Dr Jo Robinson and 'Our Theatre Royal Nottingham: its stories, people and heritage'

Dr Jo Robinson (right) at the Theatre Royal Heritage Open Day

In 2014, with the 150^th anniversary of the Theatre Royal in sight, Dr Jo Robinson of the University of Nottingham and David Longford at the Theatre Royal began to work together to explore the possibilities of researching the theatre’s rich heritage.

With limited resources, the key to what became the Heritage Lottery Funded project, ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham: its stories, people and heritage’ lay in recruiting and building a great team of volunteers as ‘citizen scholars’. These volunteers were provided with appropriate skills training, encouragement and support to enable the collection, curation and annotation of archive material and oral histories, the results of which were visible at the recent event Heritage Open Day at the Theatre Royal on 6 April 2019.

The University of Nottingham has also generously supported the development of the digital archive through which all these findings are displayed at ourtheatreroyal.org.

In 2017, with the support of the Theatre Royal and Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, Jo was awarded money from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council with the aim of studying the success and challenges of the ‘Our Theatre Royal Nottingham’ project, and developing a model case study which could be shared with other organisations. 

Jo and her co-researchers Dr Laura Carletti and Tatiana Styliari have led focus groups, workshops and interviews with the team of volunteers in order to capture the richness of their different experiences and the challenges encountered and overcome. The AHRC project has then enabled Jo to share the model of ‘citizen scholarship’ and co-creation and co-curation of a digital archive with other organisations around the region, including Bromley House Library, Erewash Museum and the Sir John Moore Foundation. The project – and the wonderful work of the volunteer team – has been presented at conferences in Barcelona, Belgrade, Malta and Krakow as well as closer to home.