The History of Theatre In Southwest England

I don't spend enough time thinking about the history of theatre in southwest England. Now a new site can help me consider it. Applause South West, at http://www.applausesw.org.uk/ , will help me rectify that situation.

ResearchBuzz readers will probably find the theatre archive part of the site the most interesting. (Click on "Theatre History Archive" from the main page.) Here you can view a list of almost two dozen theatres, and get information on them, the shows staged there, and performance ephemera associated with them. The show search engine lists over a hundred shows, some of them going back to the 19th century. Information on the shows includes the cast and images associated with that production (like playbills or rehearsal photographs.) In at least one case there's a performance film available on the site.

The multimedia search engine allows you to search the multimedia database -- which contains playbills, photographs, film, and audio interviews -- by keyword and/or subject.. Searching for "beanstalk" found a program cover and a program (from 1937!) for theatre productions of "Jack and the Beanstalk." Searching for "film" found a very brief movie of Theatre Royal in the 1930's. (The movies are in MPEG format.) Finally, the people database allows you to search for people involved in the theatre, including architects, composers, managers, performers, playwrights, and producers.

If you enjoy theatre history, you'll like this site. I only wish that the text of the site were a little bigger -- I had to set Opera on 120% size to enjoy it comfortably -- and that the search engines allowed to search by date. It would have been neat to browse pre-1900 playbills, for example.

Posted to Countries-United Kingdom