OUR ARCHIVE
A few words about the Archive
The Farnham Theatre Association is the custodian of the remaining archive of the Castle and Redgrave Theatres. The two theatres were responsible for presenting something in the region of 1500 home-grown productions over the course of a forty-five year period. There is currently no complete record of the actual list of productions, but we have been able to make a pretty good stab at it, and it is a continually evolving document, which can be read here.
The archive consists of programmes, some production files and a large quantity of production and publicity photographs. While most of what we have dates from the Redgrave era (1973-1996), there are some photos from productions at the Castle in the 1940s and the 1970s.
The Redgrave Theatre archives were rescued by volunteers with the assistance of Farnham Museum Curator at the closure of the theatre in 1999.
Some items were kept at the museum, but the bulk of the collections were held in Waverley Borough Council storage until 2017, when we were asked to remove them. FTA has loaned certain items to Surrey History Centre and the rest have been stored in Farnham, currently at St. Mark's Church in Upper Hale.
We are slowly getting to grips with what we actually have. The aim is to catalogue things by production, and by year for those times where there is less information. We have also begun the slow process of working out exactly what is in the Surrey History Centre, and digitising the more relevant items to be available to us here in Farnham.
The Photographs here in Farnham are at risk of deterioration over time, and we have so far digitised approximately 3600 photographs, together with about 2600 colour slides from the later days of the Redgrave. As further items come to light, we will continue that process.
Copyright issues are a potential hurdle, but we would hope to be able to make the collection available for research in the future.