 My name is Alexander Locke, and I'm curator of modern archives and manuscripts at the British Library. I'm Kate Dossott, professor of American History at the University of Leeds. Today we're looking at some manuscripts that are held in the Lord Chamberlain's play collection. Between 1737 and 1968, all plays destined for the English stage had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office for censorship. This involved examiners of the plays marking the play script up in blue pencil, outlining sentences or ideas that couldn't be shared with the public, writing back recommendations to the authors of the plays about this, and recommending to the Lord Chamberlain whether the play should be allowed on the stage or totally banned. Here we're looking at a play called At What A Price by Una Marsen. Kate, why At What A Price and who was Una Marsen? At What A Price is a really interesting play by the poet, activist, anti-racist campaign at Una Marsen. She was a Jamaican woman who came to London in the early 1930s. At What A Price is a really interesting play. It explores the life of the heroine Ruth Maitland. Ruth is a young, educated black woman who moves from the rural area outside Kingston to the city to take up a job at a secretarial post. We know that she's educated and we know that she's black. This is really important because the people who come to read this play in the Lord Chamberlain's office don't seem to recognise either of these facts. It's a play that seems old-fashioned in very many ways. Certainly the readers thought so, but it's actually a play that really speaks to many contemporary issues around how young women navigate male-dominated workspaces and, of course, interracial relationships too. I'm quite struck by the idea that the Lord Chamberlain's play unwittingly preserves all this material, preserves all these plays, preserves all their ideas about them. In one way they're sent in as an exercise in censorship but actually preserved and gave these plays longevity, long after the Lord Chamberlain's office was abolished. That's a really interesting point because when we look at archives and records of black creatives, intellectuals and activists from the first half of the 20th century, it is often hard to find that material. Your choice of the term unwitting, I think, is really interesting because if we read the readers' reports we have one here. The examiner of plays says, well, we understand that this was produced by the League of Colored Peoples but he says it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are of colour and speak, quote, a more or less diverting dialect. So what we see here then is that the reader of this play doesn't understand that this is about an interracial relationship. He assumes that Ruth, the hero in his white, isn't very concerned at the sexual politics of the office but certainly doesn't understand that she's a black educated Jamaican. So unwitting is absolutely there in this report. Unwitting in the sense that no understanding that an educated young woman could be black assumes that she's white but also only understands characters to be black if they speak in what a white person imagines to be a black Jamaican dialect. There's a lot in there that could be censored and crossed out in the Lord Shaman's famous blue pencil. What sort of things was he crossing out in the manuscript, if any? Did he know who Una Marson was? I suspect they didn't know who Una Marson was and certainly didn't make any inquiry as to her racial identity though of course they note that she is associated with the League of Colour people so they might have speculated as to that. The reader's report we have here says nothing to censor. It describes it as an artless old-fashioned kind of an affair. We might speculate that had they had a better grasp of what this play was about they might have censored some of the scenes around the interracial relationship because it's not a good look, you know, what senior white man harasses young black woman in the workplace. It's incredible that what began as sort of a private hidden censorship archive has eventually come to a public institution is publicly accessible and now as with the case with at what a price digitised and soon to be made available online for readers to see around the world. Reading these archives and these censorship reports allows us to talk back and to talk back to these archives and to reanimate them and to change their meaning because those censorship reports but the plays themselves have new meanings which we give to them when we read, use and even stage them today.