Healthy bodies and young minds: late-nineteenth-century performer training in Australia

Abstract

The focus of this article is the early incidence of organised training for young performers in Australia during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Whilst there is ample evidence that traditional entry points to a professional stage career arose as the natural result of birth into a theatre-connected family, or childhood indenture to a theatre producer, this article reveals that several cases of institutionalised training were initiated by highly visible theatre identities from 1880 onwards. Adopting a modernising approach to the demands of a swiftly growing theatre industry, the popular actress/manager Rose Edouin Lewis and the theatre impresario J.C. Williamson each initiated performer training projects. In both cases, the target was young people of the middle class. Shining new light on archival materials from the turn of the twentieth century, this study reveals that the lineage of institutionalised performer training in Australia has a longer genealogy than theatre histories have previously allowed.

Keywords:

• performer training
• Australia
• nineteenth century
• J.C. Williamson
• lineages
• Rose Edouin Lewis

Introduction

This essay examines the early incidence of formal stage training for young performers in Australia. Shining new light on archival materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it reveals that the lineage of institutionalised performer training in Australia has a longer genealogy than theatre histories have previously allowed. Tracing professional initiatives of the popular actress/manager Rose Edouin Lewis (1844-1925), and theatre impresario J.C. Williamson (1843‒1913), both of whom organised formal training classes for young performers between 1880 and the mid-1890s, this essay also shows that it was young people of the middle class who took up this training, supported by families who regarded the theatre business as a potential and desirable career path for their children.

Scholarship on performer training in Australia has focussed to date on institutional developments from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. According to Hadley (2008, p. 9), the earliest studies ‘focus on the way in which the influence of European ‘masters’ is felt in Australian practice, especially in the years following the establishment of NIDA [National Institute of Dramatic Art, est. 1959] … and the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in the 1970s’. According to Tait (2008, p. 84) the American Hayes Gordon introduced Stanislavsky-derived studio workshop approaches to actor training to Australia in 1952, a phenomenon that was ‘almost non-existent in 1950s Australia’. Parsons and Chance (1995, p. 500) suggest that Stanislavsky’s ideas and studio-based processes of actor training were first introduced in Australia during the 1920s. To date, however, research examining how young performers may have learned stagecraft and performance skills during much earlier periods of Australian theatre production has not been published. My broader research portfolio concerns popular entertainments of the long nineteenth century, and the participation of children in the theatre business of this period. That research has uncovered ample primary evidence showing that ‒ as with trends in the Anglophone Northern Hemisphere ‒ traditional entry points to a professional stage career arose either from the natural result of birth into a theatre-connected family, or childhood indenture to a theatre producer (Arrighi 2012, Arrighi and Emeljanow 2012, 2014). During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, however, the commercial entertainment industry grew exponentially in Australia, creating a high demand for young performers that could not be met by these traditional pathways. At the turn of the century, the region’s leading theatre producer, J.C. Williamson, acknowledged:

There is increasing scope every year almost for capable actors and actresses in Australia. We have far more openings than in former days … and young performers who are just coming on get their opportunities far more quickly than before. (Evening News 1899)

Professional theatrical activity in Australia’s swiftly urbanising cities expanded and diversified throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Whilst population growth undoubtedly drove demand for theatrical entertainments, this was only part of the equation. Internationalisation, arising from the transnational touring and exchange of actors and shows, was shaping the theatre business in Australia. Increasingly networked global theatre business practices and the international transmission of theatre and popular entertainment trends were enabled and supported by technology and the modernisation of transport and communication systems (Balme 2015a, Kelly 2005, Waterhouse 1990). What was happening in Australian theatre was not simply a national phenomenon ‒ it was linked to trends in other major theatre centres of the Northern Hemisphere.

In order to situate the two Australian cases of Rose Edouin Lewis and the J.C. Williamson theatrical organisation within an international context of trends and global transmissions, I first draw on Anne Varty’s (2008) research to summarise dominant training practices for young people in London during the period, and on nineteenth-century newspapers to provide a snapshot of similar activity in New York City. I then examine the Australian cases, beginning with the short-lived formal training programme initiated by Rose Edouin Lewis in 1880. This is followed by the case of Jennie Brenan and Minnie Everett, the two women who conducted the J.C. Williamson firm’s in-house training in Melbourne and Sydney from the 1890s. Moving from the international to the national, this strategy reveals that organised training emerged in Australia, as it did in the Anglophone Northern Hemisphere, in response to the demands of a massively growing entertainment industry.¹

Late-nineteenth-century training for young performers: snapshots from London and New York

In her study of British children working in the Victorian theatre, Anne Varty (2008, p. 22) draws attention to changes that took place in training processes for young people once the theatre profession shifted from ‘primarily a family business’ and ‘opened its gates to newcomers’. She notes that in London, theatrical agents opened their books to children and ‘supplied them to managers who trained them with more or less care’ (Varty 2008, p. 22). Examining instances where instruction was provided by parents, and by theatre managers or actors, Varty (2008, p. 30) concludes that young performers were ‘coached mechanically to imitate, copy and repeat elements of voice and movement required by their roles’. The principal point Varty makes about vocal training for young performers is that aside from developing clear enunciation and volume, elocution was considered necessary to iron out traces of a young person’s regional and social origin.

Physical training was considered imperative for all aspiring young actresses, and on this score ballet was considered the optimal pursuit. From 1876, the National Training School for Dancing operated well in advance of the establishment of any national school for acting. Initiated by the opera impresario James Mapleson, the school was directed by dancer and choreographer Katie (Katti) Lanner (1829‒1908). After a considerable ballet career in both her native Vienna and in Hamburg, Lanner settled in London, where she took over the direction of the National Training School of Dancing. Amongst her numerous positions was choreographer of the ballets for Augustus Harris’s spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes, for which she prepared many child performers (Gilliland 2004).

Aside from Lanner’s specialist dance agency, Varty also notes that there were several theatrical schools for children in London. One of the largest (and quite possibly the oldest) was run by a Mr Nolan, to whom ‘many of the infant prodigies of the stage owe their introduction’ (Jeune 1889 cited in Varty 2008, p. 10). Operating as both an agency and a training space, Nolan’s establishment taught singing, elocution, and dancing to young people, many of whom were contemporaneously employed on the London stage.

In New York as in London, classes providing professional training in stage skills for children were an element of the theatre business during the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, where a number of training schools operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn (NYSPCC May 1886, pp. 13‒14).

The mother of two child actors appearing in a 1886 production of May Blossom at New York’s Grand Opera House noted that ‘before [child actors] start out upon the road they, of course, go through a regular course of training, and you know grown persons must undergo the same process’ (NYSPCC May 1886, pp. 13‒14). Although this mother did not name the trainer to whom she sent her children, she was referring to stage trainers such as Emily Fernandez of Manhattan and Mrs Wade of Brooklyn, who both trained children for the professional stage (New York Herald 1909). At the time of her death in 1909, Emily Letitia Fernandez was described as ‘perhaps the best known woman theatrical broker in this country … [having] built up the most famous theatrical agency in the country’ (New York Sun 1909). She began her theatrical agency in the early 1880s, recruiting child performers for the manager and stage director, Augustin Daly, whose New York theatres were regarded as the most fashionable and respectable of the era (Vey 2001).

Emily Fernandez’s professional biography had much in common with that of Rose Edouin Lewis. Born in New York to a well-known American theatrical family named Bradshaw, she grew up into the theatre and many of her professional acting credits were with Daly’s companies. At some point in her adult career she gave up acting to become Daly’s secretary. Her recruitment of child performers and the theatrical actors’ agency she became particularly known for also commenced at this time. Somewhat tellingly, her daughter Bijou Fernandez came to prominence as a child star in New York in the early 1880s, indicating a nexus between Mrs Fernandez’s experience as an actress ‒ engendered as the natural result of her birth into a theatrical family ‒ her experience as a mother of a child star, and her initiation of an actor’s agency. As with Rose Edouin Lewis in Australia, her professional decisions to recruit and train child performers recognised theatre of the late nineteenth century as a networked business, not simply an art, and a business where new sorts of roles ‒ manager, broker, trainer ‒ were emerging (Leonhardt 2015).

A journalist interviewing Mrs Fernandez in 1886 enquired if she had developed a formal system of preparing children for the stage. Her response was that she tried to adapt the child’s natural capabilities ‘to the part he or she is expected to fill’ (NYSPCC May 1886, pp. 13‒14). She thought elocution was wasted on young people, since it worked against the very thing that young performers were valued for ‒ their naturalness. When asked what sorts of children were particularly suited to training for the stage, she observed that children with family affiliations to the theatre had an obvious aptitude. But she also made it clear that the children she worked with came primarily from families of the middle and working classes, who did not have ties to the stage. Another child trainer working in Brooklyn during the same period, Mrs Wade, also indicated that her clientele were families that harboured aspirations for their offspring to carve out a career on the stage, but were without professional or familial affiliation with the theatre (Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1889).

Mrs Fernandez and Mrs Wade developed their training businesses to serve a particular niche in the New York theatre business ‒ child performers were in high demand from 1880 onwards both in New York City and in the burgeoning business of theatrical touring. A broad consideration of their activities and parallel trends in London serves here to contextualise, both temporally and internationally, the Australian projects of Rose Edouin Lewis (1880‒1881) and J.C. Williamson’s organisation (from the 1890s on).

Breaking with tradition: Mrs Rose Edouin Lewis’s modernising approach

The actress Rose Edouin Lewis was well known to audiences in eastern Australia in 1880 when she began classes in elocution and stage performance at the Academy of Music in Melbourne. This was quite probably the first instance in Australia of a formal theatrical training establishment (a historical likelihood also acknowledged by J.C. Williamson almost 20 years later). Rose Edouin began her own career as a child performer in London and continued her stage career in Australia after emigrating there with her mother and siblings (Bryer/Edouin/Lewis Families Collection). In 1864, whilst on tour to Shanghai with a theatrical company produced by George Lewis, she married Lewis, a performer and theatre entrepreneur who was much older than her. Also British by birth, G.B.W. Lewis (as he was referred to in theatre circles) had been a child performer at Astley’s Amphitheatre in the circus of Andrew Ducrow, and throughout his adult career he moved between the equestrian circus, the dramatic stage, and theatre management. From 1876 until 1885, George and Rose Lewis were the lessees of Melbourne’s Academy of Music, later re-named the Bijou Theatre (Colligan 2013).

In April 1880 Mrs Lewis (as she was formally referred to in the press) produced a juvenile HMS Pinafore, with a cast of 65 children drawn primarily from her classes (all but one of the principal parts were played by her students). Following hard on the heels of the first Children’s Pinafore, produced by Richard D’Oyly Carte at London’s Opéra Comique during the Christmas pantomime season of 1879‒1880, Mrs Lewis’s production proved immensely popular with audiences, running for 16 weeks in Melbourne, 14 weeks in Sydney, followed by a return Melbourne season in October 1880. She then produced the pantomime, Little Goody Two Shoes, for the lengthy Christmas holiday season of 1880‒1881, followed by another six-week run of the Children’s Pinafore in Adelaide during March‒April 1881 (Arrighi 2012). All in all, her children’s troupe travelled vast distances throughout this 12-month period ‒ from Melbourne to Sydney, back to Melbourne, followed by the return journey between Melbourne and Adelaide. The popular success of Mrs Lewis’s Children’s Pinafore also garnered financial gain for J.C. Williamson, who owned the rights to HMS Pinafore (and eventually all of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works) in the region.²

Scant historical records shed very little light on Mrs Lewis’s approach to training. We can nevertheless deduce something of her methods from correspondence published in Melbourne newspapers and these letters are threaded through with strong arguments on behalf of the health and wellbeing benefits of theatrical training for young people.

Claims about the health advantages of Mrs Lewis’s theatrical training for children resulted from a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of children on the stage that played out in the newspapers. In May 1881, a deputation from the conference of Melbourne’s Educational Boards of Advice presented a unanimous resolution to the Chief Secretary of the colony of Victoria, Mr Berry, disapproving of the employment of children in theatres and places of amusement. The deputation’s complaint was ‘that children had been taken from school to play in HMS Pinafore’ (Argus 1881a). The Chief Secretary of Victoria responded that ‘he quite agreed with the deputation in th[e] matter [of children on the stage]’. While he had not seen the performance in question, he thought: ‘it would be very deplorable if it should become a practice for young children to be trained to amuse adults in Theatres at an age when they ought to be occupied with school lessons’. He qualified his position by observing that: ‘He was in favour of adopting fresh legislation to prevent the employment of children in this way save in exceptional cases, as where a child had developed extraordinary talent for music, and it was desirable to cultivate it in a special way’ (Argus 1881a).

Heated arguments for and against child performers immediately appeared in the press. Letters from parents, published in response to Mr Berry’s threats to legislate against child performers, articulated many of the key issues that circulated around the matter of ‘children on the stage’ in Australia. One parent was swift to highlight the hypocrisy of the Chief Secretary of the colony who had been observed, accompanied by the colony’s Minister for Education, applauding and enjoying the performances of four children at a Saturday matinee performance of The Winter’s Tale at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal just a few hours after expressing his intention to bring the matter of legislation against child performers to his parliamentary colleagues (Argus 1881b).

Revealing their middle-class values and thus, in all likelihood, their position in society, parents of the child performers deflected the question of whether their children were participating in their legally prescribed quota of classroom education by suggesting it would be a far better use of legislators’ time and energy if they turned their attention to the children of the criminal classes, to the:

hordes of neglected children, the waifs and strays of society, whose parents are pariahs and criminals, polluting the population daily and nightly by their public street exhibitions, uneducated, unclothed, and uncared for. Here is work enough for the secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association and also for [the educational Boards of Advice]. (Argus 1881b)

Victoria’s Education Act of 1872 required children aged 6‒15 to attend school on half the days school was open in each half year. Figures demonstrating the discrepancy between enrolments and actual attendance at school in the wake of this so-called ‘compulsory’ attendance law also point to the law’s ineffectiveness (Barcan 1980). Within the context of poor school attendance rates, it is understandable that the parents of Mrs Lewis’s child performers felt justified to argue that pressure from legislators should be applied to other, poorer, lower class sectors of the community, thereby revealing the likelihood that their own social position was within the middle class.

In a letter written to the Editor of Melbourne’s principal daily newspaper, the Argus, one parent issued a public invitation to the colonial Chief Secretary to observe first-hand how the children appearing in Mrs Lewis’s Pinafore spent their extra-curricular classes training for the stage. The following excerpt provides a rare insight into the formal organisation of the weekly classes at the Academy of Music:

The children … are to be seen at their lessons in the saloon, or on the stage of Melbourne’s Bijou Theatre on four days every week, the girls on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the boys on Tuesdays and Fridays. Let the Chief Secretary … examine the children, and he will be forced to confess that their parents are not only taking steps to make them useful but ornamental members of society, and, at the same time, securing their future welfare […] If we are to be amused and instructed by mature talent, I contend that this, and this only, is the way to evolve it. (Argus 1881b)

The contemporary education law requiring only half-time attendance at school accounts for why children were able to attend Mrs Lewis’s classes on weekdays and still fulfil their compulsory quota of attendance at government-sponsored schools. Other points of interest in this excerpt are the aspirational intention of the writer, and his or her conviction that the training physically improved the child trainees. For this parent, his or her child’s theatrical activities were speculatively regarded as training for a future career in the theatre, and, at the very least, as a social activity that enriched the child’s broad education and wellbeing. The same letter-writer then elaborated on his/her son, Master M. Harrison, described as ‘always puny and delicate’:

I tried doctors and nurses; one of the latter took him … to the Theatre Royal daily, and he grew quite fond of it. I then articled him to Mrs Lewis, he was her Midshipmite in ‘Pinafore,’ and her Clown in pantomimes. He can read, write, and spell, sing, dance, jump, and throw a handspring that’s quite a caution. Had I not done this, he would have been in the cemetery now, and now I pay for all this, and think the money well spent. Let [the Chief Secretary] legislate by all means against the criminal classes growing up around us, but in doing so he must make a marked distinction and distinct exception in favour of those persons who, in addition to giving their children proper scholastic education, are also going to no end of trouble and expense in the training of their children for dramatic purposes. (Argus 1881b)

It is from this account of what the letter writer’s child has learnt at Mrs Lewis’s classes that we can extrapolate the broad strands (but not the detail) of her training. Quite apart from the foundational skills of reading, writing and spelling, learned from ‘proper scholastic education’ presumably at a government-sponsored school, Master M. Harrison has learned to sing and dance at Mrs Lewis’s school. He and his ‘classmates’ must have sang and danced more than competently to satisfy the critical eyes of theatre-going audiences in Sydney and Melbourne, who, as Veronica Kelly has pointed out, ‘wanted “the best” and expected it as their prerogative, both as citizens of the British Empire and increasingly as modern cosmopolitans’ (Kelly 2005, p. 86). J.C. Williamson noted that elocution was a mainstay of Mrs Lewis’s training (Evening News 1899), but in addition to singing, dancing, and speaking for the stage, young Harrison has also learned to jump, and throw a handspring, suggesting that Mrs Lewis’s teaching also encompassed physical training and comic timing (deducing from his roles as ‘Clown’ in pantomimes and ‘Midshipmite’ in HMS Pinafore), that perhaps drew on knowledge of her husband’s early training in the London circus of Andrew Ducrow. It is the holistic exercise of the whole bios ‒ muscular, vocal, and what Jennie Brenan would later term ‘mental training’ ‒ that has, in the parent’s opinion, strengthened Master Harrison and kept him from the cemetery.

In the brief flush of impassioned letter writing to the Argus newspaper, another parent explained that his three children in Mrs Lewis’s classes were ‘happy and contented … have much improved in every way since they have been [doing the classes]’, and that ‘the greatest punishment I could inflict would be to say that they should not go to rehearsal’ (Argus 1881c). Referring to his daughter’s chronic childhood illness, in this instance occasioned by vaccination, he explained:

the healthy exercise of the stage, and the invigorating influence of change of scene and climate [referring to the year of intensive touring occasioned by lengthy seasons in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide], have done more for her than all the doctors could, and she is now, I hope, in a fair way of out-growing the terrible evils inflicted upon her by what, in my opinion, is a cruel and useless operation (vaccination) […] Any legislation which would interfere with [the children’s theatrical training and performance] would, I think, be considered by many as both unnecessary and unjust. (Argus 1881c)

Parents paid Mrs Lewis for their children’s weekly extra-curricular education across a range of theatrical skills. The productions that she then produced and toured ‒ HMS Pinafore and the pantomime Little Goody Two Shoes ‒ required the young performers to sing, dance, speak, and exhibit the contemporary codes of good stagecraft and etiquette; they were also paid for their public performances.³ The significance of Mrs Lewis’s stage academy is that it marks a break with the traditional pathways by which children and young people customarily entered the theatrical profession: either as an apprentice to a theatrical or circus troupe, or as the natural outcome of birth into a theatrical family. She could not have established her modernising approach to the theatre business without considerable interest from parents who were prepared to pay for their children’s classes on a weekly basis. Aspirations revealed in the several letters quoted above, coupled with parents’ ability to pay for regular tuition, strongly suggest the parents were of the middle class. They regarded the stage as a viable profession and Mrs Lewis’s training as a career pathway for young people of both genders.

There is essentially nothing surprising about the fact that in Australia during the nineteenth century, as in the UK and the US, children born into theatrical families (irrespective of the performance genre, whether drama, variety, comic opera, or circus) were nurtured into the same career as their parents. Or that, as a result of their birth, professional opportunities were created for them from a young age, with adults in the broader entertainment business mentoring or contributing practically to their theatrical education. Likewise, the practice for (often impoverished) parents to indenture children to entertainment producers has a long history in many parts of the world, including Australia (Arrighi and Emeljanow 2014, Bratton 2003). Whilst Mrs Lewis’s initiative to train young people for her productions was short-lived, her enterprise is evidence of the theatrical profession in Australia opening up to middle-class children whose parents harboured aspirations, or were at least open to the idea of their children following a theatrical career. Middle-class interest in theatre training for young people, speculatively taken up as a potential career pathway, also reflected the influence of the cult of celebrity and its promise of attendant financial wealth. Mrs Lewis’s public profile as an actress of considerable popularity, coupled with her role as ‘Directress’ of the recently built and elegantly appointed Bijou Theatre in Melbourne’s Bourke Street, meant that she was a potent and visible identity who could ‒ and in fact did ‒ open career paths for talented children. Many of the children she trained went on to work with the Pollards juvenile comic opera company and several, including Flora Graupner, Mary Weir, and Chrissey Peachey, subsequently enjoyed some success as adult performers (Colligan 2013).

Meeting labour demands of the commercial theatre: Jennie Brenan and Minnie Everett

During the 1890s, American-born actor turned Australasian theatre impresario, James Cassius Williamson (in partnership with George Musgrove 1892‒1899), established the foundations of what would eventually become the largest theatrical empire in the world, colloquially referred to as ‘The Firm’ (Balme 2015b, Kelly 2005). Williamson was one of the key agents of change in the commercialisation of theatre in the region. As the Asia-Pacific lynchpin in the increasingly networked global theatre business (Balme 2015, 2015b), Williamson shopped internationally in the US and the UK for productions and performers, importing and touring shows that exemplified the latest stage trends in the Northern Hemisphere. ‘By 1909 his acquisition of dramatic properties comprised 280 operas, dramas, and comedies bought outright’ (Kelly 2005, p. 81). His theatrical empire spanned Australia and New Zealand and was the largest employer and commercial nurturer of young talent in the region. (Kelly [2005] details other major Australian producers who were contemporaries of the Williamson organisation; whilst these producers may have offered training to their young performers, this essay’s attention to the Williamson firm arises from the extant evidence base.) Not confined to a narrow range of performance genres, Williamson’s commercial empire produced annual pantomime extravaganzas that toured the huge trans-Tasman region for 10 months of every year (Fantasia 1996), as well as musical theatre, dance, opera, and drama.

An in-house school for dancers who were trained to his aesthetic standards (‘good looking, straight, lithe, active girls’) was established during the 1890s. Complaining that 15 years earlier ‒ in the mid-1880s ‒ ‘the average ballet girl [in Australia] had a round-shouldered stooping figure’, Williamson contended that girls and young women trained by his theatrical organisation ‘compare favourably in physique with girls in any part of the world, and most of them have been in the class from children’ (Evening News 1899). His strategy was to develop performers who matched his aesthetic taste and suited the technical demands of the shows his company produced.

By the late 1890s, the Williamson firm’s in-house training was conducted by Jennie Brenan (1877‒1964) and Minnie Everett (1874‒1956), two young dancers who themselves had graduated from the company’s early training programme. With substantial support from Williamson, Everett and Brenan eventually established dance studios in Sydney (Everett) and Melbourne (Brenan), the two leading centres for theatrical production in the Australia‒New Zealand region. These studios would both provide primary pathways to the Williamson stage until the 1940s, with Everett also working as a ‘producer’ (what we would now term a stage director) for the firm’s productions of opera, and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

Convent-educated and the daughter of a Melbourne city councillor, Brenan began dancing lessons on the insistence of J.C. Williamson, who was, incidentally, a friend of her parents. She made her professional stage debut in 1896 as Mimi the dancing girl in Trilby (McCalman 1979), but Brenan never carved out a career as a professional performer, observing in interviews that she did not care to perform in public due to overwhelming shyness (Table Talk 1903). Opening a dance studio in Melbourne in 1904, she subsequently trained dancers, child performers, and chorus members for the J.C. Williamson ‘stable’ for over 30 years. Contracts and correspondence held in the Performing Arts Collection at Melbourne’s Arts Centre reveal both the longevity and stability of Brenan and Everett’s involvement with the Williamson organisation. Brenan’s contract granted her the sole right to provide dancers, child performers, and extras for Williamson’s productions in Melbourne. Described in the contract as a ballet mistress and a teacher of dancing and calisthenics, Brenan was permitted to align her dance studio with the Williamson organisation through the company’s extensive advertising campaigns. The cachet derived from this arrangement must have been financially and professionally beneficial to Brenan and her studio business because, in return, she was contractually required to pay the Williamson firm half of the money she earned (Brenan, correspondence file, 1921‒1938).

Everett also studied dance as a child in Melbourne and at age 13 was employed on a permanent basis as a dancer by the Williamson organisation (Maslen 1996, The Theatre 1910). Appearing first in the corps of ballerinas and then as a soloist, she took her first career position as a choreographer in 1897. Everett was most often described as the Williamson firm’s ‘ballet-mistress’ but to label her in this way is to limit and seriously undervalue her artistic contribution to the company and to the training of many of its young performers. The wording of a contract from 1918 describes Everett’s salaried duties as including everything pertaining to ‘the teaching, inventing and arranging of ballets, dances and chorus business generally’. Her revised contract of 1925 stipulated the Williamson firm’s right ‘to call upon [her] to act as producer, from time to time at our discretion’, for which Everett would receive a bonus of £100 ($7582 in today’s money)⁴ over and above her weekly salary of £20 ($1516 in today’s money). She was also ‘to act as producer and take charge of the various Gilbert and Sullivan productions’ for which she would be paid a further £500 ($37,900 in today’s money). Everett was critically acclaimed for her productions of comic and grand opera from the early years of the twentieth century. The Williamson firm’s reliance upon her to produce their regular Gilbert and Sullivan seasons endured until the early 1940s, when financial challenges arising from Australia’s involvement in World War II hastened the end of Everett’s regular employment with the firm (Everett, correspondence file, 1918‒1940). It is, however, the contractual clause concerning Everett’s Sydney-based dance studio that illuminates her contribution to the training of dancers for the largest professional theatrical organisation in the Australasia region. That clause stipulated that Williamson’s would take 50 per cent of her pupils ‘for any new ballet engagements, provided always that your pupils have the necessary ability and are, in our opinion, quite competent for the work and equal to others offering’.⁵

The nuanced relationship between Brenan, Everett, and the Williamson firm provides a snapshot of Williamson’s innovative approach to theatrical entrepreneurship at work. Brenan and Everett managed an aspect of ‘The Firm’s’ core business (training dancers, children, and extras) in cities that were geographically distant but administratively networked through major offices located in Williamson-leased or -owned theatres in each city. Operating along similar lines as the contemporary model of syndication or franchise, Brenan and Everett owed their success and their livelihoods to the J.C. Williamson brand that had creatively nurtured them as youngsters, and which they now served.

By the turn of the century, the classes taught by Brenan and Everett were already institutionalised as part of the culture of Williamson’s theatrical empire ‒ they operated as a training space for future performers with the company. Not insignificantly, strong arguments on behalf of the health and wellbeing benefits of theatrical training for young people link the available public records concerning Jennie Brenan, and the weekly classes operated almost 20 years earlier by Mrs Lewis. Williamson particularly highlighted the healthy benefits of the body-based training that was provided to two age-specific groups, ‘children’ and ‘grown-up girls’:

On every alternate afternoon you may see sixty or seventy grown-up girls at their lessons on the stage [of Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne], and on the other afternoons the classes for children are taken. […] They grow up fine, straight, healthy youngsters, and the regular exercises and calisthenics do them an immense amount of good. (Evening News 1899)

Considering her role in developing young performers for eventual employment in Williamson’s adult companies, Brenan noted in 1911 ‒ with something of a proto-feminist sentiment ‒ that theatrical training was especially good for girls, ‘for whom so few professions are open’ (Barrier Miner 1911). Echoing her employer’s outlook 12 years earlier, a key precept in Brenan’s argument on behalf of theatrical training for children was also the health and wellbeing benefits:

they derive a fine mental training, for they are trained to obtain a quick and intelligent grasp of things they are being taught in their professional life, and are also given splendid physical exercise in the dancing and ballets. […] It is no drudgery with them. They are delighted to attend the dancing lessons, and there is nothing like dancing as physical training when it is properly taught. Our system of dancing conduces to grace of deportment, besides developing the muscles. If every child took these exercises there would be no fear of physical degeneration, and there would be fewer of the unhealthy adults that we see about nowadays. (Barrier Miner 1911)

Speaking of the class of children targeted by the Williamson organisation, Brenan observed: ‘We aim at getting clever children, and take them from the best homes, so the most of them are refined and charming, and they lose none of these virtues on tour. Each child has a guardian on tour. In many instances their mothers accompany them’ (Barrier Miner 1911). (In this interview, Brenan was specifically discussing the juvenile company she had recently organised with Williamson, and its productions of The Geisha and Floradora. She may however have been speaking about her own background.)

Models for the studio-based training provided by Brenan and Everett as a corollary of the Williamson business model were well established in London’s West End theatre district. Williamson, Everett, and Brenan would no doubt have been aware of the work of Katti Lanner. Whilst the fine details of the training provided by Brenan and Everett remain elusive in the limited historical records, what can be determined is that their system of training was developed ‒ and presumably evolved over time ‒ to suit the aesthetic and repertoire choices of the Williamson theatrical empire. They each created ballets for pantomime and other spectacular entertainments and both women travelled internationally on a regular basis to observe, and absorb influence from, the latest stage production trends in the leading theatre cities of the Northern Hemisphere. They also trained dancers for ‘drama, comic opera, pantomime, and grand opera’ (Table Talk 1903), with calisthenics also applied to strengthen and lengthen muscles and generally improve deportment and carriage of the body. As the sole trainer of children and extras for productions staged in Melbourne, Brenan must also have taught essential stage-craft according to the professional theatrical codes of the period, including such things as peripheral awareness, entering and exiting the stage, taking a mark, participating in stage tableaux, stillness, facial and full body focus, as well as the code of good manners required in the rehearsal room and in all areas of the theatre. Whilst elocution and musical training were not integrated into the studio teaching provided by Brenan and Everett, and whilst stage techniques would have necessarily been learned on the job from other more experienced actors, this study reveals that a model of professional performer training for a specific commercial environment was in use by the Williamson firm from the early 1890s.

Envisioning the future of institutionalised actor training in Australia: J.C. Williamson

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the theatre industry in Australia was growing with such energy that it needed fresh faces and fresh young talent, capable of meeting the diverse demands of the popular stage repertoire. As J.C. Williamson expressed it, there were ‘far more openings than in former days’ and opportunities for advancement occurred far more quickly than at any earlier time. The high demand for a diverse range of stage entertainments, both in the continent’s populous urban centres, and in national and international touring, translated to a higher demand for performers.

At the close of the century Williamson stated that he had long harboured the desire to establish a dramatic college in Australia. Citing as ideal models the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, based at the Lyceum Theatre in New York, and the Stanhope-Wheatcroft School of Acting, also based in New York City, Williamson imagined an Australian institution to provide sustained and methodical training for the professional stage. His insistence upon a prolonged period of ‘systematic instruction’ of several years’ duration validated the work of the actor as a skilled and technical craft that needed to be learned over time (Evening News 1899).

His ambition to establish a professional stage school in Australia reflected several national and international trends, such as the swift growth of acting schools and theatre conservatories in New York City and the eastern US between 1884 and 1900 (McArthur 2000, p. 101), and the considerable expansion of the commercial Australian theatre industry during the preceding 20 years or so. The ‘proper’ curriculum recommended by Williamson addressed training for the body through dancing and calisthenics, elocution for the voice, and music ‒ presumably general music training together with specialisation in singing. The manly sports of fencing and boxing were also to be taught to male aspirants to the professional stage.

Williamson’s identification of these particular training strands reflected the needs of the commercial stage in Australasia at the turn of the twentieth century. Elocution to develop strong voices that could fill the large theatres and opera houses of the region; dancing, singing, and a grounding in musicality to fit actors for the operettas and musical comedies that were big box office attractions; and the man-to-man combat arts of fencing and pugilism essential for the theatrical staging of fights. Williamson’s proposed inclusion of calisthenics for both male and female acting students reflected the Delsartian approach to training the body as an instrument of expression that informed professional training programmes at the leading New York schools he admired. It also reflected the burgeoning social trend for physical culture that had come to the fore in Western industrialised societies during the preceding decade (Budd 1997, Segel 1998), and that was filtering through different aspects of popular culture, including the Vaudeville stage, popular magazines, and physical culture clubs for young men and women (Daley 2003).

That the theatrical profession was, by the turn of the century, wide open to aspiring young people of all social backgrounds ‒ not simply those born to theatrical families ‒ is further substantiated in journal items of the era that regularly appeared amongst extensive newspaper reportage on the Australian entertainment industry. Describing a Tuesday afternoon audition call for the upcoming pantomime at the Williamson-run Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, a writer for The Player theatrical journal thought: ‘the list of aspirants would indeed be an eye-opener as to the average Sydney girl’s desire to tread the boards’ (The Player 1903).

Needless to say, Williamson never fulfilled his ambition to establish a conservatorium-style Australian stage academy, where successful applicants would pay for a structured training programme of several years duration, then eventually gain entrée to employment on the professional stage. It would be many decades until the first professional training school opened in Australia, with the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) opening its doors in 1959 and offering what Williamson had envisioned 60 years earlier, a school ‘where candidates for the stage would be properly and systematically instructed’. However, as this study reveals, initiatives to establish formal training for the commercial stage occurred much earlier in Australia than previously examined in theatre histories.

Notes

¹ Nineteenth-century training processes discussed in this article occurred in fixed venues that were sometimes described as ‘studios’. For the sake of disambiguation, this term is not to be confused with ‘studio’ as the short-hand umbrella term for twentieth-century intensive actor training processes.

² George Selth Coppin (the Melbourne-based actor-manager who first brought Williamson and his wife Maggie Moore to Australia in 1874) estimated Williamson would earn £5000‒£6000 from H.M.S. Pinafore in 1880. G.S. Coppin to Henry Edwards, 18 May 1880. Coppin correspondence, MS8827, State Library of Victoria.

³ George Selth Coppin quoted pay rates for the child actors as 2s and 6d per night and up to £4 for adult actors. G.S. Coppin to Henry Edwards, 18 May 1880. Coppin correspondence, MS8827, State Library of Victoria.

⁴ Measuringworth.com, accessed 6 January 2016, http://www.measuringworth.com/index.php; the relative value of purchasing power is calculated to reflect 2013 monetary rates.

⁵ Correspondence from J.C. Williamson Ltd to Everett, dated 6 November 1925, Minnie Everett correspondence file, Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.