The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced swingeing cuts to its curatorial team and a complete overhaul of its collections. No longer are they going to be arranged by subject matter, but chronologically. Among those earmarked to be reordered into centuries, rather than categories, is its Theatre and Performance department.
Presumably Shakespeare’s First Folio will be moved to the new ‘Medieval to Revolution’ department; Noël Coward’s costumes end up in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’; and Pinter programmes requisitioned into ‘Modern and Contemporary’, alongside metalwork and ceramics. […]
First published in The Stage on 8 March, 2021. Read online here.
Photo credit (fair use): Detail from an 1871 sketch in Wilton’s Music Hall archive, included in the V&A’s collection