This post was contributed by Nash Trevelyan, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Renaissance Studies. As part of her course, Nash completed a research placement at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and here she shares her experiences.

Studying early modern theatre has been the perfect cover, allowing me to veil my questionable taste for the sensational and the lowbrow under the guise of Serious Literature Student. So when it was announced that the opening season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse would be Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a production promising ‘[d]ead hands, macabre wax figures [and] a poisoned Bible’, I felt I’d hit the jackpot. It was fantastic to see the playhouse put through its paces in its opening season; many of the production choices were an intriguing balance between innovation and tradition and the possibilities for future productions were becoming apparent.

The SWP consolidated the first season with a compelling series of Research in Action workshops exploring the versatility and limitations of the playhouse, which would be endlessly useful for my forthcoming incarnation as a part-time graduate student on Birkbeck’s MA Renaissance Studies. The prevailing theme of the workshops was the experimental nature of the playhouse, and as such attendees were encouraged to move around the theatre, investigating sightlines and acoustics, to broaden our understanding of the space. I learned something important about indoor playing every time I visited, so when Birkbeck offered me the opportunity, alongside PhD candidate Jennifer Reid, to partake in a research placement at the SWP, I was thrilled and excited at the prospect of gaining an additional perspective on the theatre that was fast becoming intrinsic to my research interests.

Dr Will Tosh, Post-doctoral Research Fellow with Globe Education, gave Jenny and me the warmest of welcomes. We were stationed in the Globe’s Library and Archive with the research team, which consisted of postgraduate researchers from a wide range of institutions. Research requests would come in from a variety of sources, though they most often came from the director of an imminent production as part of the pre-production process. Tasks were prioritised and delegated by the Research Coordinator. Using the in-house style guide, Jenny and I contributed to documents on an array of subjects including early modern understandings of biology, sexuality, madness, racism and otherness – all themes that related either to the current season at the SWP or the forthcoming season at the Globe – ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Changeling and The Merchant of Venice. It was imperative that our research employ reliable resources and as such we made good use of the Globe’s onsite library, as well as online databases such as EEBO and JSTOR, as well as the Wellcome, British Library and V&A sites for images. We were given the opportunity to attend Globe Education’s many lectures and events that shared themes with the current production run, which again proved useful to the research we were undertaking. We also conducted audience interviews as part of ongoing research on how the new space is perceived, which is indicative to how playhouse response is such a fundamental concern within the Globe’s ethos.

Life in the archive could be surreal at times: I researched frost fairs while overlooking the Thames from the window, while the sound of musicians rehearsing floated over from the Globe. We even took tea breaks in the green room with the actors (a 17^th-century nobleman with an electric kettle is an arresting sight). The area is so steeped in history that the whole experience was immersive. My relationship with the playhouse in the months preceding my placement informed and inspired my research; visualising the ways in which it may be used was a useful tool, particularly when time is of the essence as part of a research team with a vast amount of information to collate and examine.

Entering the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and watching my own research in action during performance was something I could never have imagined when I first stepped inside the playhouse just nine months before. It was also a huge privilege to be named in the programmes for the duration of the season, alongside actors, creatives and academics that we have admired for many years. I gained valuable insight into the ways research is used and presented by an institution with the size and reputation of Shakespeare’s Globe, particularly at such a significant moment in its history – and I have certainly become a better researcher for it.