Anyone who’s ever watched Who do you think you are? will know that ancestor hunting takes its subjects to unexpected places. It led me to Eva Elwes, playwright and actress, and my great-aunt. The chase has involved many hours searching genealogy resources and the British Newspaper Archive, a trip across the globe to the British Library… continued →
I’m the Project Officer at Kings Theatre in Portsmouth which in 2017 ran two projects linked to theatre during the First World War, made possible by grants from Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England and support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Great War Theatre’. It was via the work of Dr… continued →
Abraham Hans Abraham Hans was a Flemish author of Dutch origin. From 1909 Hans had been a primary school teacher in Kontich, a community between the outer and inner fortifications of the Antwerp Fortress. However at the outbreak of the war the Hans family found it too dangerous to stay in Kontich. They had seen the… continued →
My grandmother Gladys (Peggy) Simmons kept a diary 100 years ago, between 1 January 1917 and the New Year’s party a year later when she got home at 2am on 1 January 1918, after ‘such a thrilling year’. She was 23 and passionate about theatre. The diary, a Liberty’s Shakespeare Calendar given to her for Christmas, allows… continued →
One of the plays I was given to research for the Great War Theatre project was the 1914 recruiting drama England Expects by Seymour Hicks and Edward Knoblauch. By the start of the war Sir Edward Seymour Hicks was a successful actor-manager whose credits included instigating the building of the Aldwych Theatre, London, in 1905.… continued →
In this blog post, Mike Waters, one of the project’s volunteer researchers, shares his experience – and some of the extensive challenges, as well as unexpected discoveries in tracing long-forgotten plays and playwrights. I volunteered for the Great War Theatre project after spending many years researching my family history and finding several forebears who died in… continued →
We’ve been uncovering an incredible range of different war-themed plays as part of the Great War Theatre project but one of the discoveries which has surprised me the most is the season of French Grand Guignol plays which were performed in London in the summer of 1915. Initially I came across these through finding a… continued →
Did you know that more than 40 war plays were written or performed in the Netherlands during the Great War? That’s an average of 8 each year! The first reactions Already in August 1914 the famous Dutch socialist playwright Herman Heijermans (1864-1924) wrote three sketches: Brief in den schemer (Letter in twilight), De buikspreker (The… continued →