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THEATRE ARCHIVE

collection of original documents, production photographs, plans, posters, business records and much more

The Grand Theatre holds a large collection of original documents, production photographs, plans, posters, business records and much more.

We are presently cataloguing and preparing an online archive. The purpose is to help promote interest in the Grand in every dimension, and to widen access to its illustrious production and business history from 1894 to date. A new archive strategy will also be published here in 2007/8.

Blackpool is a town rich in showbusiness and popular theatre history. Our archive promises to be an exciting adjunct to our first role as a lively theatre. In the longer term, as National Theatre of Variety the Grand hopes to become a ‘Fully Registered Museum’ with a small research centre dedicated to the study of British light entertainment. We will be working with academic partners to further this strategy.

The Grand Theatre honorary archivists are Linda Tolson and Geoff Tolson. Our chronicler is Barry Band. You are welcome to submit questions about Blackpool theatre history: we will often have the answer, or suggest researchers and theatre historians who can help. We regret that there is no general access to our archives at present, at the theatre.

We welcome donations of Grand Theatre programmes, posters and souvenirs that supporters may wish to offer.


THE READING OF THE PLAYBILL

Playbills are the essence of theatrical antiquarianism. They are the solid, comfortable, substantive stuff of theatre history. Long ago they have been extracted and calendared, charted and published, in many substantial volumes from which one may learn exactly how many times each Theatre Royal gave A School for Scandal or A New way to Pay Old Debts, where and when a vanished host of performers made their London debuts and in which roles they appeared. From them we know the companies, the plays, the thousand performances of Hamlet and the evanescent appearance of farces that did not make it to author's benefit on the third night. The body of theatre history hangs upon these bones; its face, its gestures are familiar to us from these types and borders. A real theatre historian can tell from the evolution of the types and the changing appearance of the royal arms what period any bill belongs to, and not only at the legitimate London houses, for their style reverberates through the announcements of the provincial and minor stages, only slightly lag of their brothers. In every metropolitan and provincial library, local record office and private collection lie the enticing bundles of bills: pasted into leather-bound volumes as they are at the Garrick Club, or enclosed in acid-free envelopes; meticulously electronically catalogued, or ignorantly summed up on old index cards. However provided, they make the true researcher light up with desire. This is the real stuff: the man in the pit electrified by Kean, enticed by Jordan, awed by Siddons or thundered at by Forrest, held this flimsy page in his hand, on the very night that it records. It is from this source, more than any other, perhaps, that our conviction that we feel we know what happened in the theatrical past ultimately stems.

- Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 38-39


Backstage provides a single point of entry for finding and searching performing arts collections in the United Kingdom. It is converting the catalogues of existing specialist performing arts collections into electronic format, in order to develop a national performing arts clump allowing cross-searching at item level. Searching theatre collections and archives www.backstage.ac.uk

The principal collections at Blackpool are those of the Grand Theatre and a massive amount of material housed at Blackpool Winter Gardens.



No Orchids For Miss Blandish' at the Grand Theatre. The James Hadley Chase thriller (1939) was adapted for the stage by the author, director Robert Nesbitt and screen writer Val Guest. The tough crime story played seven weeks in the summer season of 1942, starring Robert Newton as the ruthless Slim Grissom.



This 1920s drawing of the Grand Theatre auditorium and stage offers clues for designing the new seating. Note the hanging light fittings in the Gallery slips, no longer present, and the different stage curtain pelmet, probably added after the sale of the Grand by Thomas Sergenson (for £47,500) to Blackpool Tower Company in 1909.