V&A celebrates a century of national theatre archive with tribute to avid collector

She was an avid collector of playbills, programmes and props who kickstarted the largest theatrical archive of the nation, now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Without Gabrielle Enthoven, we would not have theatre studies as a discipline today, according to Simon Sladen, the museum’s senior curator of modern and contemporary theatre and performance.

Yet many will never have heard of Enthoven. That is about to change as the V&A has named a new exhibition in her honour, celebrating a century of the national archive, which is now protected by law.

The show, Enthoven Unboxed, not only includes items from her collection of 80,000 artefacts and ephemera, gathered from the turn of the 20th century until her death aged 82 in 1950, but also some other theatrical jewels. An 18th-century bust of Sarah Siddons, sculpted as a self-portrait, reveals the actor to be an accomplished artist. Other highlights include the Killigrew Patent, one of the two most important documents in the history of British theatre, in which King Charles II granted permission for spoken drama to be performed on a London stage (Theatre Royal Drury Lane) in 1662.

The exhibition opens with a long-lost portrait of Enthoven, painted by suffragette artist Ethel Wright, which Sladen tracked down to an antique shop in 2022. Enthoven was a humanitarian as well as a pioneer of theatre collecting, said Sladen. A widow and punkish figure, she was a supporter of London’s queer scene, a family friend to Oscar Wilde, and she hosted Noël Coward in her New York home. She was a member of an amateur theatre society, The Pioneer Players, tied to the women’s suffrage movement.

She fell in love with theatre in 1880 when, aged 12, she sneaked out of her home in Windsor, with her older brother, to watch a pantomime, The Forty Thieves, at London’s Gaiety theatre.

From 1922, she dedicated herself entirely to the collection, enlisting volunteers and meticulously marking up any first night changes on programmes. Sladen, who has orchestrated the exhibition along with the V&A’s theatre and performance curatorial team, spoke of how she annotated one of Wilde’s plays, staged during his trial for “gross indecency” for homosexuality. “She notes that his name has been omitted due to the trial.”

Enthoven was not at first taken seriously by the V&A when she approached them with the idea of a dedicated theatre archive. There was no such thing at the time, and it took her a decade of persuasion tactics before the museum accepted her donation in 1924, and began to grow this archive, which has since evolved into the V&A’s Theatre and Performance collections. Sladen said that without her effort, “we would have lost a huge percentage of British theatre history”.

Inspired by Enthoven’s nickname as the “theatrical encyclopedia”, the display is organised as an A-Z of material. It stretches across music and dance, and includes modern-day memorabilia, such as outfits worn by Paul O’Grady’s drag persona, Lily Savage, and Dua Lipa, as well as the original Rolling Stones “tongue and lips” artwork by graphic designer John Pasche, a pair of diamante-studded spectacles worn by Elton John on his tours of the early 1980s and a set model designed by Misty Buckley for Stormzy’s 2019 Glastonbury festival headline performance. Among the most current items are David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for the song Blackstar, released in 2015, shortly before his death. A script for Lucy Kirkwood’s 2021 play Maryland, about male violence in the aftermath of Sarah Everard’s murder, and a prompt script used by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for her West End show Fleabag, are also included.

A red and gold tabard first worn by Richard Burton as Marc Antony in Cleopatra (1963), and then by Kenneth Williams in Carry on Cleo a year later, is among the displays. A painting from the mid 19th century of the actor Ira Aldridge dressed as Othello nestles next to a clip from Lolita Chakrabarti’s play Red Velvet, about Aldridge’s life.

The permanent gallery for theatre, which opened at the V&A in 2009, has also undergone a refresh and includes new acquisitions, such as costumes and puppets from the TV shows Peaky Blinders and His Dark Materials. Since the Theatre Museum in London shut in 2007, its entire collection is housed at the V&A.

• Enthoven Unboxed: 100 Years of Collecting Performance is at the V&A, London, 14 September-4 January