Gate Theatre Digitisation Project

The digitisation of the Gate Theatre archive began on February 1, 2016 at the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, and was completed in eighteen months. The digital archive includes 200,000 pages, 20,000 images, 150 hours of audio and 750 hours of video, representing a vast digital archive that documents the growth of the Gate Theatre from its founding year of 1928. The bulk of the archive relates to productions and administrative material from the 1950s onwards. The digital archive is available for use in the Archives and Special Collections Reading Room, Hardiman Library, at NUI Galway. For queries on access contact barry.houlihan@nuigalway.ie.

The archive includes hundreds of videos, thousands of scripts, and designs, many of them relating to major Irish writers. The Gate Theatre has distinguished itself internationally for its work with two Nobel Prize winners, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Within the archive there is extensive correspondence with both writers, as well as huge detail about productions of their work. This will be of interest not only to Irish theatre scholars, but to international scholars and researchers. There is also extensive archival material relating to other major writers, including David Mamet, Conor McPherson and Brian Friel. Indeed, Friel premiered seven plays at the Gate during the last 20 years of his life.

The Gate also has a long tradition of working with some of the world’s great actors; the archive features material relating to Orson Welles, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Ralph Fiennes, Penelope Wilton, Stephen Rea, Ian Holm, Liam Neeson, Charles Dance, and many others. By connecting the Gate archive to existing archival material of the Abbey Theatre, Druid Theatre Company, designer Joe Vanek, actor Siobhán McKenna, playwright Thomas Kilroy, among others, NUI Galway’s status as the leading international centre for the study of Irish theatre, is further enhanced. By digitising major theatre archives, NUI Galway and researchers around the world will also have access to an extraordinarily large dataset for several major Irish cultural institutions, opening up opportunities for new research through text and data mining.