A few weeks ago the Theatre Archive Project’s latest event, a Night with the Impresarios, took place in front of a full-house at the British Library’s Conference Centre. The evening featured interviews with producers John and Lisel Gale, whose work included the original Boeing, Boeing, as well as one of our leading contemporary independent producers, Matthew Byam Shaw, who was involved with the recent revival of Boeing Boeing with Mark Rylance, and also took Frost/Nixon from the Donmar to Broadway- and Hollywood. Bridging this chronological gap, Iain Mackintosh, who founded Oxford's Prospect Theatre Company, talked to Dr Alec Patton, who leads the Teaching the Talk Oral History Project, about his work. We’ve just put a podcast online of the interviews with the Gales and Iain Mackintosh, which can be found on our What's On website. It was great to see so many familiar faces – from Timothy West, and Victor Spinetti, to a number of other leading producers and directors – and we’re already starting to plan next year’s event.
Also at the event, we launched a new project to investigate the archive of the agent Peggy Ramsay, which is being catalogued at the British Library by Zoe Wilcox. Zoe will be recording the kinds of material she is uncovering on a daily basis at her new twitter feed (www.twitter.com/peggyramsay), which is currently displaying some wonderful, previously unseen photos of Peggy by photographer Fatimah Namdar, who has kindly allowed us to reproduce her stunning work online.
I’m now also handing over this blog to Zoe to report on her findings from Peggy’s archive, and to link to her update tweets. The blog will still be used for general updates on the Library’s theatrical holdings and activities, but the focus will be on supporting and sharing new discoveries from the Peggy Ramsay collection.
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