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).

Modern Drama: Defining the Field

Theatre, like other subjects in the humanities, has recently undergone quintessential changes in theory, approach, and research. Modern Drama - a collection of twelve essays from leading theatre and drama scholars - investigates the contemporary meanings and the cultural and political resonances of the terms inherent in the concepts of 'modern' and 'drama, ' delving into a range of theoretical questions on the history of modernism, modernity, post-modernism, and postmodernity as they have intersected with the shifting histories of drama, theatre, and performance.