A Choice of Programs

This article considers the shifting nature of theatre programs from their nineteenth-century origins as playbills to the expansive documents collected by 21st-century audiences, offering a selective overview, limited to productions of Hamlet, of a period that commences at the moment which saw Godfrey Tearle in the title role at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1931, and concludes at the early 1960s, where the program stabilized into the format that remains with us today. It offers a close, contextual reading of the program as the bearer of evidence of aspects of theatre history that exceed-and sometimes interrogate-the merely taxonomic. In doing so, it considers theatre programs not only as repositories of information, but as texts which can illuminate the changing practices and habits of theatregoing itself, through their management of the relationships between spectator expectations, experiences, memories, and desires. The article considers the ways in which the program, as something to be consulted before, during and after a performance, also provides evidence of how productions facilitate or determine the responses of their audiences, providing a species of performance documentation that, operating in the space between the artistic, the commercial, and the instructive, often vividly evokes the milieux, both extraordinary and everyday, in which theatrical encounters take place.