Shakespeare in Settler-built Spaces: Oscar Asche's ‘Recitals’ of Julius Caesar in the Melbourne and Sydney Town Halls

Abstract

During their first Australasian tour in 1909–1910, Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton produced costumed ‘recitals’ of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in the town halls of Sydney and Melbourne. While the landscape has been privileged as the major site of the Australian settler imaginary and its labours of familiarisation, settler investments in their built urban spaces have been less studied. The social and political specificities of these two major colonial buildings – their choices of architectural rhetoric, sitings in urban space and histories of civic use and access – frame the meanings of Asche's spare mise en scène for Shakespeare's play. The text of Julius Caesar, itself a resonant meditation on the titular character as historical ‘ghost’, becomes additionally ‘haunted’ (in Marvin Carlson's phrase) by audience knowledge of the history and typical usages of the politically contested structures in which it was encountered. As he had done for Beerbohm Tree's lavish 1898 production, Asche performed the role of Mark Antony. Yet for his ‘recitals’ in these Australian found spaces, where he both used and obscured the architectural features of the magnificent interiors, his aesthetic rather engaged elements of modernist bare staging and lighting ideas familiar from the work of Poel and Copeau.

Notes

1. David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths, ‘Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity’, in Disputed Territories: Land Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, ed. by David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), pp. 1–29 (p. 4).

2. Besides the Julius Caesar readings, the Shakespeare productions for this tour are The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Company's second tour (1912–13) added a world premiere of their Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

3. The dates for Melbourne are Saturday, 25 September 1909 and Thursday, 17 February 1910; for Sydney, Thursday, 7 October and Saturday, 23 October 1909. These costumed ‘recitals’ were also briefly hosted in theatres as ‘extra’ additions to the repertoire: in the Criterion (Sydney) in December 1909; and the Theatre Royal (Adelaide) in May 1910.

4. Trigger and Griffiths, ‘Disputed Territories’, p. 4.

5. Benedict Andrews, ‘All the Stage His World’, Australian, 12 July 2005, Arts section, p. 14.

6. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 15.

7. All textual citations are to William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. by Anthony Miller, The Bell Shakespeare (Marrickville, NSW: Science Press, 1996).

8. David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 265.

9. Wiles, A Short History, p. 1.

10. Rosemary Gaby, ‘“Here's a Marvellous Convenient Place for Our Rehearsal”: Shakespeare in Australian Space’, Australasian Drama Studies, 46 (2005), 124–38.

11. Geoffrey Milne, ‘Shakespeare Under the Stars: A New Performance Tradition’, Australasian Drama Studies, 33 (1998), 65–79.

12. John Ripley notes that the Augustan perception of a fragmented disunified play whose hero dies halfway through was challenged in the 1830s by Hermann Ulrici, who saw the unifying principle as an idea of ‘History’ (John Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], p. 5).

13. G. V. Brooke's Melbourne production of Sardanapulus, for example, performed this function of mapping the imaginary city as cosmopolis during the events of the Indian uprising. See Veronica Kelly, ‘Orientalism in Early Australian Theatre’, New Literatures Review, 26 (1993), 32–45.

14. Margo Beasley, Sydney Town Hall: A Social History (Sydney: City of Sydney/Hale & Iremonger, 1998), p. 7; Margaret Betteridge, ‘Sydney's Temple of Democracy’, World of Antiques and Art, 60 (December 2000–June 2001), 62.

15. Sandro Spinetti, ‘The Sydney Town Hall Restoration’, Building Economist, 31.2 (September 1992), 6–11.

16. Sydney's ceiling is made of pressed zinc panels. Reportedly Ernest Wunderlich was able to convince the relevant committees that delicate plaster work would be destroyed by the resonance of the organ when installed, so his own product was used instead (Spinetti, ‘Sydney Town Hall Restoration’, p. 7).

17. Shirley Fitzgerald, ‘Palace of Democracy’, in The Role of History in Conservation Work: Papers from a Workshop Conducted at the Orient Hotel, Cnr George and Argyll Streets, The Rocks, Friday–Saturday 23–4 November 1990, ed. by Terry Kass (Sydney: Professional Historians Association, 1990), p. 39.

18. The deliberately accessible exterior of Sydney Town Hall, with its low fence, was wrested to bourgeois use by a 1900s addition of a porte cochère over its main entrance – such architectural rhetoric being, as Fitzgerald (ibid, p. 40) notes, more suitable to private aristocratic residences (see Image 3). In 1930 this addition was removed for the construction of the underground railway station, and replaced by the present informal and universal meeting place of the Town Hall steps.

19. Beasley notes the determined secularity and democratic purpose of the organs of these ‘secular cathedrals’: being cheaper than an orchestra, these vast instruments were used to educate citizens in good musical taste in free or low-cost recitals. Thus the organs fulfilled the functions of town halls themselves: ‘equality of access; secular cultural achievement; civic possession and municipal improvement’ (Beasley, Sydney Town Hall, pp. 18–19).

20. Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 2.

23. Carlson, Places of Performance, p. 17.

21. César Daly, quoted in Carlson, Places of Performance, p. 82.

22. Fitzgerald, ‘Palace of Democracy’, p. 40.

24. Beasley, Sydney Town Hall, pp. 7–10; Anthony Lowe and Richard Mackay, ‘Old Sydney Burial Ground’, Australasian Historical Archeology, 10 (1992), 15–23. I am grateful to Kieran Tonge, of the Friends of the Sydney Town Hall, who hospitably gave me access to the building in 2005.

25. Graeme Tucker, ‘The Melbourne Town Hall: The City's Meeting Place?’Victorian Historical Journal, 63.2/3 (1992), 37–49 (p. 48).

26. Tucker, ‘The Melbourne Town Hall’, pp. 40–7.

27. Michael McKinnie, ‘The State of This Place: Convictions, the Courthouse, and the Geography of Performance in Belfast’, Modern Drama, 46.4 (2003), 580–97 (p. 583).

28. Gay McAuley, ‘Place in the Performance Experience’, Modern Drama, 46.4 (2003), 598–613 (p. 601).

29. Cathy Turner, ‘Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-specific Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, 20.4 (2004), 373–90 (p. 374).

30. Beasley, Sydney Town Hall, pp. 31–34.

31. Brian Singleton, Oscar Asche, Orientalism and British Musical Comedy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), p. 33.

32. See Veronica Kelly, ‘Oscar Asche's Modernisms: Flesh, Colour, Light’, ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia, 25 (2006), 233–49.

33. Singleton, Oscar Asche, p. 32.

34. Anthony Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, pp. 45–6.

35. See, for example, Arnold Aronson, ‘Their Exits and Their Entrances: Getting a Handle on Doors’, New Theatre Quarterly, 20.4 (2004), 331–40.

36. Sydney Morning Herald, 8 October 1919, p. 3. For accounts of the production, see: Age, 27 September 1909, p. 11 and 17 February 1910; Table Talk, 30 September 1909, p. 23; Bulletin, 30 September 1909, pp. 9, 22.

37. My Life in Art, quoted in Wiles, A Short History, p. 254.

38. Wiles, A Short History, p. 254.

39. The sinister and aristocratic prestige of black within European culture is noted by John Gage, ‘Colour and Culture’, in Colour: Art and Science, ed. by Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 188–9.

40. Wiles, A Short History, p. 255.

41. ‘Melbourne Chatter’, Bulletin, 30 September 1909, p. 22.

42. Ibid.

43. 27 September 1909, p. 11.

44. McAuley, ‘Place in the Performance Experience’, p. 599.

46. Ibid., p. 91.

45. Anthony Miller, ‘Imperial Caesar: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar on the Australian Stage, 1856–1889’, Australasian Drama Studies, 33 (1998), 80–94.

47. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage, p. 194.

48. For further information on this important production, see Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by Richard Madelaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Veronica Kelly, ‘Australia's Lily Brayton: Performer and Theatre Artist’, Nineteenth Century Film and Theatre, 33.1 (2006), 39–59.

49. Simon Phillips' 1990s productions of the play in Melbourne, Brisbane and elsewhere, and Benedict Andrews' Sydney Theatre Production of 2005, display a similar textual de-emphasis of the individual actions and decisions of ordinary people. This suggests that Tree's unacknowledged world-historical ‘spirit’ is indeed ‘might yet' in an Australia obsessed with totalised media persuasion, and rendered as seemingly depoliticised and void of citizen agency.

50. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage, pp. 147–68.

51. Horst Zander, ‘Introduction’, in Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays, ed. by Horst Zander (London: Routledge, 2005), 5–41 (p. 5).