Unsettling AustrIllyria: Twelfth Night, Exotic Englishness and Empire

Abstract

Examining a range of productions of Twelfth Night in Australia not only indicates the variety of approaches that Australian directors have adopted in constructing their own versions of Illyria but also that a recurring motif circulating around these productions is ‘exotic Englishness’ or a performance of Englishness grounded in Australian stereotypes of the English (and British). Acknowledging this dynamic helps to indicate how well the class war of Twelfth Night sits with, and complements, responses to the British Empire's former presence in Australia and suggests that, although Twelfth Night is not ostensibly concerned with issues of land ownership, it can very readily speak to those issues, particularly in a post-colonial theatrical environment.

Notes

1. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), p. 132.

2. 1.2.2. All references are to Twelfth Night, ed. by Elizabeth Story Donno, updated edition introduced by Penny Gay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1985]).

3. For more on Illyria in the Anglophone stage history of the play, see Shakespeare in Production: ‘Twelfth Night’, ed. by Elizabeth Schafer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

4. Graham Huggan, The Post-colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Huggan's study is not, however, primarily concerned with theatrical enactments of the exotic.

5. Ibid., pp. vii, ix.

6. Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies, 31.4 (1992), 309–29 (p. 316). See also her Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992).

7. For more on this production, see Gilbert and Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics, p. 134; Maryrose Casey, Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre, 1967–2004 (St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004); Elizabeth Schafer, ‘Reconciliation Shakespeare? Aboriginal Presence in Australian Shakespeare Production’, in Playing Australia: Australian Theatre and the International Stage, ed. by Susan Bradley Smith and Elizabeth Schafer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 63–78 (p. 66).

8. West Australian, 21 September 1991.

9. Sunday Times, 22 September 1991.

10. While many characters in anglophone Twelfth Nights have been cast as black, the only black Malvolio I have located was in Toby Robertson's 1968 Prospect Theatre production, where Malvolio was played by Jamaican actor Bari Jonson.

11. Gilbert and Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics, p. 134.

12. The Age, 15 May 1995.

13. Gay Times, 17 July 1995; Penny Gay, introduction to Twelfth Night, p. 48. This brand of Englishness was perhaps most successfully promoted in Tim Curry's performance as Frank N. Furter in the film of a major ‘Empire Writes Back’ text, The Rocky Horror Show.

14. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 1977.

15. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 1977. David Carnegie, ‘Australian and New Zealand Productions of Twelfth Night in the Twentieth Century’, in Australasian Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century’, ed. by Laurence Wright (forthcoming).

17. Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush, ‘The 1999 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture: Tearing the Cat’, Australasian Drama Studies 36 (April 2000), 4–18 (p. 15). The crucial figures Rush refers to here were Jim Sharman, artistic director of Lighthouse, the company mounting the production, and Neil Armfield.

16. This Adelaide production was so successful it was remounted in Sydney. It was subsequently filmed and released in 1986 by Twelfth Night Productions and is available via the Australian Film Commission.

18. Penny Gay, introduction to Twelfth Night, p. 48.

19. Sydney Morning Herald, 21 May 1987. (The term ‘AustrIllyria’ has been in use for years in reviews of Twelfth Night; see, for example, the Age, 15 May 1995.)

20. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1984.

21. Adelaide Advertiser, 28 February 1983; Sunday Telegraph, 15 January 1984.

22. See Geoffrey Milne, ‘Geoffrey Rush: Manic Genius or Team Player?’, Contemporary Theatre Review 14.3 (August 2004), 21–29.

23. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1984.

24. Adelaide Advertiser, 28 February 1983. Monty Python's line on Australia, as indicated by the Department of Philosophy, University of Woolloomooloo sketch, exemplified traditional, colonial attitudes.

25. For the Nimrod Shakespeares, see Julian Meyrick, See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave (Sydney: Currency Press, 2002) and John Bell, The Time of My Life (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002).

26. For Larrikin Shakespeare see, for example, Penny Gay, ‘Recent Australian Shrews: The “Larrikin Element”’, in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, 1996, ed. by Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, Dieter Miehl (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 168–182.

27. For Essie Jenyns see Janette Gordon-Clark, ‘From Leading Lady to Female Star: Women and Shakespeare, 1855–88’, in O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, ed. by John Golder and Richard Madelaine (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001), pp. 72–86 (pp. 81–86); Janette Gordon-Clark, ‘The Hard Road to Stardom: The Early Career of Essie Jenyns’, Australasian Drama Studies 40 (April 2002), 74–89.

28. Lawler was playing Feste at the National Theatre in Melbourne as early as 1949 and played the role several times later in his career.

29. For intertheatricality see Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

30. Revolver, 13 November.

31. Ibid.

32. See Gilbert and Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics, p. 141 for a discussion of ‘cultural drag’ in Shakespeare in performance in Australia.

33. The Age, 23 June 1987.

34. Ibid.

35. The Bulletin, 7 July 1987; the Globe was referenced in the Herald, 22 June 1987.

36. Sunday Herald Sun, 26 July 1998.

37. The Australian, 30 July 1998.

38. Herald Sun, 31 July 1998.

39. The Age, 31 July 1998.

40. Stage manager's reports held in the MTC archive. I'd like to thank Julian Meyrick for helping me access this material.

41. Herald Sun, 31 July 1998.

45. Penny Gay, introduction to Twelfth Night, p. 48.

42. Sun-Herald, 16 June 1991. ‘Sir Joh’ refers to Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, former Queensland premier.

43. Newcastle Herald, 31 May 1991.

44. Newcastle Herald, 31 May 1991. Frank Spencer was Michael Crawford's character in the British sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Norman Bates is the protagonist in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho.

46. Ibid.

47. West Australian, 7 March 1988.

48. Bulletin/Newsweek, 8 September 1992.

49. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16.