| E. Martin Browne (1900–1980) directed and taught modern and medieval religious drama, most notably T. S. Eliot's plays
and the revived medieval York Cycle, which was the centrepiece of York's contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain.
He was able to obtain official goodwill and permission for a production of the York Cycle which was public, prominent and
on a grand scale, at a time when the dramatic presentation of Biblical material was still controversial. The E. Martin Browne archive contains a substantial amount of his material on medieval religious theatre. It includes scrap-books, prompt copies, notes, programmes, correspondence, photographs, teaching materials, research notes and books, most importantly of the 1950s and 1960s York productions, but also of his other productions of medieval religious theatre in Britain and in the USA. It also contains some vintage audio material, including eleven minutes of unique sound-recording of the 1951 production (including some lines from Doomsday). This has been lodged with the National Sound Archive, who have supplied us with a CD of the retrieved audio. Other audio material is still being processed by them. |
 E. Martin Browne (right) and Keith Thomson, Festival Director (left) in a posed newspaper photograph from 1951. |
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The archive was
given by Martin Browne just before his death to Medieval English Theatre, and is housed at
Lancaster. The Project decided that an electronic archive should be made of this material
as a matter of urgency, starting with the 1951 Festival of Britain revival. This has now been scanned and recorded
on CD. Work on various aspects of the archive is in progress.
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