A theatre archive going online next week, after years of planning, aims to 'revitalise' the repertoire. Rosita Boland reports.

Next Tuesday, at 7 p.m., the click of a mouse will open the doors on a new online archive of more than 1,000 Irish plays, some famous, some less so, some that have never before seen the light of day. According to its founders, "the playography will not only define the Irish theatrical repertoire for the first time but will also revitalise that repertoire by reintroducing many lost scripts and providing a gateway for locating and clearing rights for all existing scripts".

The website, www.irishplayography.com, which has been produced by the Theatre Shop, has been almost three years in development. It archives 1,166 English-language plays, most of which have premièred in Ireland since 1975. Of these, 142 are for children. Ít also includes significant plays by second- generation Irish writers, such as Martin McDonagh. And there are plays by Irish writers such as Conor McPherson and Anne Devlin, whose work was first staged outside Ireland.

"In 1998, when the first edition of the Irish Theatre Handbook was published, it had an appendix of new Irish plays published in the last 10 years," explains Loughlin Deegan, the project's director. Siobhán Bourke, founder and co-producer of the Theatre Shop, had the idea of turning the appendix into something bigger and much more extensive, and so, with their colleague Jane Daly, the idea for the website formed.

Given the number of plays involved, a tremendous amount of research was involved. An advisory panel of six - Ben Barnes, Phelim Donlon, Christopher FitzSimon, Garry Hynes, Eleanor Methven and Tony Ó Dalaigh - met the team twice a year. There were also eight part-time researchers. They gathered material from a variety of sources, among them theatre companies, the Linen Hall Library, the theatre archive at University College Dublin, playwrights, personal contacts and old programmes.

You can search the site in a variety of ways, such as the number of cast members in a play, the number of acts it has, the year of production and the subject matter. The site is very detailed, including a short synopsis of each play, the venue and date of production, a short biography of the playwright and the names of the original cast. Links bring you to details of script availability, production rights and translations.

"We think the primary users will be theatre directors and academics," says Deegan. "The secondary users will be drama students, actors, journalists and amateur-dramatics societies."

Most of the €145,000 that the project has cost has been covered by the Arts Council; an anonymous donor also contributed €25,000. Access to the site is free, but there will be a fee of between €15 and €20 to download unpublished scripts, all of which have had their authors' permission to be on the site. Two-thirds of the fee will go to the author. The site is also linked to www.amazon.com, from which published scripts are available.

There may be 1,116 plays on the site, but you won't find a line of a review attached to any of them. "We made a decision not to include reviews, because reviews are subjective," Deegan says. "I believe Irish theatre producers have not had absolute faith in the standard of theatre criticism in this country. We wanted to present plays in a neutral and democratic form."

It is, however, a missed opportunity that the website does not have even the most token element of critical appraisal of any of its plays. There would, for example, be a quite justified outcry were a new play by a professional Irish writer not reviewed by the national media.

As with every other form of literature, some plays are better than others. This doesn't mean the poorer ones don't have a role in an archive, but it would be useful to users of the website to be able to put the plays in some sort of critical context. This is as true of lesser-known work as it is of well-known work, especially as the website does not mention how long or short the first runs of these plays were.

The plan now is to develop the project over time, going right back to the foundation of the Abbey, in 1904. The next period to be covered, working backwards, will be 1975-1950, which they hope to have completed by the end of next year.

Fewer new plays were produced in this period, which should make the job slightly easier, but, conversely, the further back the productions, the more difficult it is to find the accompanying material that the archive needs.

The team behind Irish Playography also hope there may be a time when funding is available to create a similar site for Irish-language plays. In the meantime, they will continue to update the current site by adding new plays to it.

[ www.irishplayography.comOpens in new window ]

What's in it:

Strangest titles: Three Bunches Of Blood And A Lump Of Fog, by Sean McCarthy (1983); The Lugnaquilla Gorilla, by Jim Doherty (1983); Sheep, Shite And Desolation, by Nell McCafferty (1994)

Longest titles: Cries From Casement As His Bones Are Brought To Dublin, adapted by Paddy Scull (1976); Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme, by Frank McGuinness (1985)

Most adapted play: Lorca's The House Of Bernarda Alba. Versions by Sebastian Barry, Lynne Parker, Aidan Mathews and Frank McGuinness

Most prolific playwright: Frank McGuinness, with 31 plays, including adaptations

Play with most characters: Native City, by Paul Mercier (117)

Number of plays with priests as characters: 43

Shortest play: The 10-minute Tall Girls Have Everything, by Stewart Parker

Number of plays by female writers: 284

Number of plays by male writers: 943