Review, On Stage: Spotlight on our Performing Arts, National Library of Australia
Theatrical posters – both highbrow and less so – reflect the lives and sensibilities of audiences as far back as colonisation
This fascinating exhibition is in part a reaction to the catastrophic situation of live performance during the last two years of Covid closures. Public health regulations during this period, as soon became apparent, had a very uneven impact on businesses and individuals: some jobs could perfectly well be done remotely, from a house in the country or by the beach; many could not.
Among the worst-affected businesses were restaurants and cafes, travel and tourism and any form of theatre, concert or cabaret.
The individuals most directly harmed were those who worked in these businesses, but their customers have also been more or less seriously affected, because restaurants, travel and theatre are all social experiences.
People have been increasingly isolated, and have correspondingly come to rely increasingly on the virtual and digital, both for communication and for entertainment. Alone and fed on a diet of social media, many people have become more neurotic and paranoid, ideological positions have become exaggerated, and some have succumbed to the labyrinths of conspiracy theories.
Theatre has a significant social function. In classical Athens, it was considered so important that the democratic state subsidised poor citizens to close their shops and attend the five-day Festival of Dionysus each year. And there are countless smaller examples of the use of theatre to create a sense of community, like the way that expatriate communities or internees in prison camps form theatre societies.
In Australia, the first theatre performance was put on in 1789, only a year after the foundation of the new colony. It was a production of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), and itself became the inspiration for Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s good, produced in 1988. The title of this play came from a Prologue performed at the inauguration of the first theatre in Sydney, also opened at the remarkably early date of 1796.
The Prologue, tongue-in-cheek but still touching, was spoken in the persona of the notorious scoundrel George Barrington, who was the subject of a recent biography (Hordern House, 2008). These are its opening lines:
From distant climes, o’er widespread seas we come,
Though not with much éclat, or beat of drum;
True patriots all, for be it understood,
We left our country, for our country’s good:
No private vews disgrac’d our generous zeal,
What urg’d our travels, was our country’s weal;
And none will doubt, but that our emigration
Has proved most useful to the British nation.
The earliest surviving playbill is also from 1796, and happens to be also the earliest extant document printed in Australia; it was only recently discovered and gifted to the Library by the Canadian government in 2007.
Also from 1796 is the first notice in the British press of a production in Sydney, although it raises some interesting questions since it refers to an entirely different double-bill being produced at the same time as the programme on our playbill.
This notice incidentally mentions the background of one of the ex-convicts involved, Sidway: “he was one of the first that went out to Botany Bay, transported for a burglary, and was appointed baker to the Colony, in which situation he has realised upwards of three thousand pounds; his time of transportation has been long expired, but he does not choose to leave the settlement, where he has a great prospect of increasing his wealth.”
It seems odd to speak of his term being “long expired” when the colony was so recent, but eight years in a penal colony could seem a long time. On the other hand, Sidway’s case is an early example of the way that transportation, unlike prison, could offer a real chance of rehabilitation. Two decades later, Governor Macquarie would actively encourage this policy, and the colony benefited greatly from the energy of men like Solomon Wiseman who could never have found an outlet for their extraordinary entrepreneurial activity in Britain.
Further theatres opened in Sydney and Hobart in the 1830s, and then Melbourne in the 1840s; within less than a decade of the discovery of gold in 1851, Ballarat had its own Theatre Royal.
There are many theatrical posters from the subsequent decades, all far more wordy and more detailed than those of the last hundred years or so; one example from 1865 advertises a star of the time, Lady Don, who seems to have been particularly noted for her performance of male characters, in this case the Earl of Leicester.
It is hard to know what the public should have expected of what is described on the poster as a “glorious historical burlesque” based on Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). Judging by the verbose, absurd and pun-riddled description of all the characters in the play which occupies the lower part of the sheet, it was heavy-handed farce. The lengthy descriptions, addressed to a public who had time to linger over the reading of posters and little else to entertain them, were an integral part of the promotion of the play.
Similarly, a generation or so later (1909), the poster for Nellie Stewart starring in Sweet Kitty Bellairs includes an outline of the events and settings of each of the four acts of the play.
A broadside for On Our Selection (1912) includes the settings of each of the four acts and a summary of the series of the hilarious or touching skits which the audience could expect to enjoy. In effect these wordy descriptions were the equivalents of trailers later produced to promote films.
Although there are also posters for productions of Shakespeare or opera, many of these theatrical entertainments were clearly far from highbrow.
One particularly egregious example is Chu-Chin- Chow, which was apparently the most popular mass-appeal play of the period of the Great War (it ran for 2238 performances in London). A 1923 theatre programme from the New Theatre Royal in Sydney, with the slogan “the world’s wonder play”, is adorned with an illustration of a caricatural evil Chinaman, and so we would expect something like Sax Rohmer’s contemporary character Dr Fu Manchu.
In fact, however, Chu-Chin-Chow is a character in a musical comedy about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which of course comes from the Thousand and One Nights, and is therefore of Persian-Arab origin. This explains why the painting of Oscar Asche, the play’s author, in the title role, looks more Turkish than Chinese. One can only imagine that for the popular audiences who flocked to this play, these different peoples all merged into the blurred image of a sinister yet also comical Oriental.
In contrast, there is an interesting collection of material about a Chinese-Australian performer, Rose Quong, who performed in London – there is a photograph of her with Ellen Terry and a very young Laurence Olivier – and later seems to have presented a one-woman show in America on The Culture, wit and wisdom of China; it would be interesting to know if this was inspired by Lin Yutang’s influential introduction to Chinese culture, The Importance of Living (1937).
As theatre in Australia became a bigger business, big entrepreneurs like J.C. Williamson were able to import international stars as well as mounting local productions of international successes.
The exhibition includes Williamson’s salary book as well as correspondence with various celebrated individuals, notably Dame Nellie Melba, by far the most famous Australian performer in the world at the time.
Ballet also became an important form between the wars. Serge Diaghilev had remodelled it as a spectacular modern theatrical art with his Ballets Russes in the years before and after the Great War, and this new impetus led to the rise of national ballet companies in London (The Royal Ballet, 1931) and elsewhere; the most important ballerina to visit Australia was Anna Pavlova, whom J.C. Williamson produced here twice, in 1926 and 1929, but Williamson brought out other figures associated with Diaghilev as well, including Edouard Borovansky.
After Borovansky’s death in 1961, the company was directed by Dame Peggy van Praagh, and became the Australian Ballet in 1962. During the following decades some of the greatest dancers in the world, including Dame Margot Fonteyn and both her earlier co-star Sir Robert Helpmann and her later partner Rudolf Nureyev, performed with the Australian ballet; Helpmann and Nureyev also choreographed works for the ballet, collaborating on their famous Don Quixote.
Helpmann was one of the most versatile of Australian performers, not only establishing himself as the leading male dancer of his time in London, but always cultivating a parallel role as an actor on stage and in film. Here there is a striking picture of him in costume as Oberon (1954) as well as a press clipping of him with Katharine Hepburn, when the two of them came to Australia in 1955 with the Old Vic company and performed in three Shakespeare plays.
It was at the same period that Dr Coombs established the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, whose purpose is summarised in a letter from Coombs written in 1954. For several decades, the Trust was the main funding body supporting performance of all kinds across the Commonwealth, and fostering companies as large as the Australian Opera and as small as the Marionette Theatre.
At the same time, a so-called New Wave of Australian theatre arose, with Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) as a precursor; then Alexander Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed (1968), Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy’s Legend of King O’Malley (1970) and David Williamson’s Don’s Party (1971) – the last of which most explicitly evoking the discontent and malaise brewing in the years before Gough Whitlam’s election as prime minister in 1972.
Australian theatre had reflected life in the colony and then the new nation since the beginning, but it became more self-conscious and also more anxious in these years; before, the specifically Australian experience had been a kind of colonial supplement to a shared mainstream of British culture; now that recourse had become more remote.
Australian authors were asserting the distinctiveness of the Australian experience but at the same time – as in the art of the same years – haunted by the fear that it was provincial and irrelevant to the new mainstream of American modernism.
Barry Humphries, meanwhile, was looking at Australian culture with an acerbic, highly original and yet ultimately less self-centred eye.
The focus is much less clear towards the end of the exhibition, which rather loses sight of theatre and is dominated by a series of large and loud rock music posters. Once again the images of dance are the most compelling, including some from the Sydney Dance Company and Bangarra. The most striking work in the latter part of the exhibition, however, is a portrait of Meryl Tankard by Régis Lansac (1984), which captures the decisive but almost ineffable sense of direction and intentionality that makes dance memorable.
On Stage: Spotlight on our Performing Arts National Library of Australia to August 2.
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