- Hi, I'm Erin and I'm head of Archive
at the National Theatre.
I'm here to tell you a bit about the NT Archive,
the history of the National Theatre,
and about times in our past where we've faced disruption
to business as usual.
The Archive is based at the National Theatre Studio,
next to the Old Vic in London
and we hold and provide access to materials
relating to all of our shows
so if you want to know what happened backstage
through some of our stage management reports,
if you want to see some of our costume designs
or you want to get your hands on some of the puppets
from "His Dark Materials" then we've got you covered.
We're usually open to the public four days a week
and absolutely anyone can visit us for free.
Our aim is to document, preserve and make accessible
everything related to the history of the National Theatre.
That's quite a wide remit and covers everything
from the architecture of the building
to the running of the theatre, to the shows on its stages.
We hold records for all of our shows
right back to our opening night
with "Hamlet" in 1963 including prompt scripts,
costume bibles, programmes, photographs and posters.
We also record every production and have done so since 1995
and all of these, including all of the NT Live recordings
of productions at the NT and elsewhere,
are available to access for free in the Archive.
If you are part of an education establishment
such as a university, library or school,
you can access 30 of these titles via the NT Collection
in partnership with Bloomsbury Drama Online and ProQuest.
Over the next few minutes I'm going to tell you
a bit about the NT in times of disruption.
I'm going to start by going as far back as I can:
the movement to found the National Theatre.
The movement to found the NT reaches back into the 1800s
and came from two different movements:
one to found a national theatre
and the other to create a monument to Shakespeare.
The two movements joined forces
and created the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Trust,
which I will call the SMNT from now on,
which had the sole aim
of founding a national theatre in Shakespeare's honour.
We hold the SMNT collection in the Archive
and it's fully catalogued and accessible.
The SMNT committee lent the site they owned
for the purposes of building a national theatre
behind the British Museum to the building of a YMCA hut
during the First World War for recuperating ANZAC soldiers.
It was built on what is now
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The women of the movement to found the NT
shifted their focus from campaigning
for the national theatre to performing Shakespeare plays
to the soldiers in the Hut.
I say hut but you can see from the drawing
that it was quite a grand building.
One of our researchers, Ailsa Grant-Ferguson,
published a book last year on the hut called,
"The Shakespeare Hut:
A Story of Memory, Performance and Identity 1916-1923"
so you are interested to hear more then take a look at that.
The National Theatre Act was passed by parliament in 1949
and planning for the physical site was well under way.
During the planning stage for the National Theatre,
many sites were discussed and owned across London.
The Bloomsbury site was given up
in favour of one in South Kensington
before the focus moved to the Waterloo area,
firstly the area to the west of Waterloo Bridge
where the Queen lay a foundation stone
on the 13th July 1951.
In frustration at the constant changing of sites
and the delays in founding the NT,
critics Kenneth Tynan and Richard Findlater
staged a mock funeral next to the foundation stone.
It wasn't to remain there for long, however,
as it was moved in 1953 when the London County Council
shifted the NT site to the other side of Waterloo Bridge.
Permission had to be sought from Buckingham Palace
for the foundation stone to be moved to the other side
of the bridge where the NT stands today.
At the time, this was a patch of scrubland
with wild heather growing.
The greens, purples and browns of this area
are what established the colour palate
for the NT used by our art director Ken Briggs.
There's a lot of information about the establishing
of the NT and its whole life-time on the NT website,
under the About Us section and entitled Stage by Stage
in case you want any more information
on any of these points.
Now if we fast-forward a few decades
of painful deliberation and negotiation
with the London County Council and the government,
the NT opened in 1963.
It was housed in the Old Vic on The Cut
and opened with "Hamlet",
played by Peter O'Toole
and directed by the then artistic director Laurence Olivier.
One of my favourite anecdotes from this show
was that Derek Jacobi
was playing Laertes on his 25th birthday.
Shirley Bassey happened to be in the audience that night
and came along to the after-show party,
where she gave a rendition of Happy Birthday for Jacobi.
What an amazing experience at such a young age.
And here is the poster for this production of "Hamlet".
This is a scan of a transparency
rather than of a physical copy of the poster
because only five of these posters survive in the world.
Apparently, the art director of the NT, Ken Briggs,
the man responsible for the NT branding
and distinctive style, went to the printers
in the evening to collect five copies to take into the NT
for comment the following day.
Overnight the printers burned down
and no more copies were ever made.
So, they are rare and unfortunately,
we don't have one but we are always on the look out
for one to be added to our collection.
While the NT company was playing at the Old Vic,
the NT building was under construction for around 13 years.
Here are some photos taken during the build.
We actually received some photographs
of the topping out ceremony from 1973
along with the topping out spade last year.
They were given to the secretary of the chairman of McAlpine
and she had kept them in her shed for over 40 years.
Her daughter and granddaughter contacted us
and donated the spade and photos,
which are stored alongside the breaking ground spade
that we already had from a ceremony
held several years earlier.
So, you can view both of these
if you come to visit us in the Archive.
If you want to know more information
about the building of the NT on the South Bank
then there are two architecture exhibitions
on the Google Art and Culture platform,
with lots of photos, essays and interviews about the build.
The building was eventually opened by the Queen
on 25th October 1976 even though it wasn't quite finished
and here is a photo of her meeting
the then artistic director Peter Hall
and the former artistic director Laurence Olivier.
Olivier gave a speech at the royal opening
marking his only appearance on any of the new stages.
He spoke in the theatre that bears his name
and seats of his favourite colour, purple.
The NT company and staff made the move from the nissen huts
in Aquinas Steet to the massive South Bank building.
The NT had begun life with 18 full-time staff
and had to take on hundreds more administrative
and backstage employees for the new building.
Peter Hall later summed up the move from the huts
and the Old Vic to the new building by saying that
"we didn't just expand, we exploded."
The first plays were the transfer of "Hamlet"
from the Old Vic in the Lyttelton
with Albert Finney in the title role
and "Tamburlaine the Great" in the Olivier.
Not everything went smoothly with the opening
of the new South Bank building, however.
The Olivier was not ready when it was meant to be
and the company rehearsing "Tamburlaine the Great",
who had been in rehearsals for over six months
before the theatre opened, had taken to performing
sections of it on the South Bank for the public.
The problems didn't stop there.
The Cottesloe Theatre, now the Dorfman,
was never meant to be a theatre.
Peter Hall insisted that he needed
a three-auditorium complex to deliver his rep
and so the architects had to go back to the drawing board
to change a rehearsal space
into a fully functioning black box theatre.
This is why there is no direct access
to the Dorfman from front of house.
This theatre was not ready on time for the 1976 opening
but never fear there was a plan B
and the planned shows would have an audience.
Peter Hall moved the first season to the Young Vic,
which had been founded in 1970, and entitled it,
"The National Theatre summer season at the Young Vic".
In 1977 the Cotts was completed
and Ken Campbell's "Illuminatus"
became the first show in that space.
The troubles didn't die down for Peter Hall,
who faced striking backstage staff
over pay and work shifts.
In 1979 this closed all three theatres.
Some shows were staged in limited or the wrong sets
and members of the public were offered
reduced tickets to watch these.
The 1980s then got off to a rough start
with the "Romans in Britain" court case
brought by Mrs Mary Whitehouse,
the self-appointed guardian of public morality,
against the NT and the director Michael Bogdanov
due to a scene depicting attempted homosexual rape.
Bogdanov went on trial in 1982 charged
with procuring an act of gross indecency
between two of the characters in the play.
It should be noted that Mrs Whitehouse
never actually saw the show.
Howard Brenton, the playwright,
went on the road to 10 different theatres across the UK
to perform the play himself as a narrative.
He did this to raise money for the Theatre Defence Fund
to support Bogdanov's legal costs.
After 18 months of legal wrangling,
the prosecution lawyers retracted their case
and Michael Bogdanov and the NT were acquitted.
Despite, or perhaps because of the publicity,
the play went down well
with 75% seat capacity across the 26 performances.
If you want to read more about this
and the financial difficulties of the NT during the 1980s,
when Peter Hall fought back
against the Arts Council reduction in funding in real terms
and which culminated in his coffee table speech
to the press in 1985, then please take a look
at Daniel Rosenthal's National Theatre Story.
It is an exhaustive account of the NT from its conception
through to the 50th anniversary in 2013.
It has 10 years of research behind it
and is the most thorough published source of information
on the NT in existence.
I'm going to skip forward now to the 2000s.
The London bombings in July 2005
closed the theatre to a public audience.
This was during the Connections festival,
which is the NT's annual nationwide theatre-making programme
for 13-19 year olds, and there were already two companies
in the building rehearsing for their performances.
The decision was made to stage these productions
without a public audience
but one made up of NT staff and company,
which really shows the community pulling together
to support each other and the youth festival
in a time of uncertainty.
In 2011, playwright Alecky Blythe
and composer Adam Cork's "London Road",
a unique piece of music theatre developed at the NT Studio,
opened in the Cottesloe to great acclaim.
It was so successful that its run was extended,
and of course subsequently went on to be staged
in the Olivier and then to become a film.
In order to accommodate the extension
of its run in the Cottesloe and because this coincided
with the start of the NT Future
redevelopment of the building,
the backstage scenic studio was converted
into a temporary theatre space called, the Paint Frame
and was open for public performances
for the very first time.
The NT presented four short plays by writers
who were new to the NT under the title Double Feature.
These are some photos of the space,
which kept a lot of the look
and feel of the actual paint frame.
The NT's new paint frame, housed in the Max Rayne Centre
can be viewed alongside several other workshop
and construction spaces from the Backstage Walkway,
which is open to the public whenever the building is open.
NT Future, which I mentioned earlier,
began in 2012 and involved the closure of the Cottesloe
for its refurbishment to become the Dorfman.
To combat this loss of space,
the NT opened the temporary theatre
on the South Bank with "Table",
written by Tanya Ronder and directed by Rufus Norris
and it housed 50 productions before closing in 2016,
later than had been scheduled
to close due to its popularity.
It was hugely popular with audiences and artists alike
and here are some of the photos that were taken
when the theatre was being dismantled
showing the backstage spaces covered in graffiti
left behind by every company who performed there.
Also, in 2013 was the collapse of the Apollo Theatre ceiling
during a performance
of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time".
In the aftermath of this,
Curious was mounted in studio format
without all of the tech that you will see
in the West End and free performances of the production
were given for students from 14 secondary schools
in east London and at Rambert Dance Studios for families
of those who were present that night
or were first responders.
Curious resumed its West End run
at the Gielgud the following summer.
This shows the creativity and determination
of the company to share the production
with as many people as they could
even in very difficult circumstances
and this paved the way for what has become
the very successful Curious Schools tour
over the past few years, which has been seen
by almost 25,000 students across England.
I hope some of these snippets have shown you
how the National Theatre has responded
to disruptions to business as usual
and embraced the opportunities that come with that.
The Archive is here to hold all of these stories
about the National's past, to collect them in the present
and to use them to envision the future of the NT.
Thank you for listening
and I hope to share more of the Archive with you all soon.