Simon Callow on Saving the Theatre Museum

[Denis Salter]

Dear Colleagues,
This is a passionate and well-informed argument by Simon Callow about why the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden ought to be saved.  Perhaps it would be worth writing letters / emails of concern (again!) to the V & A Director, Mark Jones.
--Denis Salter.
>From the Evening Standard, published online at thisislondon.co.uk
Don't give up on the Theatre Museum
By Simon Callow 31.10.06 
 


 
Simon Callow says the Theatre Museum has a unique combination of the scholarly and interactive 

Look here too
It looks like curtains for the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced that it intends to re-absorb it into its main South Kensington operation. 
Despite considerable success with the Theatre Museum's innovative educational programme, some smashing small- scale exhibitions and an unparalleled video record of virtually every significant production of recent times, it is to be ousted from its central premises. 

Money is tight in the museum world and the Covent Garden building is difficult, all plans to expand or transform it having failed to attract funding from either the public or the private sector. To the trustees of the V&A, simply returning it to its former base no doubt seems an elegant solution to a number of problems. 

But from where I sit, as a member of the Theatre Museum committee appointed, five years ago, to put the theatrical profession's point of view, it can only seem to be a retreat. 

It's a pretty humiliating one at that, taking the organisation out of the theatre and into the museum, a betrayal of the triumphant impulse that took it in the opposite direction. 

Some 30 years ago, Roy Strong, the splendidly flamboyant director of the V&A, all floppy hats and Zapata moustachios, and as much impresario as scholar, acknowledged the growing pressure from our profession to accept that the magnificent theatre collection, quietly gathering dust in South Kensington for half a century before that, was different in kind from any of his other collections. 

The most physical of all the arts needed to be much more actively visible than the tapestries, ceramics and golden chalices so exquisitely but reverently displayed in the genteel surroundings of the Royal Borough. The theatre collection needed presentation, it needed context and it needed to be located in the heart of the West End. 

Strong and the head of the theatre collection, Alexander Schouvaloff, went out looking for premises. They rejected Somerset House and found instead, in the newly transformed Covent Garden, the former head offices of a fruiterers, right opposite the Opera House, two minutes from Drury Lane, ideally situated between the old 18th-century theatre district and today's. 

In 1987, the doors of the Theatre Museum were opened with great fanfare, to the acclaim of the press and the profession and to the great interest of the public, who thronged through its galleries in large numbers. 

All that enthusiasm was not misplaced. The idea is a great one. It is obvious that the theatre - including opera, ballet, mime and all the allied performing arts - which is so central to the identity of the West End, and such a focus for Britain's image abroad, should be celebrated in a dedicated building in which it can share its secrets, its techniques, its history and its processes with the public. 

The Theatre Museum is perfectly placed to do three things: to intrigue and inform audiences; to stimulate a profession often so busy with the here and now that it hardly has time to reflect on its own history or learn from what is going on elsewhere in the world; and to feed into the general education system, in which theatre currently plays so woefully small a part. 

It is often objected that the idea of a Theatre Museum is a paradox. Far from it. It is a unique combination of the scholarly - the collection, unrivalled in the world, which consists of documents, objects, complete archives and video recordings, all superbly preserved, catalogued and annotated - and the interactive, offering brilliantly imaginative demonstrations of the physical crafts that are involved in making a piece of theatre, breaking it down and putting it back together before the viewers' eyes, involving people directly in make-up, costume, light, sound, space. 

Theatre arts are all arts of the possible: physical, tangible, transient phenomena. Even at its most exquisitely achieved, the magic is still rough. It needs to be seen, smelt, touched. None of this can happen within the quite properly sedate portals of the V&A, nor should it. The Theatre Museum is the place for it. 

So what's the problem? First, the building Strong and Schouvaloff found proved, for all its perfect location, to have severe limitations in terms of public access and adaptability for major exhibitions, which are so important for attracting new audiences. Second, the Theatre Museum's relationship with the V&A has, from the earliest days, proved awkward, precisely because of its quite distinct character, to which the usual curatorial rules simply don't apply. 

Strong and Schouvaloff fell out spectacularly early on and the love affair has never fully resumed, though ironically, the present V&A director, Mark Jones, has been more publicly supportive of the Theatre Museum than any of his predecessors, seeing its potential to change the profile of the V&A. The stumbling block in this instance has been the increasingly limited premises. 

Various brilliant plans have been drawn up to adapt it, but they have all been rejected by the Heritage Lottery Fund, mostly on grounds of cost (upwards of £12 million) and the future has been clouded by recrimination and intrigue. Twice, the Evening Standard has fought a campaign on the Theatre Museum's behalf and twice it has been reprieved. 

The truth of the matter is that in the unending negotiations - the compromises and counter-compromises - between South Kensington and Covent Garden, the original vision has been lost and the museum is perceived as unendingly involved in a rearguard defensive action. 

We should stop apologising. London and the theatre deserve the best theatre museum in the world. It should not be a mere adjunct of the V&A, though the superb work of cataloguing and conserving with which that great organisation is associated must, of course, continue. It is to be hoped that other great theatrical organisations - the Opera House, the National Theatre, the RSC - will work in conjunction with it to show off their rarely glimpsed treasures. We have the material. We have the skills. We have the imagination. 

What is needed is a grand - and theatrical - New Theatre Museum in the centre of town, a kind of theatrical Disneyland, filled with dramatised exhibitions, full of sound and light and sensation, plus demonstrations of the latest theatre technology, with major themed shows - like the great 1950s Diaghilev exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival, which had a huge influence on the theatre of its time - featuring regularly. 

The building could be custom-built, although personally I'd favour a premises with theatrical associations. Perfect for the purpose would have been the Hippodrome, that Cinderella of West End auditoriums, abandoned as a theatre, doomed as a disco, a shabby and seedy monument on the edge of Leicester Square, dense with theatre history. But it is not available. Next year, it becomes a casino. The New Theatre Museum could be a bastion against the casinoisation of London. 

It will not be cheap. Given a clear objective like this, however, the theatre and the whole profession will fight for it all the way, as it never has done so far; between them the Mayor's office, the Society of London Theatres, the City of Westminster and VisitLondon should commit themselves to what would surely become an attraction to rival and even outstrip the Eye, Madame Tussauds and the Tower of London. The Olympics gives us the perfect deadline.

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" . . . we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and ignorance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the thing."--Robert Fisk
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"In 2005, the world . . . pass[ed] the trillion-dollar mark in the expenditure, annually, on arms. We're fighting for $50 billion annually for foreign aid for Africa: the military total outstrips human need by 20 to 1. Can someone please explain to me our contemporary balance of values?" --Stephen Lewis.
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Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montréal, QC
H3A 2T6
Tel (514) 398 6592 
Regular Fax (514) 398 8146
Computer Fax (309) 294 0444
denis.salter at mcgill.ca
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