A Profitable weekend...

Easter Bank Holiday weekend in the UK.  Pleased to have typed up and started to analyse the weekly accounts for the Benson Company from August 1908 to September 1910.  Sadly, the figures show that the touring was not very profitable at all... Watch this space for further thoughts after my upcoming trip to Stratford!

Stratford Great Escape 2016

Time is such a relative thing. I find it hard to believe that it is already a week since we were a day into our Stratford 'Great Escape' - four nights in a lovely cottage in the heart of the town, less than three minutes from the Shakespeare Centre, paid for by the Louis Marder Scholarship I was awarded last year.

Having this amount of time to research is a real luxury - normally I'm squeezing time out of the day job and fitting it in where I can. I'd planned three days of research in the Birthplace Library and Archives during which time I was able to access some of the company's accounts and prompt books from three specific productions.

Having the cottage meant a relaxing start to the day, a leisurely saunter to the Archives around 10am and a return to a warm, cosy and very comfortable house, with plenty of work space, two very comfortable sofas and lovely beds! We decided to self-cater - although the tea shops of Stratford did provide some welcome late lunches - and thanks to Marks and Spencer, dined like Queens!  Rachel, who owns the cottage, had left us a welcome gift: how could she have known I was such a fan of ginger?  The discovery of a DVD of The Great Escape in one of the cupboards was another unexpected bonus...

Stratford in February can be incredibly cold and we'd gone prepared with woolly socks and hot water bottles.  Sitting all day in the Library was a chilly business and we were glad of the central heating!

As I'd taken my research assistant with me (she's also my mum!) we were able to get about thirty hours worth of work done between us over the three days: lots of data to add to my database, extra information about the financial state of the company, and the wonderful prompt books.

I'm very much an amateur at this, but I've developed a method for using the prompt books - I buy cheap copies of the plays and then deface them in accordance with the script! Some prompt books are more detailed than others but they all give a flavour of what the productions must have been like on stage to watch.  It's an incredible feeling, handling a book which must have been used in the wings of countless theatres on hundreds of occasions.

The account books, too, have a papery charm - heavy pages designed for pen and ink, meticulously handwritten, each page telling the stark truth about Benson's dreadful financial situation!  In between the pages sometimes are still some 'daily returns' from the theatre managers on the touring circuit or the occasional bill from a printer - the daily ephemera of running a a theatre company,

So busy were we with archival stuff that Stratford itself sort of faded into the background, although on Thursday - which had been a beautiful day - we went and took some photos as the sun set spectacularly over our favourite monument.  My photos don't do it justice!

After such a wonderful week, coming back to reality has been something of a challenge!  Although much of the material we discovered is still to be typed up, I've already used some of the details from the account books to update the database, add some dates and repertoire details, and correct a few gaps and errors.

I now have approximately 60% of the main (principal or A) company mapped, which is really exciting.

It was such a successful visit that I'm already working out when it might be possible to repeat the experience.  We're back in Stratford, as luck would have it, in just over four weeks time but we'll be theatre tourists rather than researchers.  Hopefully, the first signs of spring we saw last week will have fully blossomed by then!

(When I finally arrived home, I could barely get the front door open: six complementary copies of the edition of Theatre Notebook with my essay in were blocking the door!)

In Shakespeare's Garden

Magnolia blossom by the canal

A quick catch up...

Not quite sure where 2015 went to, nor where January 2016 has gone.  2016 is a highly significant year for Shakespeare aficionados, of course, and FRB has already had an honourable mention in an article Gregory Doran, artistic director of the RSC, wrote for the Sunday Telegraph on January 1st
Read it here.

FRB as Othello, date unknown

The very last day of 2015 also saw the publication of my Midsummer Night's Dream article in Theatre Notebook - my own  small attempt at putting FRB back on the British Shakespeare Map.  Of course, I'm hyper-critical of it and can see lots of things which I could have done better... but it is lovely to see it properly in print!

After a very time-pressured start to the year, work has again resumed on the data base and in a little over a week's time I'm heading back to the archives in Stratford, having used some of the Louis Marder Scholarship money to rent a cottage for the week. I've set myself (and my willing research assistant!) a mountain of material to get through, including the prompt books for three tragedies - Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Othello.  I'm interested to see how Benson edited them and whether they were as rearranged as some of the other plays were. I'm also hoping to fill in some of the gaps in the database, particularly in relation to the smaller companies, where the itineraries still look rather colander-like...

Looking forward to lots of cake and good company, and just being in my absolute favourite place on earth!

Stratford upon Avon in the Spring

Stratford upon Avon is wonderful in any season, but it is especially beautiful in Spring.  For the last two years I've spent 24 hours there as part of my Easter holiday - it's a kind of 'cultural retreat'.  I stay in B&B near the theatre, walk, eat cake, talk to as few people as I can get away with, go to the theatre (of course!) and then spend the second day in the Birthplace Trust library and archives reading room, trying to cram a year's research into five and a bit hours...

The Birthplace Library holds the archives of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and has a lot of material relating to Frank Benson which I'm slowly becoming more familiar with.  This time, I looked at two prompt books for As You Like It and Taming of the Shrew and began to sift through some of the company's accounts from 1909 and 1910 which made for quite alarming reading because Benson was clearly touring at a ridiculous level of financial loss.

Stratford is a very spiritual place, for me. It's hard to explain it without it sounding silly, but the first time I went there I felt as if I'd returned home to somewhere I'd always been missing.  It has the same impact for me still, today, almost thirty years on, and there's a sense of theatrical history there which is almost tangible. Leaving it is always a wrench. I'm saving some of the pictures for a post later in the month about the old Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, but these give something of the flavour of Stratford in Spring...  I wish I could  bottle the scent and sound of the place as well!

Holy Trinity Churchyard; The 'Gower' Hamlet; Canal Basin and Avon bankside looking towards the Church:
 April 10th 2015