The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama, 1890s-1920s by Veronica Kelly (review)

Theatre historians face many challenges. Perhaps the greatest is to convince the wider community of scholars that their work is more than a footnote to "real" history; incidental at best. I recall, from my childhood, Mad magazine's satire on the U.S. Mail's dead letter office and how history might have been different if the following postcard had been delivered: "Dear Abe, saw Our American Cousin. It's a turkey. Stay home." Many accounts of that terrible event continue to ignore the imagined narratives played out in the minds of postbellum Americans, starting with John Wilkes Booth. As François Jost noted in Modern Language Notes (1978: 503-5), Booth, who once played Shakespeare's Brutus, shouted from the stage after firing the fatal shot, "Sic semper tyrannus!" He, at least, thought life would imitate art; though, like Caesar's assassins, he misjudged the willingness of the people to rise up in support. Perhaps they were busy reading Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Veronica Kelly is preeminent among the second generation of Australasian theatre historians who, from the 1980s, moved beyond the excavatory efforts of those who first drew attention to the long tradition of live performance in Australia and New Zealand and, while continuing to dig, started to analyze in an increasingly theorized manner the major professional live theatre industry in those countries before it was almost entirely wiped out by silent and then sound movies, by radio and the Great Depression, and wiped too from popular memory. This leads to another challenge: to introduce readers to texts they have never heard of and demonstrate that plays that survive today are not necessarily those that the societies that first saw them discussed and in part modeled their lives on. A theatregoer between 1890 and 1930 would be astonished that the plays of Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw and (to them) unknown women are staged today, while The Sign of the Cross, The Prisoner of Zenda, A Royal Divorce, Monsieur Beaucaire, and Chu Chin Chow are (although operatic and musical versions have lasted better: Tosca, The Girl of the Golden West, The Merry Widow, and Kismet). Long before Kurosawa, audiences knew about Japanese samurai culture (The Darling of the Gods), thrilled to Pirates of the Caribbean equivalents (The Spanish Main), and suffered with gladiators played by Geelong-born, London-acclaimed Oscar Asche, "probably the boofiest bloke before Russell Crowe to perform masculinity in the [Australasian] region," as Kelly colloquially notes (112). Inevitably, the theatre historians have much basic story and character explaining to do and more, if they are to try to convey in writing and still images the effect of movement and dance, colorful sets, lights, and makeup, swirling costumes, and resonant voices.

Empire Actors is written with immense scholarship and wit and much of it is done superbly, including reproducing a rich array of visual evidence. It is an account of some of the major actors who, condemned to be in the limelight only in the regional touring companies while Irving, Tree, et al. held sway in the metropolis, toured the world in the years after steamships made it safe and before film undercut their preeminence. It is understandable that in 1912 the Wellington Post in most distant, most lonely, most loyal New Zealand would see them as evidence of the British Empire's cultural reach (15), but in fact many were American, including Minnie Tittell Brune (see Kelly's article in Theatre History Studies, 1995) and the impresario who brought her to Australia, J. C. Williamson, both prominent in this book. Kelly is well aware of this and twists the phrase around to mean "an empire of actors" (15), but they were more precisely cultural manifestations of what on both sides of the Atlantic was called, when occasion suited (e.g., the London Times on September 21, 1881, after the assassination of another president, Garfield), "the English-speaking race"—white, of course.

The subtitle refers...