INNOVATION PROFILE NUIGTHE ABBEY Theatre and NUI Galway have come together to digitise the Abbey Archive for future generations. It is hoped that the digitisation project will unlock a new era of theatre scholarship and will shed new light on the history of Irish theatre and Irish life.
Entitled A Digital Journey through Irish Theatre History, the project involves the digitisation of almost two million Abbey posters, prints, programmes, costume designs, stage sets, prompt sheets, books of account, boar minutes and so on.
When the complete collection goes online in about three years’ time, it will “undoubtedly be the biggest digital theatre archive in the world”, says Dr Patrick Lonergan, director of drama programmes at NUI Galway.
The importance of this project, both in terms of the preservation of the Abbey archive and for the future cultural life of Ireland, cannot be overstated. No other cultural institution is as inextricably bound with Ireland’s birth and evolution as an independent nation, and for the past 108 years the theatre has been seen by many as the measure of the country’s artistic pulse.
The Abbey’s establishment in 1904 was based on an ethos of using art to overcome the many divisions that existed in Irish society, and it has remained committed to that value ever since, often seeking to reveal important truths about our nation at times when it was unpopular to do so.
Its ability to provoke debate was evident from the beginning, most famously in the riots that greeted the premiere production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and in the controversy that greeted the premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926.
Indeed, that latter event was a key moment for the development of the new State, becoming a crucial test of the nation’s attitudes towards freedom of speech.
The preservation of the archive for historical reasons alone would be worthwhile, but its artistic contribution too is vitally important and not just within Ireland. The Abbey has gone on to have a worldwide impact with its plays appearing on Broadway, at the Edinburgh International Festival, in London’s West End, and throughout Europe. Today, almost every major academic textbook about theatre features a section on the Abbey and its significance.
The most important aspect of the project is that it will preserve the Abbey’s collection for future generations. Much of the collection is in a very fragile state due to age or as a result of damage caused when the original theatre was burned down in 1951. The digitisation project will protect that material, allowing it to be used by researchers.
It will do a lot more than simply preserve, however. It will contribute to a new understanding of the intersection between science and technology and the arts at NUI Galway.
“When students come here as 18 year olds they tend to think of the arts and sciences as very separate things”, Lonergan explains. “This project brings the two together and shows how the creative arts and science and technology can be combined.”
NUI Galway became involved because of its proven expertise and track record in the area of theatre archive digitisation. “We had been acquiring and digitising theatre archives for some time and that’s how the possibility of a partnership with the Abbey emerged”, says Prof Sean Ryder, acting director of the Moore Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway.
“We have developed considerable expertise in the digitisation of archives such as these. Digitisation is increasingly being seen as a way of conserving, preserving, and making archive materials accessible to researchers and the public.”
Accessibility is a key issue here as there is little point in having an archive if it can’t be properly accessed by future generations. “Sometimes preserving an archive like this means restricting access to protect it physically,” Ryder explains. “But digitising allows that access. This is a public good as it opens up the archive much more to researchers. There is a great benefit to being able to sit at a desk and access all this material wherever you are.”
The project will also catalogue the material and this is vitally important. The archive is enormous, running to almost two million items and the theatre has had a full-time archivist for over 15 years. But large parts of the collection remain uncatalogued.
“The project will mean that for the first time researchers will be able to view everything in the archive at the click of a button”, says Lonergan. “This is an enormously exciting prospect and is likely to have a major impact on what we know about Irish drama and, by extension, Irish society and its development since 1904.”
It also has the potential to change our understanding of Irish drama. The history of Irish drama is largely understood to be the history of Irish plays – that is, of the written script prepared by dramatists. As a full multimedia archive, the digital archive will provide researchers with access to the full range of materials associated with the theatre performance: not just the scripts but also the visual materials such as costume, set, and lighting designs, sound materials including music scores and sound effects, and the supporting materials such as advertisements, press releases and reviews.
The project will also make available material about the productions – the work of important Irish actors such as Barry Fitzgerald, Sara Allgood, Siobhán McKenna, Donal McCann, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Colm Meaney, Fiona Shaw and many others.
And it will tell the hidden stories of what went on behind the scenes, giving a valuable insight into board meetings, correspondence, and so on. In this sense the archive could revolutionise the study of Irish theatre.
Lonergan gives one example of this insight. “When you look back to the minute books of the board meetings of 1925 you get a sense of what was happening at the time”, he says. “WB Yeats was in the chair and the Abbey had just become the first theatre in the English-speaking world to get a State subsidy. But that came at the price of a state nominee on the board.
“In that same year O’Casey submitted The Plough and the Stars to the Abbey for production. The play called into question the very basis of the Irish State and was clearly controversial. The minutes show that there was a vote on whether to stage it and that it was carried by three votes to one with only the State nominee voting against.”
Our understanding of the history of Irish writing may also change. The Abbey is associated with almost all of the key writers of the 20th century in Ireland.
The archive will make available material about WB Yeats, Lady Gregory, JM Synge, Seán O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, and many others. It also features important material about international writers, such as the great American dramatists Eugene O’Neill and Sam Shepard. Some of this material has never before been seen by researchers and it is believed that new discoveries are very likely.
The project highlights two of the most important features of contemporary Ireland – the richness of its cultural traditions and its capacity for technological innovation.
“The Abbey Theatre is one of the world’s great national theatres, and Irish drama is one of the world’s great national traditions,” says Lonergan concludes. “The archive will protect its legacy and make it available much more widely than ever before. We hope to complete the digitisation in about three years’ time and to have made a number of projects and exhibitions available to the public before then.”
