Using the West Yorkshire Playhouse Archive

Copyright University of Leeds

Once I knew I was going to be looking at the West Yorkshire Playhouse I began to use the archive intensively. I sifted through the ‘Education and Outreach’ boxes of which there were 28, to find information on the TIE. It was hard not to get side tracked by scripts and other interesting memorabilia, as it was all just so fascinating. I spent a lot of my 6 weeks in Special Collections as the archive was central to my West Yorkshire Playhouse case study. The key boxes I used were numbers 11, 22 and 96 which included letters from the director of the TIE, aims and objectives of some of their plays and TIE brochures.

As well as using Special Collections I was also using Leeds Central Library resources, books from the university libraries, the internet and also conducting interviews with theatre practitioners to help write my report.