Unfinished Histories
Voices from the archives
Dr Susan Croft’s office is stuffed so tightly with books, it’s a wonder they don’t tumble out on top of her. A theatre historian with a background that straddles art and academia, Croft is the founder of Unfinished Histories, an extraordinary resource recording alternative theatre in the UK. Last week, she opened a new exhibition at London Performance Studios, Radical Rediscovery: Homosexual Acts and Beyond.
“People think queer theatre is a new invention,” says Croft. This exhibition shows otherwise. 50 years ago, performance group Inter-Action staged Homosexual Acts, the first official gay theatre season in Britain, at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho. “In ‘75, Gay Sweatshop are putting on their first season,” Croft explains. “The Brixton Faeries are starting to get going. There’s amazing stuff happening in Bradford. It’s a moment of upsurge and excitement and variety.”
Unfinished Histories
Academics are not often seen as artists, but as Associate Artist at LPS, Croft is both. Her background includes being a senior curator at the V&A and running away to the US to join the experimental Magic Theatre in Omaha, “partly to avoid joining Thatcher’s dole queue.”
Unfinished Histories, came about from her attraction to oral history and the collection of stories that slip out of traditional record-keeping. “I was interested in what remains,” she says, “and what histories get recorded.” With co-founder Jessica Higgs, Unfinished Histories became a space to record and interview figures from some of the first Black, queer, disabled, political theatre groups in the UK.
Their collection begins in the late 60s. “It was the key moment that changed things,” Croft says. “The ending of theatre censorship in 1968 was a huge liberating moment. All the events in ‘68 in Czechoslovakia and Paris. There’s this huge new energy. Then the anti-Vietnam war movement, the women’s liberation movement, the Gay Liberation Front coming along. There’s a lot of forces pushing for change. Each of them informs new movements and new companies that develop in theatre.”
The project is now headed up by Croft, but the work they have done collectively has led to an online platform that offers an extravagance of archival riches. For this exhibition, the focus is specifically on queer stories collected from the last few decades of theatre in Britain, featuring ephemera from companies including Gay Sweatshop, Sidewalk, Split Britches, BLOOLIPS, Theatre of Black Women, Donna and Kebab, Outcast Theatre and Brixton Faeries.
Homosexual Acts and Beyond
Posters, books, scripts, newspapers, costumes, photographs, shoes and letters line the bright-white studio. The personal and political rub up against each other, recounting how these artists lived and worked while grappling with fears around HIV/AIDS, Section 28, racism, homophobia and transphobia. When I talk to Croft, she notes how these artists weren’t siloed in their activism. “There was a sense of needing to be part of this movement,” she says, “coming together and challenging yourself. Being part of a larger community of interconnection, which seems to me what we need to rediscover today.”
On the opening night, she did a Q&A with Alastair Curtis, another LPS Artist and creator of the AIDS Plays Project, who described Croft’s work as “a reminder that the struggle for inclusion is itself a living history.”
The designs from so many of these posters are delicious. The scribbles on the sides of them give tiny clues about people who made or interacted with them at the time. On one poster for a night of lesbian cabaret (£1.50 tickets, £1.00 unwaged) multiple parties have scrawled on the side fighting about it being a women-only space.
As you lean in close to all the displays, you can spot names that recur, groups where individuals split off, cabaret nights you would love to have been at.
A living room archive
The breadth of precious physical ephemera here is remarkable, particularly given that the collection began by accident. Croft had been working with oral histories, occasionally putting on small exhibitions to mark the work she was recording - and people saw her as a safe place to keep their family or friends’ work. “They kept saying ‘I’ve got a suitcase of stuff, do you want it?’ I rashly said yes.” Boxes were discovered in attics and cupboards. She was once given material found in a coal hole. “People lent us things, some of which they never came back for, so we ended up with a de facto archive.” As Curtis noted in the Q&A, it’s a lesson not to throw anything away.
Much of Unfinished Histories was created with the support of Heritage Fund grant from the National Lottery. Once that was used up, Croft’s team could no longer afford their office in Bethnal Green, storing what they could at Bishopsgate Institute instead, with the overflow now in both her office at LPS, plus the slightly less formal additional archive of her living room (“I’m an archivist not a hoarder,” Croft insists). This is how the stories have grown for this exhibition: through personal meetings, chance encounters, hearing that a stranger might be interested in looking after the legacy of someone you loved.
Looking ahead
Croft wanted this exhibition to be an opportunity for communities to tangibly connect with the past work and people who made it. Last weekend, a symposium of work took place, with a reunion of Sidewalk Theatre, and a series of works from contemporary queer artists responding to the material on display. This weekend, a play-reading of Martin Patrick’s Where To Now will be directed by Lesley Ewen, with the cast including Cyril Nri and Dickie Beau.
Academic work can often look inwards, Croft tells me. Her ambition is for this exhibition and the surrounding events to look both out and ahead. To bring people together and inspire new stories. New interviews and donations of ephemera from performances of the time are still being accepted (plus financial donations, if you’re interested in supporting the care of this work). Building an archive is a fragile thing, and a task that is ever-unfinished.
Radical Rediscovery: Homosexual Acts and Beyond, London Performance Studios, November 7 – December 14, 2025, Thursday to Sunday 12-5pm. Free entry.