Archival Relations: Women and Regional Theater in the Kathleen Barker Archive

Abstract

Archival Relations:Women and Regional Theater in the Kathleen Barker Archive Fiona Ritchie (bio) Keywords Eighteenth century theater history, women's theatre history, Kathleen Barker, archives, women's writing, women's and gender studies For the last few years, I have been working on a study of women and regional theater in Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century.1 The last comprehensive research on provincial theater in this period was undertaken by Sybil Rosenfeld, whose Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 was published over eighty years ago in 1939. A new study of the subject is therefore long overdue, but the topic is so vast that perhaps I am a fool to grapple with it. However, I take inspiration from the late and much-missed theater historian Jane Moody, who was working on this topic when she died in 2011.2 She would have produced a brilliant book on regional theater, and it is a huge loss to academia that she did not get the chance to do so. The focus of my own project on theater outside London in the long eighteenth century is gender. Extensive archival research across Britain and Ireland will allow me to uncover the important contributions made by women to regional performance culture, not just in terms of acting but also with regard to management and other types of off-stage labor. When I began this undertaking, I felt overwhelmed at the scale of the task ahead of me and unsure where to start. So my first port of call was Bristol, my hometown. I reasoned that I at least knew something of the city, its culture, history, and geography that could help me orient myself. This turned out to be a brilliant plan. Bristol, of course, has a rich theatrical history. The present day Old Vic began life as the city's Theatre Royal in the middle of the eighteenth century and is "the longest continuously working theater in the English-speaking world."3 Furthermore, the University of Bristol has rich archival holdings related to performance (both in Bristol and elsewhere) in its Theatre Collection, which was founded in 1951 to serve the first university drama department in the United Kingdom.4 One of their holdings is the Kathleen Barker Archive. Barker lived from 1925 to 1991, and research into theater history was her life's work. The collection is described in detail by Christopher Robinson in a short chapter of a festschrift devoted to Barker, published in 1994: Basically the archive comprises eighty stout arch-files, each one containing between 600 and 800 quarto or A4 sheets, most of them double-sided, on [End Page 131] which virtually everything that ever appeared in print, in newspapers and theater journals, relating to provincial entertainment has been painstakingly reproduced, mainly by a manual typewriter.5 Barker's interests in provincial theater ranged beyond Bristol and beyond the eighteenth century. She was awarded her doctorate by the University of Leicester in 1982 for a thesis entitled "Provincial Entertainment 1840–1870: The Performing Arts in Five Provincial Towns," a study which encompassed performance culture in Nottingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, Brighton, and Bristol. Fifteen folders in the Barker archive contain research undertaken for this project. Barker's hometown remained a key focus of her research, however, and the collection contains material she amassed in writing books on theater in the city, The Theatre Royal Bristol, 1766–1966: Two Centuries of Stage History (1974) and Bristol at Play: Five Centuries of Live Entertainment (1976).6 Robinson makes clear the extent of these resources: "Her authoritative history of the Theatre Royal, Bristol, from 1766 to 1966, is related in 267 pages, but the reference material she assembled covering this period fills twenty-four files, or something in excess of 16,000 pages" (p. 14). Furthermore, Barker's definition of entertainment was capacious. Bristol at Play includes discussion of musical concerts, circus, puppet shows, pantomime, equestrian entertainment, menageries, dioramas, and so on. Her archive is therefore of great use to scholars working across centuries, geographical locations, and types of performance. My work with the Barker archive has primarily been concerned with a specific aspect of Bristol theater...