Interview with the National Theatre’s head archivist, Erin Lee
Erin Lee is Head of Archive for the National Theatre, one of the UK's largest theatre archives. It contains over 1,000 linear metres of materials including theatre designer Jocelyn Herbert's life's work. The archive is open to practitioners, researchers and members of the public free of charge. Interview by Emma Tompkins
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to the archive?
I studied Classics at university and didn’t know what to do with a Classics degree, so I decided to go into librarianship. I didn’t realise at university that you had to do a masters in librarianship and that there was a graduate trainee scheme. So I went to St John’s College in Cambridge and did a traineeship in libraries, which I loved. I then got a scholarship to Syracuse University to study Library and Information Science as a masters. For that whole year I worked in Syracuse University archives which I applied for because I had to work on campus as an international student and I thought this would be interesting. I think they took me because I’m Scottish and they hold the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 bombing archives. They had 35 students on board the plane, and they are one of the largest institutions that had an interest in the event so they’ve taken the collection. They’d never had a Scottish person working with that collection and it was also the year that Scotland let Abdelbaset al-Megrahi out of prison, so there were a lot of inquiries coming in around that collection. It’s a really sobering collection to work with; They have remnants of the plane, bits of luggage, photographs of all the victims and lots to do with the court cases so it was a very interesting collection to work with. I loved that year and I felt I wanted to stay in archives rather than libraries so when I came back from the States, I applied to all kinds of archive jobs and I finally got a job as the Archive Assistant at the National Theatre.
I don’t come from a theatre background, I knew nothing about theatre, I had been to the National once before but I didn’t know that’s where I’d been. I found the programme for the show I’d seen a couple of weeks into my job and realised it was the same programme I had. I hadn’t done Drama at school, my school didn’t even offer it so working in a theatre environment was very new to me.
I started working at the NT on a fixed-term contract and then took over a new role during the 50th anniversary in 2013, and I’ve headed up the team since 2014. I am now doing a PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in how we archive performance. I would never have imagined I would have done something like this but it’s researching the role of an archive in a theatre and thinking about how we can document the development process; the 2-4 years of a production before it goes into rehearsals. In the NT Archive we are very good at archiving the rehearsals up to a show going on stage, but the bit before, the development period, is not as well documented.
How do you decide what the ‘bit before’ was? Does that include the commissioning conversations or early design conversations?
It’s from the very start of an idea, as early as we can get. So it may well be commissioning conversations with the New Work dramaturg and that process, it could be the workshop where they bring a designer and director together for a week. We would like to start documenting the process as early as possible. Obviously a lot of it is conversations, a lot of it is informal chats, I do appreciate that and I know that we won’t get everything for the NT Archive. It’s a really interesting area because I think a lot of practitioners would love to have that early stage archived and a lot of them won’t. A lot of them will want to use the New Work time for experimentation and failure and to have the freedom to fail and it not be documented.
I’ve interviewed a lot of practitioners as part of my PHD and they’ve said it’s the failures that are really useful. If they want to stage that show themselves, they need to understand where the pitfalls are, to prepare for them in advance of rehearsal and not be taken by surprise. So I think there’s a big value to doing it, I just think it’s about how we talk about this and contextualise it to practitioners when we want to archive it.
Doing my PHD in a drama school setting allows me to do practice research and also to develop that work in the context of and alongside practitioners and then to produce a way forward for actively archiving at the NT and a discussion paper that will be more applicable to archivists than a traditional thesis.
Could you tell us about the National Theatre Archive?
The NT Archive has a mission statement which is “to document and preserve materials relating to the history of the NT and its ongoing activities while interpreting that history and making it accessible to everyone.”
We split the collection into three areas which helps us with access, budgeting and future planning. The largest area is the ‘Business Archive’. We are predominantly a business archive as the National Theatre is a business and we look after all the financial and legal records related to the running of that business so that’s folded into records management and most of that is closed because it’s not catalogued, but also because it is commercially sensitive and so need to be careful about who accesses that. There are methods to access it if researchers want to but it’s not open to everybody that comes in.
Then we have ‘External Collections’. We have received a number of donations such as the collection of the movement to found the National Theatre which is the ‘Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Collection’. That movement started in the mid 1800s and takes us right up to the founding in 1963. Then we have a couple of collections about the building of the building on the Southbank, so one called the ‘South Bank Theatre Board’ which was the committee set up (separate to the National Theatre) to look after the building and the funding and government policy and oversight of what was being built, and then we have the ‘Theatre Projects Consultants papers’.
The TPC is actually a company that came out of the founding of the National. They were the middleman between Denys Lasdun, our architect, who had never designed a theatre before, and Laurence Oliver, who also had never designed a theatre before. The two of them struggled to speak the same language and so the lighting designer Richard Pilbrow was brought in: he already worked with the National Theatre and was asked to act as a middleman between these two and he made a career of doing that. The TCP papers are full of lots of technical information about the National, so we have all of the background and designs for the drum revolve including the original manual for it, which was used for the refurbishment of the drum because it’s not changed since the 70s. There are a lot of technical and engineering floor plans, and a lot of information about the lighting desks and all the technical equipment that was installed in the 70s which at the time was really forward thinking and innovative. It’s a very interesting collection to some niche groups of people and it has just been catalogued so it is now fully accessible!
The third part of our archive, in addition to Business and External Collections, is the ‘Cultural Archive’. That’s everything to do with shows; so we have pretty full records for every production since 1963 so every show will have a programme, a poster, stage management reports, front of house reports, press reviews, prompt script, costume bible, technical production & rehearsal photography. Then for shows from 1984 we will have a recording of the ‘Platform’, which is the talk or the lecture that happened alongside the production. Most shows have 1-3 platforms and we’ve audio recorded all of those from the 80s, so we have 1000s of those that people can listen to and they are really untapped, they’re amazing, and there’s so much information in there that you’re not going to get anywhere else, it’s not going to be written down, it’s not in a book, and I think there’s a lot of potential there for researchers to use. They will quite often be with the designer, director, writer or main actors, but the designer is one of the ones that tends to get interviewed and then since 1995 we recorded every production so you can watch over 30 years worth of productions here for free.
What’s the biggest collection you have?
The biggest external collection we have is that of Jocelyn Herbert. She was our first female theatre designer back in the 1960s. When her collection was offered to us I asked staff members who had known her about her and the collections and they told me that ‘it feels like she’s coming home’.
She was quite influential in the design of the Olivier. Because Denys Lasdun hadn’t built a theatre before, there was a building committee created, including Jocelyn as one of the only women. Denys sent out questionnaires to this group about what people wanted in the auditorium and a lot of the questions were about things like ‘what’s the maximum distance from the front of the stage to the furthest away seat?’ and one was about whether to have technical machinery in the stage itself. Everyone came back and said ‘no’, Peter Hall said ‘absolutely not’ and Jocelyn Herbert said ‘you have to have a drum revolve, you have to offer designers that adaptability when they’re on set’ and she got her way and you just wonder what conversation happened in that meeting where she is one of very few women. This was in the 70s, for her to have had the power to have brought all those people over to her side, for them to decide they needed a drum revolve shows her character. Quite a few people to this day say she’s the only designer who can design for the Olivier as it was intended.
That’s why so many people felt like she was coming home. Her partner was George Devine and she was also instrumental in the design language of the English Stage Company which is now the Royal Court, so a lot of the productions that she staged were there, and she was best friends with Samuel Beckett and designed a lot of his UK premieres at the Royal Court. We have her full collection of 6000 drawings, all of which are digitised and we have all of her notebooks from when she was 16 until the day she died. We have a lot of photographs, her correspondence with people like David Storey, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Harrison, Samuel Beckett; you get a real sense from that correspondence, using her drawings, of the conversations happening and then you’ll see her working it out in the drawings. You might have Samuel Beckett saying in Happy Days ‘I really want it to be a blue sky’ and she responds ‘I think it should be an orange sky’ and you’ll see her storyboarding different options and you can see that she ends up with wants she wants every time, but you see that she did try out different ideas for each director or writer. She was quite a woman and we do a lot of projects with that collection, including with BA Theatre Design students at University of the Arts London. .
How does the collection get used?
Each year we do a big project with the BA Theatre Design at UAL. We do it over three weeks, introducing them to the whole of the Jocelyn Herbert Archive. Most of the students have never been in an archive before, so it’s quite a baptism of fire for them because they have to understand copyright, catalogue numbers and crediting so it is quite a lot for them. We tend to give them a couple of productions which are selected by the professors and the trustee of Jocelyn’s collection comes, as does Jocelyn’s daughter and several people will talk about Jocelyn from different perspectives. The students are given the brief of ‘respond’, it’s really broad and they are split into groups and all they are told is that they have to make one physical item each and then they can present it in whatever way they want to, so that could be a sketch from a production that they’ve decided to write, it could be a film, they could make a model and present it at a model showing. Every year they come up with something completely different! It’s really fantastic to see the students engage with that content and also to start questioning how they document their own process, because a lot of them have never had an active conversation about how they archive and the fact that just keeping something in an external hard drive is not ok and thinking about those things early in their career because they see just how much Jocelyn kept and now being the digital world it’s very easy just to save over your drafts and then you don’t actually have any documentation of your development from start to finish.
Do you keep any costume pieces and can a member of the public access any items held in the archive?
We keep costume designs and costume bibles. The actual costumes and props are held by our Costume and Props Hire department. They are a separate arm of the NT. If you want to look at a piece of costume you’d have to go to Costume Hire, and you can contact them through their website. They have a catalogue of everything that they hold so you’ll be able to ask them if they have a particular costume and you can actually visit their store and walk through all of the costumes and you can hire things as a member of the public.
In terms of designs for costumes and sets, we don’t as a rule receive them, because it’s the work of a freelancer so that’s something I am looking at, even if it’s just a copy of them that we receive. Quite often we will get something with the costume bible because the bible is put together by the costume staff so it’s the records that the staff need to remake a costume and sometimes that will include copies of designs and sometimes it won’t. The prompt script sometimes includes story boarding or some of the designs, the production office department sometimes includes photographs of the white white card model, it might include some set photographs but we don’t get the designs in full. We get the technical drawings both in the original CAD format but also in an accessible pdf format. We also have all the drawing office drawings, before the drawing department went digital, so we have tubes of all the hand drawn technical drawings.
We do hold a sample set of set models. They don’t belong to us, they belong to the designer, they are made of materials that tend to degrade quickly such as adhesives so they aren’t very archivally stable and they tend to be very large and difficult to store. So we have a set of about twenty of them and then if the Production department feels like there is a show that’s been particularly innovative or exciting then we will take in the model. This creates a sample set of models. What is amazing is when we get the model people and props because we don’t we don’t really get them we just get empty models, so we don’t get any of the props or any of the pieces most of the time. One exception is Antigone (2012) designed by Soutra Gilmour, where we do have all of the pieces and the people. We have produced a film on Antigone as part of our In Search of Greek Theatre series on YouTube where we have filmed the set model with furniture and people on stage and used a probe lens to take the viewer through the model and it looks beautiful.
How does design content make its way to the archive, is it at the designers discretion?
It is and quite a lot of people actually add to our collection that way, so we do have a lot of people who come across things in the attic or things that belong to their parents or family friends who passed away and have inherited them so we do receive quite a lot of donations in that way. If it was something that we felt we needed to purchase because it was so important for the history of the NT then we could seek out external funding sources to support us with that.
In terms of design content being used by each department, they all have a retention schedule. Every department has a spreadsheet or a crib sheet of things to send to the NT Archive, it will have a list of things that we’re looking for from each production and they will also have a list of things that we don’t want. We tell staff what we do with that content when it gets to the NT Archive. It is so important to explain that staff are not just sending something into a black hole, we show what we do with it, and tell them who the people are who will come in to use the materials. So when I tell the Costume teams that it is costume students who come in and want to see and learn how to make a Costume bible, they understand that these are the people that the NT will be looking to hire in a few years when they come out of uni and that means what the Costume department are doing in their daily job is being used to teach future practitioners. This was like a lightbulb moment for the Costume teams in what they sent to the Archive and how they organised it. The understanding was that it wasn’t just going to sit on a shelf in case they wanted it back, it’s going to be used for something actively. Materials tend to get sent through at the end of a repertory season for Costume and for Stage Management teams. So when they finish the rep season the teams tend to sit down, sort their bibles and send them over in a batch. Obviously with things going digital, a lot of the materials are on the server rather than necessarily physical, so we are in a stage now where materials are partly physical and partly digital, so we are figuring out how best to set up workflows for these teams to make transfer to the NT Archive as simple and pain free as possible.
How does a member of the public access your archives?
If you go onto our website, we have a full catalogue on there and the catalogue can be searched in various ways so if you’re interested in a particular production you can search by production. For example, every time we’ve done Antony and Cleopatra, you can click on whichever one you might be interested in and you can see when it was on, where, the full cast, the full creative team and it gives you a list of everything that we hold in the NT Archive related to that production. Or you can search for a person, so if you’re interested in Maggie Smith, you can see everything she’s appeared in. Or if you are interested in a particular role, if you are researching Hamlet for example, then you can search for each Hamlet, or if you are interested in a designer, you can search for anyone who’s been a designer at the NT or you can do a straightforward catalogue search. So that’s how you find out what we have and then you can either book in to visit us or send us an enquiry. We also run public tours, which can be booked online.
If you are unable to visit us in person, there are a variety of ways you can still access archive materials. If you are a school or educational organisation, you can sign up to the NT Collection or if you are a member of the public, you can access NT at Home. We have numerous free exhibitions online, short films on Greek Drama from our collections, and you can always check out the Black Plays Archive website, which we manage and host.
Do you have a favourite piece in the archive?
I think my favourite thing are these little projection slides that we have, which are a really unusual shape. We put them in an exhibition once and the Lighting team came to me to say how unusual they were. They’re 4-sided with one side curved, and they were made for the 21st anniversary of the building. These projections slides feature the heads of each of our artistic directors up to that date and they would have been projected onto one of the concrete blades in the building. I think it’s such a microcosm of that time, nowadays we would not put the current artistic director’s face on a blade for a party, it’s so strange to think that’s what we did. It was one of those things that came to us in an internal transfer envelope with a random note from someone saying ‘you might be interested in this’, with no context. Great that somebody sent it to us but quite often it’s like I’ve found a weird thing!
Did you have to become a detective to work out where they came from?
You can tell if you get a magnifying glass, they have the logo of the 21st anniversary so that would help, and then we talked to quite a few members of staff who remembered the projections were a thing we did.
What excites you most about the archive?
I think for me it’s seeing people’s reactions to it. You get quite used to what your archive holds and it never gets old seeing people react emotionally to that. We showed some University tutors from South Korea around a few years ago and I showed them the Hamlet 1963 prompt script, directed by Laurence Olivier starring Peter O’Toole and one of them just started crying. She couldn’t describe how important this was for her.
We have an unusually well stocked archive, it is massive and it is a lot more thorough and comprehensive than anybody expects, so seeing people’s reactions when they go into the basement or when they see what’s available digitally really makes it all worthwhile doing the job. We have made such strides in terms of digital and being able to take the NT Archive outside of London via platforms like NT at Home and the NT Collection, which is available to every state school in the UK for free, it is just amazing.
Do you collect anything about the National Theatre beyond information relating to its founding and what happens on its stages?
Yes, all the time. The NT Archive aims to document and preserve all facets of the work of the NT. So this covers our plays but also the day to day running of the organisation as a charity including its retail offers, funding, relationship to government, architecture, technical elements of theatre and much, much more.
Part of this is capturing the experience of those who work at or with the NT. It can be difficult within an archive to hear staff voices and so we have been running an oral history for over two decades, specifically aimed at capturing the experiences of staff who have been working at the NT for a long period of time. Over that time, we have recorded sessions with scenic artists, sound operators, stage door managers, stage managers, press officers and more. Their accounts of their time at the NT adds so much colour and vibrancy to the history of the organisation and ensures that some of those more anecdotal elements of life at the NT are captured for posterity.
During the Covid-19 pandemic we also carried out an oral history project to capture the involvement of some of the board, executive team, senior leadership and heads of department. This project aimed to document how the NT was working during the pandemic and some of the reasoning behind the decisions that were made during this time. We also interviewed some freelancers who were working with the NT just before or during the pandemic to document their experience. With over forty interviews, this collection is incredibly valuable as a record of how an arts organisation navigated the pandemic. These recordings will be closed for thirty years due to their sensitive nature but I hope that one day they can be used to build a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic and how arts organisations responded.
Are there any big plans for the archive that you’d like to share?
One project at the moment is digital preservation, which is a huge project for the NT Archive. It’s looking at how we preserve digital assets forever, so how do you make sure a Word document can be viewed in 150 years time. It is a project that we have had in the pipeline for a long time and we got sign-off just before the pandemic so we started implementing our solution in 2020. That is incredibly exciting because it is all of NT Live recordings, all of our broadcast arm, every single digital asset that the NT creates that we bring into the NT Archive needs to be digitally preserved and so knowing that that content is going to be preserved forever and accessible means everyone can sleep better at night. This work is supporting projects like NT at Home and the NT Collection, ensuring that those video assets are safe in perpetuity. That’s a really exciting part of what we’re doing and it isn’t shiny and exciting compared to theatre shows but the NT Archive is here to reflect what’s happened and theatre is so ephemeral, it is so difficult to capture. The idea that the NT‘s heritage will be made safe for future generations is fantastic and in this project is a big investment in that future by the National and appreciation of the value of that history.
How does the archive fit in with education and the curriculum in schools?
The NT Archive makes the National Theatre kind of ‘rep proof’ in terms of the syllabus so if we don’t have Shakespeare onstage for 9 months, school students can still come to the NT Archive to view a relevant recording. This is why the NT Collection is such a vital resource, as it now streams 70 productions into classrooms around the world. 1 in 4 state secondary school students in the UK has engaged with recordings on the NT Collection, which is a fantastic number but there is further to reach.
We have the Black Plays Archive, which is a website that documents the first professional production in the UK of plays written by Black British, African, and Caribbean playwrights. Not all of those plays have been staged at the National but this is a database that brings together all of those first productions in the UK and then tells you where they were and then it tells you which archive to go to to find out more information. So that may be here, that may be the V&A, it might be the British Library etc. There’s lots of resources on that website, whether that’s interviews, monologue guides, essays, or recordings of rehearsed readings.
We have two PhD students working on the Black Plays Archive in partnership with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. One of these students, Nadine, created the That Black Theatre Podcast as part of their PhD, which is a 12-part series taking you chronologically through the BPA looking at female playwrights in BPA starting with Una Marson back in the 1930s. It’s really good, it’s a fantastic introduction to the Black Plays Archive.
We’ve also got some teachers writing up guidance for schools about how to access the Black Plays Archive, particularly if teachers aren’t familiar with those plays; there’s about 800 plays in there just for reference and so it’s more about how you approach the Black Plays Archive and how you build up confidence in talking about those plays with classes.
What would you like anyone reading this to know about the Archive?
I would say that the NT Archive, like the National Theatre, is here for everyone. I would love practitioners to use it more and I think the NT Archive is uniquely positioned to work with practitioners.
As part of my PhD I’ve done a segmentation of our users and half of our researchers are academics or students. Then a quarter of the users are the general public and then you have theatre practitioners which is another quarter so that’s about probably 1,000 a year of our researchers coming from practitioner background.
Most of the practitioners come from London and that’s really interesting because the academics come from all over the world and practitioners just from London so we need to figure out why that is.
I would love to work with more practitioners and to run more projects with practitioners in training to open up the conversation about archiving early on in their careers and I’d love to work collaboratively with practitioners during their time at the NT to make sure we are documenting their work really well. I would love to do more with the BA Theatre design courses, we can now do it virtually so we can do that with any university. It’s more of a kind of invitation to come in and see what you can do with the NT Archive and its collections.
What have you learnt about theatre design that you might not have known before you started as a theatre archivist.
Probably around the collaboration point. Working with Jocelyn’s collection and talking to a lot of people who knew her, hearing about and how she led the way with that collaborative process with the writer and the director, which was something that was quite new at that point, but it’s something that’s become so pivotal in the field. In her collection you can see this collaboration through the correspondence, for example, through all the postcards Tony Harrison had sent her from his holiday in Greece. Understanding that has been really important. During my PhD I have been following the progress of the production Till The Stars Come Down and getting to understand a lot more about the creative processes behind the scenes. This has been a fascinating opportunity to learn more about, most of all, the collaboration that happens between the artistic team, cast, and so many of the NT staff. I am hoping to carry this learning through into how we document this work so that we can create a more representative archive of performance for our researchers.
Erin Lee is Head of Archive at the National Theatre, where she has worked since 2012. She is also a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama where she is researching how to archive the development period of productions at the National Theatre in London. She gained an MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University and an MA in Classics from the University of Oxford. She sits on the APGRD’s International Advisory Board and BAFTA’s Heritage Committee and she stepped down from the board of the Association of Performing Arts Collections in 2023 after nine years. She has most recently edited a special issue of the Archive and Records journal in the UK on new professional research, presented at the TaPRA postgraduate symposium in London, UK, and conferences of the American Society for Theatre Research in Providence, RI, and the Association of Business Historians in Newcastle, UK.
