Veronica Kelly

A Complementary Economy? National Markets and International Product in Early Australian Theatre Managements

The international circulation of commercial theatre in the early twentieth century was driven not only from the centres of Great Britain and the USA, but by the specific enterprise and habitus of managers in ‘complementary’ production sites such as Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The activity of this period suggests a de-centred competitive trade in theatrical commodities – whether performers, scripts, or productions – wherein the perceived entertainment preferences and geographies of non-metropolitan centres were formative of international enterprise. The major producers were linked in complex bonds of partnerships, family, or common experience which crossed the globe. The fractures and commonalities displayed in the partnerships of James Cassius Williamson and George Musgrove, which came to dominate and shape the fortunes of the Australian industry for much of the century, indicate the contradictory commercial and artistic pressures bearing upon entrepreneurs seeking to provide high-quality entertainment and form advantageous combinations in competition with other local and international managements. Clarke, Meynell and Gunn mounted just such spirited competition from 1906 to 1911, and their story demonstrates both the opportunities and the centralizing logic bearing upon local managements shopping and dealing in a global market. The author, Veronica Kelly, works at the University of Queensland. She is presently undertaking a study of commercial stars and managements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, with a focus on the star performer as model of history, gender, and nation.

Beauty and the Market: Actress Postcards and their Senders in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kellys study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).

‘Make Do and Mend’: Civilian and Military Audiences in Australian Popular Entertainment During the Pacific War of 1942–1945

During World War 2 the Australian region experienced unprecedented internal and transnational migrations of female and male civilians both urban and rural, caused by the social conditions of universal national military and labour conscription. During the Pacific War of 1942–1945 mainland Australia became an American supply and training base. Although different urban and rural regions experienced it in specific ways, the wartime imaginary put prevailing concepts of race, masculinity and femininity under intense pressure. These were managed by a hugely expanded popular variety entertainment industry which recombined aspects of Australian, British and American popular culture into an influential new ‘national’ wartime identity. The theatrical practices of the dominant Tivoli organisation reveal how popular theatre expressed and profited from these new gendered demographics and social priorities. In responding to a historically unprecedented wartime audience base—and a national emergency—professional variety created its own transformative concept of national conscription as a willing worker in the war effort.

‘A Sweet Tribute to Her Memory’: War-time Edith Cavell Plays and Films

In the Senate House of Brussels late on the afternoon of 8 October 1915, the English nurse Edith Cavell and four Belgian and French civilians were sentenced to death by firing squad by a military tribunal of the German General Government of occupied Belgium. Their charge was ‘treason in time of war’ under Paragraph 58 of the German Military Code, which prohibited ‘conducting soldiers to the enemy’. Under a decree of June 1915 issued by General Moritz Freiherr von Bissing, Governor General of Belgium, civilians were tried under military law for activities seen as acting against the German state or the German army. On 10 October, Traugott von Sauberzweig, the Military Governor of Brussels, confirmed Cavell’s sentence with ‘immediate effect’. Diplomatic personnel then spent frantic nocturnal hours seeking to stay the sentence, led by Brand Whitlock, head of the American legation in Belgium, and the Spanish Marquis de Villalobar. Baron Oscar von der Lancken, the German civilian Governor-General, appealed in vain to von Sauberzweig. In the early morning of the 11 October, Cavell and the clandestine Belgian journalist Philippe Baucq were shot and buried at the Tir National firing range in northeast Brussels. The good offices of Whitlock, plus representations from the Pope, King Alfonso of Spain and other European royalty, secured the commutation of the other sentences to life imprisonment. Most of these were released at the war’s end.1

The Green Goddess: William Archer's Great War Play

William Archers melodrama The Green Goddess (1919) is the sole commercial international success enjoyed by the famed theatre critic and Ibsen scholar. While it successfully applies its authors knowledge of the conventions of popular melodrama, the plays subject ‘foundrsquo; its author in late 1919 during a period of heightened post-war personal and public turmoil. Set in a fictional principality on the North-West Frontier of imperial India, it takes the form of a hostage drama whose principal character is the cynical and ruthless Raja, played in the theatre and in two films by the veteran character actor George Arliss. This annotated edition uses staging evidence from the Promptbook of the 1924 Australian commercial production by J. C. Williamson Ltd and the silent (1923) and sound (1930) films. The Introduction places The Green Goddess in the generic context of post-war Orientalism. It explores its origins in Archers official war work refuting German propaganda in various pamphlets and dramas. His wartime polemical themes of ‘barbarismrsquo; and ‘civilisationrsquo; (especially relating to Belgium) also permeate his 1919 play. The ethics of the aerial terror bombing of civilians, practised routinely in colonial policing and introduced to Europe in the Great War, both resolve the action of The Green Goddess and interrogate former wartime moral polarities. Its staging details are sourced in Archers India and the Future (1917), such that an early example of British theatre dealing with the trauma of the Great War is overlaid upon a conventional-seeming colonial adventure melodrama.

Shakespeare in settler-built spaces: Oscar Asche's 'Recitals' of Julius Caesar in the Melbourne and Sydney Town Halls

During their first Australasian tour in 1909–1910, Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton produced costumed ‘recitals’ of Shakespeares Julius Caesar in the town halls of Sydney and Melbourne. While the landscape has been privileged as the major site of the Australian settler imaginary and its labours of familiarisation, settler investments in their built urban spaces have been less studied. The social and political specificities of these two major colonial buildings – their choices of architectural rhetoric, sitings in urban space and histories of civic use and access – frame the meanings of Asches spare mise en scène for Shakespeares play. The text of Julius Caesar, itself a resonant meditation on the titular character as historical ‘ghost’, becomes additionally ‘haunted’ (in Marvin Carlsons phrase) by audience knowledge of the history and typical usages of the politically contested structures in which it was encountered. As he had done for Beerbohm Trees lavish 1898 production, Asche performed the role of Mark Antony. Yet for his ‘recitals’ in these Australian found spaces, where he both used and obscured the architectural features of the magnificent interiors, his aesthetic rather engaged elements of modernist bare staging and lighting ideas familiar from the work of Poel and Copeau.

Australia’s Lily Brayton: Performer and theatre artist

Recognition is the aim of this account of an artist who is now remembered largely for her beauty, her wide iconic fame achieved by mass distribution of her image via photography and postcards, and her professional association with a internationally prominent producer who was also her husband. It is however a historically situated study, confining itself to readings of the kind of theatrical, social and cultural work performed by Braytons presence in a rapidly-modernising Australia during the period between Federation in 1901 and the first World War, which event marks a disjuncture in the patterns of entertainment and cultural discourse in the new nation. Pre-war Australian theatre and vaudeville managements competed vigorously to secure the most acclaimed artists, seeing it as a kind of service and duty to boost their countrys prestige along with their own coffers. Meanwhile, local playwrights and producers promoted a burgeoning repertoire of Australian dramas and films which played alongside the imported products in a complex network of cultural codes and affects.

Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism [Book Review]

Marc Maufort, Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism, PIE-Peter Lang, Bruxelles, 2003. 29.90.