Claire Cochrane

The Pervasiveness of the Commonplace: The Historian and Amateur Theatre

Amateur theatre constitutes a largely unexplored narrative within the dominant histories of British theatre that traditionally foreground professional practice. A consequence of advanced capitalism has been an increasing emphasis on professionalism in all sectors of society that constructs the amateur as incompetent and expects guaranteed rewards for professional expertise. Statistically, however, amateur theatre has represented a major experience of performance for a significant proportion of the population especially those of the small nations that have been subsumed within the British nation-state. Much of todays state-funded theatre that ostracizes the amateur, has its roots in early twentieth-century amateur/professional collaborations and grassroots activity in the inter-war years. An examination of the ideological basis of aesthetic value judgements which are, in fact, socially constructed judgements of taste, raises issues about both the cultural value of performance and the responsibility of the historian to the experience of the past.

The Contaminated Audience: Researching Amateur Theatre in Wales Before 1939.

As concepts of nationhood and national identity become increasingly slippery, so the theatre historian attempting to recover neglected histories submerged within the dominant discourse of the nation state needs to be wary of imposing an ideologically pre-determined reading on the surviving evidence of performance practice and audience response. It is also important to acknowledge that theatre practice which represents the majority experience of national audiences does not necessarily conform to the subjective value judgements of the critic-historians who have tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record. In attempting to re/write the history of twentieth-century British theatre Claire Cochrane has researched the hitherto neglected area of amateur theatre which was a widespread phenomenon across the component nations. Focusing in this article on the cultural importance of amateur theatre in Welsh communities before the Second World War, she explores the religious, socio-political, and topographical roots of its rapid expansion, and the complex national identities played out in the collaboration between actors and audience. Claire Cochrane lectures in drama and performance studies at University College Worcester. Her most recent book is Birmingham Rep: a Citys Theatre, 1962–2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). She is currently working on a history of twentieth-century British theatre practice for Cambridge University Press.

Theatre and Urban Space: the Case of Birmingham Rep

In NTQ61, Deborah Saivetz described the attempts over the past decade of the Italian director Pino DiBuduo to create ‘invisible cities’ – performances intended to restore the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants, through exploring the actual and spiritual histories of both. Earlier in the present issue, Baz Kershaw suggests some broader analogies between the theatre and its macrocosmic environment. Here, Claire Cochrane, who teaches at University College, Worcester, narrows the focus to a particular British city and the role over time of a specific theatre in relation to its urban setting. Her subject is the history and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in relation to the city – of which its founder, Barry Jackson, was a lifelong resident – as an outcome of the citys growth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which made it distinctive in terms of its manufactures, the workers and entrepreneurs who produced them, and a civic consciousness that was disputed yet also shared. She traces, too, the transition between old and new theatre buildings and spaces which continued to reflect shifting class and cultural relationships as the city, its politicians, and its planners adapted to the second half of the twentieth century.

The Haunted Theatre: Birmingham Rep, Shakespeare and European Exchanges

Forests, the production by the iconoclastic Spanish-Catalan director Calixto Bieito staged at the ‘Old’ Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 2012, functions here as the starting point for an exploration of the way a radical revisioning of Shakespeare in performance stimulated through an engagement with European modernism began in this now venerable theatre over 100 years ago. What was dubbed Bieito’s ‘epic arboreal mash-up’ was I suggest haunted by the material traces of groundbreaking past performances mounted by the Rep’s founder Barry Jackson, which included the first Shakespeare in modern-dress productions of the 1920s and the highly influential 1951–53 staging of the Henry VI trilogy.

Birmingham Rep, youth and community, and the products and possibilities of precarity

ABSTRACT Birmingham Rep, a leading producing theatre based in the UK’s ‘second city’, has historically had a complex relationship with the cultural priorities of its home city. In recent years, Birmingham City Council has faced multiple challenges represented by debt burden, government-imposed cuts in public funding, scandals linked to failing children’s services and fears of Islamic radicalisation in the city’s schools. From a detailed consideration of the way the Rep’s artistic policy has been shaped in the context of chronic financial instability and these broader challenges, I argue that the increasingly central position youth and community engagement has assumed signals a major paradigm shift in the expectations associated with the role and function of the regional producing theatre in the UK.

Facing the Face of the Other: The Case of the Nia Centre

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.

Theatre History and Historiography

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.

Introduction to Theatre History and Historiography Ethics, Evidence and Truth

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.

Facing the Face of the Other

In 1991 the Nia Centre for African and Caribbean Culture opened in Manchester, in the inner city area of Hulme. Not only was it exceptional as the first large-scale, black-led arts centre in Europe; it was also notable that such an ambitious artistic venture linked to a black community should come to fruition in a regional city rather than in London. Nia was established in a refurbished Grade II-listed Edwardian theatre, where the contemporary structural features and striking colour scheme of the interior design harmonised with the historic origins of the building to produce a dynamic and celebratory visual expression of African cultural heritage. Created to present and promote performances by black artists of national and international repute, the project was the result of £1.3 million investment and twenty years of local community activity. Within six years, however, the good will and optimism which had driven the founding vision proved unequal to rapidly emerging obstacles to success. The dream collapsed. Nia ceased trading and closed its doors in 1997.

A City’s Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914–1918

The military historian Stephen Badsey has argued that as the first mass global war of the industrialized age, the Great War was the direct result of the long-term impact of the Industrial Revolution.1 In Britain, outside London, where the exploitation of ample resources of water, coal, iron and other minerals had launched the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century and nurtured unprecedented regional economic growth, cities had to grapple with the challenge to supply both the technological capacity and the essential labour to wage total war. In Birmingham, the focus of this chapter, the city’s industrial strength was based on the processing of a variety of metals. By 1910, ‘the city of a thousand trades’2 was already dominated by manufacturing priorities linked to the collective presence of Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) amalgamated with the Daimler Company; the Kynoch armaments firm and the Lanchester Motor Company.3 The result during the war was the production of ambulances, staff cars, armoured cars, bicycles and motor bikes used by despatch riders and eventually aeroplanes. Vast quantities of cartridges, shell cases and detonators were produced along with, as Martin Killeen has put it, ‘three of the iconic weapons used throughout the conflict by the British armies in the trenches of northern France: the “Mills Bomb” hand grenade developed by William Mills, the Lee Enfield rifle and the Lewis Air-Cooled Automatic Machine Gun.