catalogue, which NT staff can already access through their internal computer network (type in 'Hamlet' and back come 100 references), and to make material available to the public via the National's website, which already offers an e-mail pro forma for archive enquiries.
"We want to get all of the cast lists and production teams online," [now acheived] Clarke says, "because the majority of the enquiries we get from the UK and abroad – 15 a day on average – are from people asking 'Who played so-and-so in such-and-such a production.'" There are plenty of less obvious requests, too, including a recent e-mail from a woman in New Zealand who'd just purchased a second-hand set of drawings of soldiers, marked "National Theatre 1969", and wanted to know which production they came from. The answer was Charles Wood's 'H'.
When you start to browse through the cuttings files and production boxes, you realise that the archive is of immense value because it has preserved material that not only commemorates the finished product (programmes, contempoary reviews, photographs etc.), but also the myriad transactions, negotiations, alterations and minor mishaps that unfold beyond the audience's gaze, shaping what we see on the National's stages.
I spent a few hours examining material for the first four shows from 1963-64. In the box for Hamlet is a file containing dozens of thumbnail-sized fabric swatches and annotations that would delight a costume historian (the over-robe worn by Michael Redgrave as Claudius used 16 yards of patterned beige lining from Harrods).
In the box for Saint Joan, with Joan Plowright in the title role, correspondence between the National and the Society of Authors (George Bernard Shaw's literary executors) reveals that the society had assigned the production rights for a £100 advance and a 7.5% royalty on the first £1,000 of gross weekly receipts, and 10% thereafter. This was evidently a much tougher deal than the National had anticipated, because Stephen Arlen, the administrative director, wrote a memo to Olivier lamenting that "from this [position] they would not move. So if you choose to have a little groan at some point I see no reason why not."
Amongst the papers concerning George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, directed by William Gaskill, the stage management time sheets record one-off flaws ("tree lowered badly because rope caught on pulley") and the duration of each performance. The nightly stage traffic in December 1963 fluctuated between two hours and 15 minutes and two hours and 31 minutes – a large enough variation for Stephen Arlen to dispatch another memo to Olivier asking if "the producers" (as directors were then credited) saw the time sheets. Did Gaskill's company appear too hurried at the shortest show, or, as the production bedded down, were they driving the comedy with an optimal combination of energy and fluency?
Finally, my eye was caught by an Uncle Vanya programme that would seem a rather austere souvenir alongside the one you're holding now, with a plain cover and just two advertisements – one reminding us that in 1963 a packet of 20 cigarettes could be yours for four shillings and sixpence, the other promoting the Argo Shakespeare LP recordings whose casts featured three twentysomethings with a passion for the Bard: Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn. The more things change...
Daniel Rosenthal writes on theatre for The Times and Independent on Sunday and regularly chairs NT Platforms.
(Quiz answer: Patrick Marber's Closer)
