Special Collections: Manchester Theatre Collection

Material relating to Manchester's theatre history has been gathered since the beginning of the public library service in Manchester and has built over the years into the substantial collection we know today as the Manchester Theatre Collection.

Historically the collection benefitted from a number of Chief Librarians and senior staff members having a deep interest in local theatre and its history - an interest that has over the years been reflected in the acquisition of material. After the Second World War the Society for Theatre Research established a North West branch and their early research highlighted the importance and uniqueness of the material within the collection. By the mid 1960s custodianship had been handed over to the then Arts Librarian Elizabeth Leach, who more than any other became the driving force behind the accumulation and promotion of the collection.

The focus of the collection has always been the City of Manchester rather than Greater Manchester and consists of a wide range of material including long runs of programmes and playbills for the principal Manchester theatres. Posters, handbills, newspaper cuttings, photographs, books, periodicals, manuscripts, scrapbooks, postcards and other memorabilia are also held along with detailed architectural plans for a number of theatres. The earliest holding is a fragment of a playbill for 'Recruiting Officer' from First Exchange Theatre in 1743. A really useful part of the collection is 'The Manchester Programme of Entertainment and Leisure', 1897-1934 (ref: Th 792.42 M13), a weekly journal which records the early days of cinema in Manchester among many other variety and theatre acts.

The collection is complemented by holdings within Archives and Local Studies, who as part of their local image database have photographs of interiors and exteriors of Manchester theatres and hold additional archive material, for example the account books of the Palace Theatre.

Theatre Collection items are included in the Library Catalogue (Spydus), but in addition there are two main guides to the collection, which provide greater detail. 'Manchester Theatres' by Terry Wyke and Nigel Rudyard was written to celebrate Manchester's status as City of Drama in 1994 and remains to this day the most complete source of information on the collection. The second source of information is the theatre card index, which is an index to the programmes and playbills within the collection and also contains index entries for 'The Manchester Programme of Entertainment and Leisure' and so contains a lot of information relating to individual production titles, company names and most performers. Work is in progress on a further index to the programmes and playbills, which is being added to the Archives Catalogue. Note that only Library Theatre programmes 1946-2009, Opera House programmes 1912-1938 and Palace Theatre programmes 1891-2001 are on GMLives - a lot more index entries are on CALM itself.