The Irish Theatre Institute's monumental Irish Playography site provides detailed information on over 2,000 Irish plays and productions, writes Karlin Lillington
With the launch of the final phase of a major internet archive on Irish theatre, a contemporary bard might say the play's now the online thing.
As the final 1904-1949 piece of the Irish Theatre Institute's monumental Irish Playography went live earlier this month, detailed information on more than 2,000 Irish plays and productions, and contributions from 11,000 people, are now freely available online.
Along with full bibliographical information, the playography offers many unpublished plays as downloadable PDF scripts, with the intention of expanding this to include out-of-print works.
"Our goal with this project is to revitalise the repertoire," says Caroline Williams, research director, Irish Theatre Institute. "We've gotten a lot attention from peer organisations in Europe as a model because there was no model for what we did," says Williams.
What they've produced is a stunning archive that includes details about productions that are often overlooked - costume designers, electricians, scenery makers, as well as the actors, playwrights and directors. Even more obvious information - company repertoires, for example - risked being lost forever if not documented, she says.
The playography was born out of a project dreamt up by then-project director Loughlin Deegan, now a producer with Rough Magic theatre company, to publish a print handbook that would list new plays in Ireland. But the possibilities of putting this and a broader range of information online and having it become a public, searchable resource quickly became apparent, says Williams.
In 2001, the Irish Theatre Institute met with Dublin web design company X Communications to work out how such an archive and resource might look and feel, what could be made available, and how to gather and enter information on such a wide range of topics.
The resulting archive site became a major, long-term project that has been launched in three phases over the past five years, with the final piece put into place earlier this month at a launch attended by over 150 theatre figures from the past and present.
"The institute came and wanted to know if it was possible to do something like this, and if so, what could they do with the site," says Ciaran Burke, operations manager, X Communications.
"We sat down, worked out what kind of information they had, and how it would link. The sense was that they wanted to take advantage of what the internet could offer."
Williams adds: "X Communications brought a great sensitivity to it. Ciaran is a theatre-goer, which was so helpful."
Burke says the biggest technical challenge in the project was "handling all the information back to 1904. It's been one of X Communications' great successes, something we're very proud of."
Having a greenfield project is always a bit easier, says Burke, because the structure can be worked out and then imposed from the start.
Williams says a huge amount of time was spent deciding what sort of fields would be used in the database. There are 33 fields of entry for each play, for example.
Themes - "the bluntest tool", according to Williams - were a difficult area, mainly because they are so subjective. But even listing authors caused problems because usually there is one, but other times perhaps a three or even five-person collaboration.
Then, the institute found cases where they had different people with the same name - five John Kavanaghs, for example - and many phone calls had to be made, politely trying to verify who a person was and what productions they had been involved with.
"The pseudonyms were a nightmare as well," says Williams. People in the period just completed (1904 to 1949) particularly liked to use pseudonyms, seemingly to separate the different jobs they might do: an actor under one name, a writer under another.
The flexibility of the database helped to solve those problems, says Burke. It is one of the more complicated databases the company has produced, with 116 related database tables and 470 stored queries. That means when a user calls up a play, the page is a mesh of hyperlinks that take the user to further information.
Williams says the sheer scale of the repertoire posed the biggest challenge to those working on the project, despite the fact that their parameters were quite restrictive, limiting entries to professional productions only and excluding most fringe performances and pantomimes.
They had no sense of the number of plays and people involved with them at the beginning but in the end, received help from over 11,000 theatre practitioners in compiling the playography.
As they moved back in time, they often had to rely on reviews and publicity, as well as programmes. The Linen Hall Library in Belfast has a wonderful collection of programmes and scripts that was crucial, she says, and Dublin's Pearse Street Library also had very helpful collections.
What surprised her most? "I suppose the amazing characters that emerged, that made the work," says Williams.
"Lennox Robinson, for example - he directed 95 new plays and there are 25 he wrote. I learned that [ writer and playwright] Jennifer Johnston appeared as a child actor. The amount of work people did is staggering."
She especially enjoyed preparing the section on the early years. "The early phase was fascinating, just fascinating. There are the names that are so well known to us - Lady Gregory, etc - just to track what they were doing, the minutiae, produced some surprising things.
For example, it was well known that Annie Horniman provided funding to the Abbey, but she also designed the costumes. I think there's a lot to be discovered in this material."
She loves that the way the online archive is structured is completely democratic and egalitarian. "A lunchtime play at Bewley's will get the same attention as Dancing at Lughnasa."
Help from a distinguished advisory board helped shape the project, too. Advisors included well-known theatre writers, producers, directors and actors: Ben Barnes, Phelim Donlon, Christopher Fitz-Simon. John Fairleigh, Garry Hynes, Eleanor Methven and Tony O Dálaigh.
One unexpected delight has been the ability to use the database to produce some fascinating statistics and tables on Irish theatre over the past century-plus. The institute decided to delve into the archive in this way to provide some snapshots for a findings report issued at the launch.
"Usually people use it to do a specific search, but we wanted to do something on a large scale and see what you can say about it overall." says Burke.
The data include a large two-page spread showing a bar graph, year by year, of the number of new plays and adaptations since 1904 (eight in 1904; 54 in 2005). There's a gender pie chart (76 per cent of the repertoire is by male writers) and a listing of playwrights with three or more new plays since 2000.
Information will continue to be added on a regular basis. The archive features an easy-to-use forms element, where an archivist can enter information, and a new entry can be displayed for private viewing before it is posted live to the site. About 50-60 new plays will be added yearly, estimates Williams.
"The playography is very much the people, the actors and the writers and the production people that give life to Irish theatre," says Williams.
"And there's the thrill of making something. We've made something."
• The website can be located at www.irishplayography.com
Playography: what is it?
•Every professionally produced play in Ireland North and South since 1904
• More than 2,000 plays
• Nearly 800 playwrights
• More than 4,000 performers
• Most prolific playwright: Lady Gregory, with 36 plays or adaptations professionally produced
• Size of database: 80 megabytes, with 116 related database tables and 470 stored queries
• Top 10 Google searches: 1) Brian Friel; 2) Martin McDonagh; 3) Conor McPherson; 4) Irish plays; 5) Paul Mercier; 6) Irish Playography; 7) Marina Carr; 8) Alone It Stands; 9) Stones In His Pockets; 10) Frank McGuinness
