 Mae'r rheswm yma ar y cyfnod o'r sgifeth yma ar y sgifeth yma, sy'n ddod 3 yma. Mae'r rheswm yn ymddangos 3 yma ar y cyfnod yma. Y 2015'r grwnt yn gweithio i dr Paul Maloney, yn ymddangos i'r ysgifeth yma ar y cyfnod, ac yn ymddangos i'r pwysig yma ar y ddechrau Llasgo. He's currently a research fellow at Queen's University Belfast, and the author of two books on Scotland and the Music Hall, and recently the Britannia Panoptican Music Hall, that's the building that's being restored in Glasgow. He has worked with Professor Adrian Scullion, who was at Glasgow and is now at Queen's University Belfast, on several research projects about Scottish pantomime and popular theatre and performing arts. And it was with Adrian Scullion that he collaborated over the project that was supported by the Royal Philosophical Society on the Glasgow Jewish Institute players opening the archive. Now this evening we would also like to welcome a very distinguished visitor, a guest, Eida Schuster Barclay. Is it Eida or Eida? Eida, Schuster Barclay, a distinguished actor who acted with the Jewish Institute players and her family were very much involved with them, so we're really pleased to have you here this evening. Good evening. Can you hear me? No. Are you good to know? Is that working now? Do you think that works? You've passed the test. Can you hear me now? Yes. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you this evening. My colleague Adrian Scullion sent her apologies for not being able to be here. She is detained by work commitments in Belfast. We'd very much like to thank the society for supporting our research and to briefly explain the project, its aims, the work we undertook and to give you some idea of its outcomes. And I'm going to do this in nine and a half minutes, so here we go. Our project concerned the Glasgow Jewish Institute players, a dynamic community-based theatre group which made an important and underappreciated contribution to mid-20th century Scottish theatre. A highly innovative group, the players not only established an ambitious new model for non-professional, that is amateur theatre in Scotland, but also helped redefine the identities and self-image of Jewish immigrant communities, seeking to rationalise their place in British society during the inter- and post-war periods. Founded in 1936 by the director and playwright, Avron Greenbaum, and active until just before his death in 1963, the Jewish Institute players were significant on several counts. First, they set new standards for non-professional theatre in Scotland, largely due to Greenbaum's innovative working methods. And these methods consisted of extensive rehearsal periods that built up detailed character-based work, eliciting strong performances often from previously inexperienced actors. An intense focus on the importance of the total stage picture developed through close working collaborations with fine artists such as Joseph Anchill and particularly Tom McDonald. And the integral use of carefully chosen music to set the psychological dimension of productions. Now all these are familiar today, but their deployment in this non-professional context represented a new benchmark in the 1940s and 1950s. The group quickly became leading participants in the enormously popular competitions held by the Scottish Community Drama Association, the SCDA, and in 1940 they became one of the founding members of the better-known Glasgow Unity Theatre. It was in fact launched with the revival of Greenbaum's production of Clifford Odette's Awake and Sing that had been produced by the Jewish Institute players only a month before. There we go, and that's the group in rehearsal. Secondly, however, has this gone to sleep, has it, the link? As they say, talk amongst yourselves. You're restarting it. Okay, here we go, let me just see if I can get this down. Okay, there we are, finally. Secondly, however, the players were also significant because they performed an extraordinarily wide range of plays that explored the many facets of Scottish Jewish identity. Based at the Jewish Institute in South Portland Street, the social hub of the Jewish community, and made up of first and second generation immigrants, their repertoire consisted of plays that looked back to Jewish history and heritage, often evoking memories of recent persecutions, such as Greenbaum's own play, The Bread of Reflection from 1936, which was set during a pogrom in the Ukraine in 1920, plays that portrayed Jewish life in contemporary Britain, such as Noah Elsteen's Israel in the Kitchen, ambitious European classics, Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, and Lorca's Blood Wedding, and a series of plays by a new generation of American Jewish writers that look forward to life in the new world. And it's this range of work and the transactional aspect of its links to both a European past and a future in the new world achieved through the players' diasporic and family links to theatre makers in New York that make the players' stories so significant and worthy of critical attention. So, to briefly talk about our research, so we thought that the Jewish Institute players were interesting and knew that little work had been done to understand their story, but the particular spur or impetus for the project and the reason for its subtitle opening the archive came from the fact that the Scottish Theatre Archive at Glasgow University Library held a large collection of material on the players, including Avron Greenbaum's own papers and collection of manuscripts, amounting to more than 30 boxes of material, only loosely catalogued and certainly never explored in any depth. So, one of the project's core activities and methodologies involved scoping and critically assessing this wide range of material, which included programmes, posters, photographs, play scripts, press cuttings books and costume designs. Part of the aim was to critically evaluate the significance of all the material available, and particularly Greenbaum's own plays, several of which were successful in his lifetime. And as part of this archival survey, we also explored the material on the Glasgow Jewish Institute players and its successor company, the Avron Greenbaum players, held at the Scottish Jewish Archive Centre at Garnet Hill, which is very complementary to the material in the STA. Oh yes, okay. One of the highlights was discovering the correspondence between Avron Greenbaum and the American playwright Sylvia Reagan. This began in 1945 when Greenbaum wrote to Reagan in New York having directed the British premiere of her play Morning Star. The play, which tells the story of an immigrant family in the lower east side of New York between 1910 and 1931, clearly had enormous resonance for Glasgow audiences and went on to become the Jewish Institute players' signature production. Although Greenbaum's own letters are lost, Reagan's letters to him survive in the STA and provide a fascinating insight into the diasporic connections between the Jewish theatre worlds of Glasgow and New York. But as well as the written material archive, we also wanted to capture the living archive of the Glasgow Jewish Institute players, and so we were delighted to be able to record some oral history interviews with several surviving members of the players. These included Edna Cates, formerly Edna Green, shown here kneeling as the bride on the right-hand side of the picture in the 1951 production of Lorca's Blood Wedding, and Ida Schuster, also shown in this photograph Upstage Centre as the Mother. Ida Schuster was not only a founder member of the players who became one of the stars of the group and went on to enjoy a distinguished career in professional theatre in Scotland, creating amongst others the role of Sadie and the Slab Boys, but she also had a close family connection in that Avron Greenbaum was her brother-in-law being married to her sister Ray. So we're particularly delighted that Ida is able to join us tonight in her 101st year. Thank you, Ida, thank you very much. Now to talk about outputs and disseminations, as well as researching and evaluating the range of archival resources on the players, the project also aimed to promote the story of the group in several outputs aimed at both academics and the wider public. So for the future researcher, we've completed a hand list with interpretive notes on the full range of Glasgow Jewish Institute players material held in the Scottish Theatre Archive. For the Theatre Archive's online site, we also contributed an illustrated blog post, Avron Greenbaum and the Glasgow Jewish Institute players, providing the STA and its users and browsers with a foundational introductory essay on the players with links to the wide range of material and repertoire associated with the group. So this is a sort of the bedrock and it's a really useful resource for people coming in wanting to establish the various elements of what's in the archive, the wide range of material. We also curated a small display of original material including programmes, posters, photographs and correspondence, including several of Sylvia Reagan's letters for the special collections area at Glasgow University Library. And we sought to share our research with our academic peers. We presented papers on different aspects of the Jewish Institute players for three peer-reviewed conferences at narrative spaces in Scottish Jewish culture at Glasgow University in April 2017, at the Second World Congress of Scottish Literatures of Vancouver in June 2017 and most recently at the Urban Jewish Heritage Conference in Cracow in September this year. Articles developed from the first two papers have been or about to be published in academic journals. The first addressing a theatre studies constituency appeared in New Theatre Quarterly at the end of 2017 and the second introducing the company to a Jewish studies audience will appear in Jewish culture and history in January. We're also working on a third essay based on our Cracow paper that is about one specific production, The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto by Ben Hecht, which the players produced during the war. We'd also like to find a way to bring at least one of Avron Greenbarn's original plays to publication. So if you have any ideas, let us know. Our email address is displayed at the end or do make contact. Finally, and before we again say thank you for supporting our project, one of the pleasing aspects of our publications is that New Theatre Quarterly chose to put our photograph of Morning Star on the cover featuring Ida in the role of Becky Felderman in the Players 1959 revival. Again, just a nice aspect of the work you helped support. So we hope this has given you an insight into our work. You can read more in New Theatre Quarterly and soon in Jewish culture and history too. But in the meantime, thank you again for your support and I'll finish there. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Paul. That's so good to see the way in which the society's fans have been used in this project.