At a charity shop in Stockbridge in 2007, I bought a complete run of programmes from the Edinburgh Gateway Company, 1953-1965. During these twelve seasons at the 542-seat theatre on Elm Row, this company produced 150 plays, establishing the non-profit, subsidised repertory movement in Edinburgh some years after the pioneers in Glasgow, St Andrews, Perth, Dundee and Pitlochry, thus paving the way for the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company from 1965. Many of these samples have superb woodcuts:
The programme is the only tangible thing the spectator takes away from the performance – perhaps their ticket is tucked inside. Programmes are often hoarded for a lifetime, an aide-memoire for elusive titles, parts and names, sometimes thrown away during a move or after death so that very few are preserved. Yet for the theatre and social historian the programme is a primary research document, sometimes the only record of a production.
I have edited over 500 programmes during my career, often writing editorials for theatres that I managed, articles for contextualising the play in repertory theatres at Northampton, Ipswich and Newbury, and thousands of actors and creative team ‘biographies’. (There are many ways of compiling these - I favour the list-form, but it is important to be consistent in style). Sometimes, the programmes were published by the theatre, sometimes by a specialist, such as Stillwell Darby & Co Ltd of Ilford, or John Good Holbrook from 1989. In either case, a critical factor would be my calculation of sales predictions (one in three theatregoers?) and print order for what had to be a very profitable income source. In Australia, we published our own programmes at the Nimrod Theatre of Sydney (given free) and State Theatre Company at the Adelaide Festival Centre, and in North Queensland they were printed on the obverse of an A1 show poster. For commercial transfers at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, it was an important part of the negotiation to retain programme control and profits - it was here that I encountered the publisher Brian Nebenzahl of Playbill Australia Pty Ltd, whose company has since become a one-stop supplier of merchandsising for sport, music, venues and entertainment.
It was at Northampton Repertory Theatre, my first job in arts administration when aged 18, that I met the top theatre historians and collectors Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson. They were friends of Willard Stoker, the Director of Productions, and they told me what I had to do to produce the best programmes. Every theatre sent copies to them, so that their Collection, housed from 2011 at Bristol University, has over 150,000 samples! I went to their house in Sydenham for more lessons in theatre publications. Northampton Rep had an excellent reference shelf, including a complete run of Who's Who in the Theatre. I recall asking Bill Bland Wood, the general manager, to authorise a letterpress block for the playwright John Dryden to be pictured in the programme for All for Love. I ordered too many copies and the extra £2 expenditure sent the edition into loss; no more pictures were allowed for six months, until a full page (one colour) cover image for The Boys in the Band!
I also collected programmes from other eras - of course, many fewer than Mander & Mitchenson! As well as the basic details of an entertainment, they contain much extra information, ranging from ‘before’ and ‘after’ pieces, entr’actes, productions in rehearsal, and forthcoming attractions, ticket prices, times of performances, number of intervals, scene changes, staff lists, illustrations from rehearsals, costume designs and scenery, and of course the advertisements which set the programme in its social context. They also reflect the different tastes of theatre managers and how certain theatres are associated with a particular type of entertainment. Many old programmes (such as my run from the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, 1909-1914) have succinct remarks added by their former owner, and reviews from newspapers have been appended, so that public opinion is represented. I am surprised how often programmes fail to state the dates of performance - in most of these Gateway Theatre examples the year is omitted.
The theatre programme fulfils a basic need, telling us what will happen, informing us whether this is our type of entertainment, enabling us to discuss the production after the performance, although amounts of editorial have fluctuated over time and between theatres. The bill of the play was first printed in England as a broadside in the late seventeenth century and was used as an advertisement. By the middle of the nineteenth century the playbill had grown to unwieldy proportions with the theatre managers desire to include as much information as possible in order to attract new audiences. Examples of this can be seen in the copy from the Theatre Royal Edinburgh and Beverley Theatre playbills on this website.
This resulted in the development of the smaller, more manageable programme, which by the 1880s was issued by most provincial and all London theatres. The new development of many types of printing presses in an age when individuality was prized meant that theatres were able to compete with each other in the size, style, elegance and originality of their programmes.
Little has been written about the history of the programme, since it is a by-product of the history of the theatre, but in our age of scholarly research and the use of databases to extract and classify information from printed sources, the full potential of the programme is being realised. The programme was widely used by Diana Howard in her research for London Theatres and Music Halls 1850-1950. Programmes are the main source of information for J. P. Wearing’s sixteen volumes The London Stage: A Calendar of Plays and Performance 1890-1984. The abstracted information in these calendars is superb, and yet when consulting the actual programmes from which the information is gleaned, like those from the Edinburgh Gateway Theatre, there is an immediacy that cannot be reproduced by a book, a better feeling of theatre in performance.
Further reading:
A. D. Mackie, Robert Kemp, Lennox Milne, Tom Fleming and Moultrie R. Kelsall,The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965, Edinburgh, St Giles Press, 1965.
Michael Elder, What Do You During the Day? A reminiscence about the Edinburgh Gateway Theatre Company, Edinburgh, Eldon Productions, 2003.
Ian Brown, (ed.), Journey’s Beginning:The Gateway Theatre Building and Company 1884-1965, Bristol, Intellect, 2004.
George Speaight, Collecting Theatre Memorabilia, Ashbourne, Moorland Publishing, 1988.
Another important theatre collector was Gabrielle Enthoven, one of the first to appreciate the importance of theatre programmes. She presented her collection to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1924 and it was immediately apparent that the programme constituted a unique record of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century theatre. She wrote the entry ‘Playbill, Programme (English)’, for the first edition of Phyllis Hartnoll, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 1951. This does not appear after the third edition of 1971.
