You were best to call them generally...

After my visit to York last week, I was spurred into action by Maurice Crichton's comments about the way Benson's company might have reflected Shakespeare's own, with specific roles marked for particular players. His interest in the range of roles played by actors within the repertory, has led me to think about how to start thinking about the actor's perspective of the company. 

I'd wrestled before with trying to catalogue actors who were part of the company across the years of its existence, and had been defeated because I didn't know what I would find most useful and in trying to record 'everything' I quickly became overwhelmed by it. However last week's conversation led me to think much more about the kinds of information that I actually need to know, the best way to document it and and how it could be made usefully accessible. 

Midweek, something did suggest itself as providing a potentially useful sample - a kind of 'snapshot' of the company across its many iterations.   J.C. Trewin includes a table as an appendix to his book which covers the 1900 Lyceum season and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has cast lists for all the productions at Stratford.  Looking at these creates a possible starting point.  Hopefully, then, by supplementing this with reviews and advertising, it might be possible to create comparable data for the  'missing' years when the Company wasn't in Stratford, and even potentially extend that into information about the North (B) and South (C) companies.

I tried to think about what information that would be the most use to anyone who was sufficiently interested to look at it.  As well as knowing what roles any actor played, it might be useful to see if any 'career progression' could be noticed and to note when people joined, left or returned to the company.  When I began to look closely at the SBT material, it was clear that there were also a number of 'one role' people each season - could they be locals, recruited for the Festival, rather than regular members of the company? And then there are the doubling 'names' - Walter Plinge and F.Anney being, famously, the ones most employed, although  M.Argate, B. Righton and (my personal favourite) L,Oakall  all appear on cast lists! (There's also good chapter in 'The Dillen' about local supers -there are some fabulous bits about the theatre and FRB in there, which I will return to in a later post!)

I've used Microsoft Excel to create a spread sheet with three separate pages, using the same information slightly differently on each. The main page is arranged in listings for each season to allow for searching across a specific production or year; the second focuses on actors in alphabetical order with their chronologically arranged roles across the years to show career progression and continuity, and the third lists the 'extra' one-role actors and doublers.  

After two days of pretty solid work - and a steep learning curve as far as Excel is concerned! - I've reached 1906 and am already noticing interesting patterns. Benson purchased what was basically an 'old fashioned' stock touring company from Walter Bentley and the structure of that seems to have remained largely unchanged, with actors employed for a specific 'line' of roles.  Some years are 'watershed' years with a high turnover within the company - 1900/01 being the main one because of the financial fallout from the London season - but there is a surprising amount of stability within the Company, generally provided by a backbone of  actors like George Weir, H.O. Nicholson and Arthur Whitby.  

Casting for events like the 'Histories' and the 'eternity' Hamlet in 1901 show a challenging range of roles which were out of the usual rep.  And I had no idea that there were so many characters called 'Balthazar' across Shakespeare's plays. Usually played by an actress, poor Leah Hanman (who was also the Company's resident Puck) must have had to keep her wits about her to remember which Balthazar she was playing each day!

As the Festival grew, and the number of performances increased, there are 'guest' returners for specific parts - Genevive Ward for Volumnia, Alice Denvil and Eleanor Aickin for Mistress Quickly - and later on I know there are many guest appearances by former Bensonians - Henry Ainley as Orlando, Matheson Lang and his wife Hutin Briton as the Macbeths etc - and guest 'stars' - Constance Collier, Lena Ashwell and Ellen Terry.  These 'non typical' repertory weeks will certainly need to be supplemented by material from touring reviews and programmes as it would be more useful to me to know who played these roles on a day-to-day basis

Programme from Theatre Royal Belfast 1899 

I don't know, without that conversation last week, whether any of this would have occurred to me. As it is, it has come at a perfect point - I'm now desperate to 'get going'  - and amassing background material like this can only be a useful occupation! Being 'accepted' as a student again (my official ID card arrived this week and my log-in details work on academic publishing websites) has also made me feel I once again have the right to spend hours pouring over all this stuff and can stop feeling guilty about it!

And this is only one of several things I jotted down after speaking to Maurice - a timely reminder that sharing knowledge and hearing others' opinions can only improve my thought processes!

Programme from Theatre Royal Belfast 1899 

(Hopefully, next week's post will be accompanied by a link to the spreadsheet - once I've finished its first iteration and figured out how to convert it to Google Sheets!)