“After fulfilling their original purpose, records may appear to pause in the archive – suspended between past and future. Yet their continued use in fresh and innovative ways breathes new life into them, enriching our understanding of the life and work of Nick Darke and allowing his legacy to inspire generations to come.”
Carole Green, Archivist and Special Collections Officer, Falmouth Exeter Plus
To mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Cornish playwright, Nick Darke, Falmouth University hosted a celebratory event in summer 2025 entitled Life, Work, Legacy.
Alongside a curated exhibition of artifacts taken from the Nick Darke Archive which was held in the University’s Archives and Library, the event featured a performance which showcased the breadth of Darke’s career, his creative practice, and the recurring themes that inspired his work.
Students from the BA (Hons) Creative Writing course were invited to explore Darke’s extensive archive and create a performance inspired by its contents.
Beyond Darke’s published and performed works, the archive offers insight into his creative process including lesser-known, incomplete, or never-performed pieces, as well as the early seeds of his ideas.
Students spent considerable time in the reading room, engaging in depth with the contents of the archive. Rather than creating new writing in response to the archive, students focused on giving voice to the unheard and unperformed pieces.
This idea was largely drawn from the extensive series of writer’s notebooks that form a core part of the collection. These notebooks include meeting and rehearsal notes, research material, reworked play extracts, diary-type entries, scraps of dialogue and overheard conversations, wordplay, financial calculations, to-do lists, shopping lists, recipes, and notes on findings from Darke’s beachcombing explorations.
Supported by the archive team and academic, Nicola Coplin, students created a bricolage piece by collaging extracts from the extensive collection of Darke’s notebooks. They combined this with previously unpublished scenes to create a unique performance presented at the University’s public arts centre and performed by BA(Hons) Acting students. This offered a rare and intimate insight into Darke’s life and works, deepening the students’ understanding of how play texts develop from thoughts and notes to text and performance.
The archive team worked closely with Jane Darke, the donor and wife of the playwright, to ensure that materials from the collection were handled with care and sensitivity. As many of the items were created solely for Darke himself, this collaboration helped preserve the personal nature of the work while allowing students to engage with its humour and beauty.
For the Archives and Special Collections team, the process was transformative, sparking a renewed interest in the research, teaching and performance of Nick Darke’s work. The project demonstrated that collections can be used in unexpected ways, and that fresh perspectives from new users can further enrich the unique value of such a collection.