Memories of Pinter wanted: 50th anniversary of first stage play to be captured by British Library

Students at Bristol University are marking the 50th anniversary of the debut of Harold Pinter's first stage play, The Room which was originally performed by a student group in the Bristol University Drama Studio in 1957, with their own production in the Old Squash Court Theatre on 24 - 26 May 2007.

The Theatre Archive Project team (www.bl.uk/theatrearchive) hope to track down those involved with that first performance to capture their memories of the production for a series of oral history interviews which will be conserved at the British Library and Bristol Theatre Collections, as well as being made accessible to researchers online. The project team are looking for the original cast and backstage team (of both The Room and the accompanying piece The Rehearsal), audience members, reviewers. anyone with memories of that first production is invited to contact the British Library.

The Room was written by Pinter in just a few days for his friend Henry Woolf, a Bristol post-graduate who needed to produce a play for the Drama department but otherwise, comparatively little record of Pinter's Bristol debut survives. While Pinter's first London production of 'The Birthday Party' (at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958) closed after a week and was met with (almost) unanimous critical bafflement, a year earlier Bristol had enthusiastically embraced the unknown Pinter's first work. The Bristol Evening World - proclaimed The Room 'a hit', while the Evening Post rather presciently noted that 'Mr Pinter may well make some impact as a dramatist'. As a private production, no script of The Room was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's licensing office, and a printed version was not published until the 1960 revival at the Hampstead Theatre Club.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, a student production is to be held of The Room in the Old Squash Court Theatre at Bristol University, the first time it has been used for a theatre production in many years (its current role is as a storage area for desks out of exam period).

For more information, please contact Ruth Howlett at the British Library Press Office: +44 (0)20 7412 7112 or ruth.howlett@bl.uk.

EDITORS NOTES

The Theatre Archive Project is a collaboration between the British Library, University of Sheffield and AHRC. It is a five-year project (2003-2008) to reinvestigate British theatre history 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both the theatregoer and the practitioner. The Project Team includes staff from both the British Library and the University of Sheffield. This exciting Project places individual productions in a new context and sheds light on the society and culture of post-war British theatre from an audience perspective.

Outcomes will include scholarly publications, an online catalogue of scripts performed in licensed spaces since 1968, two Ph.D. studentships, large amounts of oral history material deposited at the British Library, and an international conference.

The Oral History strand began in November 2003, and aims to interview as many people as possible who visited or worked in the theatre between 1945 and 1968. The original recordings may be consulted via the Listening and Viewing Service of the British Library Sound Archive and full, searchable transcripts are also accessible online. Over one hundred interviews have been added to the site, and interviewees include Frith Banbury, Michael Frayn, Trevor Griffiths, Ann Jellicoe, Ian McDiarmid, Peter Nichols, Corin Redgrave, Arnold Wesker, Timothy West. This is the first time that the Oral History team aims to investigate a specific performance from the perspective of everyone involved or who attended.

The British Library is the national Library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. Further information is available on the Library's website at www.bl.uk