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 Kelly's 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).

Surgical Theatre, Gifted Performances: The Changing Moral Economy of Surgical Training

Fred Hollows and his work to reduce blindness in Indigenous communities is an obvious example of benevolence of doctors and nurses towards patients while the role of the staff of burns units around Australia in treating the victims of the Bali bombing is another. Some different stories about benevolence in medicine, concerning the benevolence of patients towards trainee clinical staff are suggested.

An Australian Idol of Modernist Consumerism: Minnie Tittell Brune and the Gallery Girls

The Australian career of the young American actor Minnie Tittell Brune exemplifies the complex cultural and economic forces operating on the institution of live theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Brune focalizes the contemporary processes which reconstituted the international institution of mass entertainment out of the traditional cultural practices of theatre. The theatrical star is seen as both engaging with and resisting the commodification of her labour power; image and talent resulting from her ambiguous industrial role as magnetic 'star' and as managerial commodity. However, the iconic and affective power of the actor evokes strong attachment from significant sections of the newly heterosocial popular audience, in particular from the gallery girls, the young female audience who idolized Brune as a performative personality enacting social self-realization and glamorous transformation. Through reading Brume's repertoire, her social persona as 'star' and her 'emotional' performative style, it is demonstrated how artistic retro-glamour, religious evangelicalism and discourses of sexuality and femininity serve to manage theatre's move into the mass-entertainment age.

From Zheng Qiang to Jiang Shuiying: The feminization of a revolutionary hero in Maoist theatre's 'Song of the Dragon River'

Since the 1980s, analysis of the representation of women in Maoist theatre has argued that the heroines of the Cultural Revolution model works (yangbanxi) were 'gender-less revolutionaries erased of anything feminine. This article challenges such a view through a case study of Song of the Dragon River in which the male hero of the 1964 spoken drama version was changed to a female in the 1972 yangbanxi adaptation. Evidence is presented that the characterization of the heroine in the latter work conforms closely not only with traditional beliefs in innate female characteristics but also with current Chinese beliefs in the characteristics of successful women in leadership. Rosemary Roberts is a lecturer in Chinese at the University of Queensland, Australia. She completed postgraduate studies at Beijing University in the early 1980s and has a PhD in Chinese literature from the Australian National University. She has published numerous articles and translations in the field of Chinese literature and culture and is currently writing a book on gender in Maoist theatre of the Cultural Revolution.