Wednesday 17th September 2025
Via lifts and port-holed doors, today I caught glimpses of the labyrinthine workings of the British Library. From post rooms to stores, philatelic cataloguing to staff canteens, it is vast.
Standing in the Eccles Institute next to crates of books labelled ‘for deaccessioning’ Iris Bachmann, Curator of Latin American Published Collections shared information on the colour coded stamping of volumes by laser and hand – one of the ways the chaos of unruly books and knowledge is controlled. She points to the stamping crew, waving to a space beyond a makeshift wall of bookcases dividing teams that catalogue and allocate shelf numbers. The fate of some of these deaccessioned books at my feet may be ‘the shredder’- an almost sacrilegious utterance in this sanctuary of books.
The foyer bookshop shelves are filled with books about books, about lovers of books tracing stories of bibliophiles and Biblioteques. A PhD researcher cataloguing a donor’s specialist archive of Victorian porn and 1960s comics says his friends tell him his ‘love language is bibliography’ – passing on books and recommendations, reading inscriptions, deciphering notes in margins – finding a place for things and words. I wonder how much actually ends up in the shredder of doom as I read one of my pile of books for today – ordered up last week to be picked out by robots and driven to London from the British Library’s store in Boston Spa, Yorkshire.
Voices from the Federal Theatre
Dangerous Theatre
The Federal Theatre 1935-1939
John Housman’s foreword to ‘Federal Theatre Project: free, adult, uncensored’ mentions the fact that in 1949 it was recommended that the archives of the Federal Theatre Project that I now research with such curiosity be destroyed. Who gets to decide what is kept and remembered, forgotten, banned or censored? Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts Alex Lock beams in on zoom with an introduction to the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection – a record of the absurdity and bigotry of theatre censorship from 1737-1968 in which original play manuscripts are accompanied by ‘reader reports’ – readers being mainly retired military officer bureaucrats charged with passing often damning judgement on every public theatrical production in Britain – their blue pencil marking Ibsen and Pinter.
As Hallie Flanagan, Director of the Federal Theatre Project stated “The theatre, when it’s good, is always dangerous.” And so I journey into this dangerous history – of an era when the Living Newspaper Unit’s productions that I focus on were labelled ‘communist’ by their critics and ultimate censors whilst pushing the boundaries of a theatre and art that reached beyond a cultural elite and engaged with the issues of the time. As with all of the Works Progress Administration initiatives of the era the core underlying aim was ‘relief’ - employment for the mass unemployed in the era of the Great Depression. Their productions involved not only out of work theatre professionals but unemployed newspaper personnal. Combining factual information with theatrical symbol and intense soundscape, a key feature was the ‘voice of the living newspaper’ - a voice that became that of the public – questioning and challenging officials and the status quo.
“The Living Newspaper was a new dramatic form. A committed documentary that informed the audience of the size, nature and origin of a social problem, then called for specific action to solve it.” (Federal Theatre Project: free, adult, uncensored). The first of the Living Newspapers ‘Triple A Ploughed Under’ (1935. Written by Arthur Arendt and directed by Joe Losey and H Gordon Graham) about the Dust Bowl called for the Soil Conservation Act and Farm Labour Party. The Living Newspaper Unit plays often involved rowdy audience interaction and were a divisive and controversial antidote to a commercial theatre that in FTP Director Hallie Flanagan’s words continued “to tell in polite whispers its tales of small triangular love stories in small rectangular settings.” I hone in on this unit amidst the broad catalogue (from Vaudeville to historical drama) of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project because they innovated in form - bringing together the languages of avant-garde theatre, analogue multimedia and newsroom. What can I take from this stagecraft, the combined sources of the theatrical, the bureaucratic and the archival? I look to the Living Newspaper Units influences in Russian agit prop and constructivist theatre, to the epic non naturalistic theatre of Brecht and my early immersion in these and Meyerhold during my MA Scenography in Prague’s Theatre Academy. How can these influences fuse and adapt to considering a Living Newspaper Unit for this time? A work that isn’t theatre made for the stage but that stages a form of Living Newspaper in print and performance that speaks to and addresses these times.
A list of Living Newspaper Unit plays reveals their chosen themes continued relevance.
TRIPLE A PLOUGHED UNDER: Agricultural policy. INJUNCTION GRANTED: Unionised Labour. ONE THIRD OF A NATION: Housing. POWER: Energy Democracy and a call for the public ownership of utilities.
What elements can be adapted to my work now? The processes of writing the Living Newspaper? the collaborative editing? the adaptation of cinematic and projection devices? Where is my stage? Is it in miniature? In the microfiche units that house the headlines of the era’s newsrooms? If so, why choose to work with seemingly defunct, analogue technologies in a digital, ai advancing age? The impacts of the recent cyber-attack on the British Library are far reaching and the value of the analogue suddenly made apparent in stories of microfiche and card catalogues being the only thing up and running in the aftermath of this serious data breach. Can I adapt and play with the languages of how we consume our ‘content’ and assess fact and truth, transferring swipe and scroll to a reimagining and reediting of the microfiche bed? What is the legacy of the Living Newspaper Unit when now newspapers themselves are part of a ‘legacy’ media?
Slightly overloaded with questions and book dust I upload caffeine in the foyer café sitting next to a young man quizzing his friend with questions from the ‘Life In The UK’ test. I admit that I can barely answer any of the questions. Vaguely remembered histories drift into focus – Guy Fawkes, 1066….. They are identifying lochs and national flowers as I get up to meet Laura Carderera, Programme Curator for Research & Scholarship at the Eccles Institute for an appointment with a microfiche reader. A more urgent gauge of citizenship would be a ‘Life on Earth’ test – are we aware of our interconnectedness? the value of each niche within a wider ecology. Everyone in this place is busying themselves on their niche – co existing and contributing to the diversity of knowledge and life. Can you tell the stories of the materials that surround you? Q1. What is a pencil made of? Carbon (graphite), clay, wood (I ‘ve been thinking a lot/obsessing about pencils prompted by the many ‘Pencils Only’ signs) Do you understand the infrastructures that support you? Social, technical, political. I pack up my bags to face London Underground, purposely not thinking of the tunnels’ depth and the earth’s weight by imagining the books lurking below the city surrounded by ancient clay. Strange eczema blotches my hands. A reaction to history erupting from paper, ink and records of multiple voices and times.
