Theatres of War: New insights into wartime theatre production through the Recovering First World War Theatre project

2016 the Recovering First World Theatre project was launched with the aim of exploring the impact of the Great War on British Theatre. Using the Lord Chamberlains’ manuscript collection at the British Library, phase 1 (2016-2017) recorded data on the first production of all new plays licensed between June 1914 and December 1918. Phase 2, which focusses specifically on plays identified as dealing with the theme of war, was launched in March 2017. Here a team of over 150 volunteer historians are working to trace both the authorship and the subsequent performance histories of these ‘war plays’ using a combination of newspaper/periodical archives and genealogical records. The resulting dataset – which enables analysis of new wartime theatre by, amongst other factors, author, theatre, date of performance, length, theme, composition of the cast, and theme – is already offering fascinating new insights into geographic, temporal, and gendered patterns of wartime theatre production.

This paper will detail some of these initial findings around both what was being produced and how it was being produced. Placing these findings in the wider context of the war, it will argue, we can also begin to see how theatre across England, Scotland and Wales responded to the experiences and conditions of the First World War. The paper will also show how these insights into working practices, have been made available through the use on the one hand, of diverse archival materials and attention to the dialogue between these sources, and on the other, a new model of citizen-history research.