The big wardrobe project gets underway at the Abbey Theatre

26 Aug 2024

As the Company of Ten heads towards its 90th anniversary season, there has been a major project underway at the Abbey Theatre – a revamp of its extensive wardrobe department.

Since the beginning of July more than 50 members of The Company of Ten have been moving costumes out of the upstairs wardrobe, down to the main stage, and helping with much needed rennovations of the wardrobe room.

Although it would be impossible to count the number of items moved, here are some vital statistics:

• The blouses were hung on a fly bar above the stage and they stretched all the way across – that’s 7 metres of blouses. The CoT have donated or sold about a third of these.
• There were 25 metres of rails taken up by ladies’ dresses, coats, suits and skirts. They only fit on this amount of rail because they were squeezed up – they more or less doubled in size when freed – the Company of Ten are in the process of selling and donating some of these at the moment.
• Men’s clothes took up about 20 metres, plus about another 6 metres of military items. They are selling quite a lot of the military to organisations who dress film companies and re-enacters.
• On top of all the hanging costumes they had at least 100 boxes, some of them very big, of other costumes.
• They were also able to give away some costumes at the Cottonmill Gathering community event.
• Overall they hope to have reduced stock by about 20 per cent – weeding out items which they no longer use, were in poor condition or are in sizes which won’t fit today’s actors.
  
  Gill Stratford, life member and lead for the wardrobe team said: “We have been overwhelmed by all the help we’ve had – carrying costumes is heavy work, but many people have come and helped several times.
  “Overall about 50 members have come along so far, and there will be more over the coming weeks when we put everything back!
  “I wouldn’t like to put a figure on how many ‘person hours’ it is taking, but we started on 1st July and there has been someone working on it in some capacity every day since then.
  “We would like to thank everyone who has helped so far and will be helping next week. This has been a perfect example of the CoT doing what it does best – acting as a big team to achieve a collective goal, like a family, in fact.”
  All photos by Nick Clark.