Geeking Out - The David Tennant Edition

...or, I (excitedly) correct one of David Tennant's theatre performance info sources

If you’re a historian/archivist/researcher in a niche area like I am (er, that’s everything David Tennant, you know!), you eventually end up getting a few chances to flex your nerdy-geeky muscles…and probably also get stupidly pat-yourself-on-the-back excited about it when you do.

Or is that just me?

*ahem*

Annyway, I experienced both a few days ago, and with my typical over-the-top exuberance, I can’t wait to tell everyone about it!

Over the holidays I’ve taken on a bit of a project. I’ve been wanting to migrate my entire collection of theatre-based physical objects concerning David’s theatre work from where it currently resides (Starchive) into an open-source bit of software on my own computer called Tropy. While I’m at it, I decided to re-scan everything in higher quality, too.

I’m doing this primarily to keep track of my current collection, but I think it’ll help me develop a more critical eye with regards to variants so I can make sure I know important details like which programme went with which city and with which run.

It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s paying dividends already. For one, you can see how it’s helped greatly in my last post about programmes for What The Butler Saw, but it’s also helped in another way. It helped me find out that one of my sources for information about David’s theatre work was wrong!

Okay, okay…not wrong, really. But partially incorrect. So half-wrong.

While working on my new Tropy database, I was scanning in this flyer from my collection for a one-off co-hosting performance David did back in 1998 for the RSC Fringe Festival called For One Night Only:

The front and reverse of my flyer for the 19 July 1998 performance of 'For One Night Only'

Migrating to Tropy is a two-part job: one part re-scanning images to a higher quality, and one part filling out all the informational fields relevant to the production inside the database.

If there is an “official” source I can use while making these transfers (for example, an entry in the National Theatre Archive, or the V&A, or the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, etc.) I also pull those up right alongside my Tropy entry field in the database as I do all the information transfers. That way I cover all my bases.

For this particular piece I thought it would be easy, since I’d already written a post here on A Tennantcy To Act about this interesting one-off (which I highly encourage you to read):

Theatre Deep Dive: David Tennant in 'For One Night Only' at the RSC Fringe Festival (1998)

…and I knew it also had this entry at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Easy, right?

So I pulled up my Tropy database entry field and then pulled up the following entry at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for the performance:

Entry at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for “Fore One Night Only”

I thought I’d just transfer the information and be done with it…but lo and behold, putting the information in on Tropy made me sit up and say, “Wait. What?”

And that’s the moment I got excitedly geeky.

If you’ve studied the entry above and the scan of my flyer, you might’ve noticed the difference(s), too.

Did you notice them?

If not, here they are again, side by side, with the differences highlighted this time.

The first discrepancy - the venue - is a fairly straightforward one.

The fact For One Night Only was part of the RSC Fringe Festival at The Other Place in Stratford is absolutely correct. For One Night Only was the opening evening performance for that festival.

But For One Night Only was explicitly not held at The Other Place - it was held across the way in the Swan Theatre. My flyer says so, and so do contemporary newspaper reports for the performance:

Articles from the 15 July 1998 (left) and 18 July 1998 (right) editions of the 'Birmingham Post'

It’s that second discrepancy - the one about the actors who appeared at the performance of For One Night Only - that’s the harder of the two to work out.

My flyer says it was Desmond Barrit, Emma Handy and Amanda Harris who were the three others besides David to co-host the event. However, the entry at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust leaves Harris out and names Maureen Beattie as the fourth actor…and so does every other contemporary newspaper report I’ve been able to unearth.

Part of the reason David may have been asked to go along to do For One Night Only was because he was performing in the play The Real Inspector Hound/Black Comedy with Desmond Barrit at the time. If so, the same could be said of Amanda Harris, as she was also a member of the cast of that play.

Knowing this, I looked to see if there was a print date on my flyer. I thought perhaps my flyer was printed far enough in advance of the show to include Harris…and perhaps at the last minute she couldn’t attend, and Beattie had been tapped as the fourth host? The fact Beattie had been tapped was clear by four days before the show, since newspapers both before and after the show all named Beattie.

But nope, no print date. All I did have was the date the ticket on the reverse of my flyer was issued - 3 July 1998. If that’s anything to go by, the flyer may have been printed shortly before that, and that might mean that at least by the late part of June/early part of July, Amanda Harris was still planned as the fourth actor for the show and whatever happened to change that may have happened between the 3rd and the 15th of July.

But that wasn’t something I could confidently answer.

But I could do something else - help them make sure their database entry for For One Night Only was as completely accurate as it could be. So, I sat down to compose an email to the archivists at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. I laid out my case for the Swan Theatre as the show’s venue, and was sure to include all of my proof (my flyer and the newspaper reports).

I also mentioned the cast discrepancy. It’s my hope they may be able to piece something together now that I’ve given them a bit more to go on (a change of venue which may have prevented them from searching their holdings for the correct files).

It’s the holidays, so it’ll be late January or early February before they can get back to me…if they do. I hope they do. I’m super curious.

And geeky. Did I mention I’m geeky?