Hugh Hunt Papers
Date range: 1924-1980
Medium: Archive
Papers of Hugh S. Hunt (1911-1993), theatre director and Professor of Drama at the University of Manchester.
From 1935 to 1938 Hunt was a producer at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where he put on over thirty new plays by Irish writers, including Paul Vincent Carroll's Shadow and Substance . After war service, Hunt became a director at the Bristol Old Vic, where he enjoyed success with productions of King Lear , Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Hamlet . He was then promoted to be a director of the Old Vic Company in London, where his opening production of Love's Labour's Lost in 1949 was probably the most successful of his career. After six years in Canada and Australia, Hunt returned to England in 1960 and in the following year he was appointed first Professor of Drama at Manchester. Here Hunt combined academic work with the directing of several plays, and he instigated the building of the University Theatre, which opened in 1965.
The archive includes:
- Files on plays produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (including three plays jointly written by Hugh Hunt and Frank O'Connor), the Sydney Opera House and the Bristol and London Old Vic Companies;
- Volumes of press cuttings concerning the Bristol and London Old Vics;
- Programmes from the Abbey Theatre and English provincial theatres;
- Correspondence relating to Hunt's appointments with the Bristol Old Vic, 1945-9, the London Old Vic, 1949-53, and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre, 1954-8;
- Miscellaneous articles and newsletters;
- A photograph album for the Oxford University Dramatic Society production of King John in 1933.
See also:
Further information:
Catalogue available via Special Collections reading rooms.
Alternative formats:
Published microfiche: Theatre History Series, No. 3: The Hugh Hunt Collection in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (Haslemere: Emmett Publishing Ltd, 1990).
Location:
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