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NLA News - home August 2000 Volume X Number 11
Curtain Calls
Playbill for the Theatre Royal production On Our Selection

Ann Nugent discovers some gems of Australian theatre history in the National Library’s collection of theatre broadsides, playbills and posters

Live performance is, by its nature, ephemeral. Even in one short season each performance is slightly different from the one that preceded it and the one that will follow. Nuance, gesture, emphasis—all vary as the performers get into their stride or succumb to the impromptu bright idea. And nowhere are changes more likely than in popular theatre, which depends to a large extent on the moods and reactions of its audiences. The old variety shows were very much ‘play as you go’.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century variety circuit in England had a voracious appetite for melodrama, pantomime and variety shows, all with a generous dash of the exotic. Larger towns expected a change of bill weekly, while touring companies would play a couple of nights and then move on to the next location. In their heyday, the shows might have been as fresh as new paint, sparkling with local colour and a contemporary spin, but a century-and-a-half later there is very little material to help us identify the performers, let alone recapture the immediacy of their acts.

Playbill for School of Reform

Playbill for School of Reform; Or, How to Rule a Husband and La Pérouse; Or, The Desolate Island, Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden, London, Friday, 12 July 1816
London: Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden, 1816
broadside; 31 x 22 cm
Ephemera Collection (PA Broadside 6)

Playbill for the Theatre Royal production of On Our Selection, which opened on Thursday, 26 December 1912, Christchurch, New Zealand
Christchurch, New Zealand: [s.n.], 1912 (Star Office)
broadside: illustrated, 101 x 38 cm
Ephemera Collection (Broadside 180)
Playbill for The Bush-Rangers Often, all that remains of this highly vibrant, predominantly working-class theatre is its advertising materials: broadsides, playbills and posters. And the National Library has a nice little stack of these stored in its Australiana collections.

Richard Stone, former Manager, Australian Collection Development, points out that each item in the Library’s collection is documentary evidence of Australian enterprise or has an Australian connection. For example, the production might have originated in Australia or have been written by an Australian. Still others featured epic events in Australian history. Early topics included incidents from the voyages of Captain Cook, La Pérouse and Bligh. Then came shows featuring personalities of the convict era such as Margaret Catchpole and George Barrington, followed by the adventures of bushrangers and the erratic fortunes of diggers in the gold rush. Publicity broadsides and playbills provide details of these productions, as well as the names of the many Australian performers who appeared in England.

 

Playbill for Not Dead Yet Or The Counterfeit
Playbill for The Bush-Rangers!! Or the Humours of Van Diemen’s Land, Adelphi Theatre
[Edinburgh]: Edinburgh Adelphi Theatre, 1851
broadside; 45 x 20 cm
Ephemera Collection (PA Broadside 7)
Playbill for Not Dead Yet Or The Counterfeit, Theatre-Royal, Glasgow, Wednesday,
13 June 1866
[Glasgow]: Theatre-Royal, Glasgow, 1866
broadside; 76 x 26 cm
Ephemera Collection (PA Broadside 4)

Broadsides, which were usually pasted on advertising billboards and displayed at the front of the theatre, often substituted for theatre programs. They were crammed with text: a full list of the cast and their roles, details about music and entr’actes, a brief outline of the action, as well as the location, season and prices, and an advertisement for the theatre’s next attraction.

One of the earliest broadsides in the Library’s collection is for a performance at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, where a box could be had for seven shillings, and a place in the gallery for sixpence. On 12 July 1816, the Theatre Royal played a double bill: School of Reform; Or, How to Rule a Husband, a comedy featuring lords, ladies, bailiffs and jailers, and a pantomime ballet, La Pérouse; Or, The Desolate Island. It’s the La Pérouse segment that earns this particular piece of ephemera a place in the national collection.

Thirty years after La Pérouse sailed out of Botany Bay and into history, the Theatre Royal’s pantomime speculates on his survival on a desolate island. The La Pérouse pantomime offers highly decorative theatre, including original music composed by ‘the late Mr Moorehead and Mr Davy’, ‘a Chimpanzee (an Animal of the Defolate Ifland) played by Mafter E. Parsloe’, and the ‘Natives of a Neighbouring Ifland’, extravagantly named Kanko, Umba, Pootoomora and Tangaboo. The broadside suggests that the Theatre Royal is more interested in pandering to its audience’s taste for the florid and exotic, than in any credible portrayal of La Pérouse’s fate.

From the Library’s perspective, the La Pérouse pantomime provides an historical association with Australia. However, it’s the quirky connections of hindsight which bemuse contemporary viewers. Here’s a fantastical production about a French explorer and his crew who were last seen in Botany Bay in 1788, a date of major significance in Australian history. The Royal’s production, which stretches the bounds of historical probability, was performed not in Sydney but in London, the centre of an empire of which Australia was the most far-flung colony.

The appetite for colonial themes continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century. An 1851 broadside advertises The Bush-Rangers!! or the Humours of Van Diemen’s Land, a ‘New Melo-Dramatic Spectacle’ in three acts. The show was repeated at the Adelphi Theatre, Edinburgh, on Wednesday, 27 August, after having been received the previous evening with ‘Great Applause and Approbation’ at the same theatre. Although the description of the action has all the clichés of melodramatic adventure and contrivance—including ‘Crocodile Creeks’ and ‘Breckneck Hills’—the broadside shows the production also touched on race and social relations of the time. In one of its subplots, the ‘fair’ Kangaree, sister of the tribal chief Binnilong, is courted by her lover, the wrongly-transported Irish convict, Darby Ballylagan. In a subsequent act, Mr and Mrs Ballylagan warn the settlers of ‘the proposed Attack by the Bush-Rangers’. Reading between the lines of broadsides tantalises the taste for the full playscripts. But no playscript of this particular production survives. However, an extant 1829 three-act play, Bushrangers, promises much the same troubles and triumphs as the 1851 version.

Variety theatre is about entertainment, and historical facts are but grist to the mill of theatrical invention.

In 1851 E.H. Hardgraves found gold in New South Wales and later in the same year Thomas Hiscock discovered the rich alluvial goldfields of Ballarat—the Australian gold rush was on. These events had their repercussions at the Theatre-Royal in Dunlop Street, Glasgow, where Not Dead Yet Or The Counterfeit, the ‘new Sensational Drama’ by Mr David Fisher with ‘new scenery and effects’, was staged in 1866. The advertisement for the melodrama promises a rollicking production with ‘song and chorus, carousal and dance’ around the Gold Digger’s Hut in the ‘Bendigo Country of Australia’. The show’s finale, a ‘Grand Fancy Ball’ with a ballet by Miss Marion Inch, takes place in ‘Lady Moreton’s Garden and Grounds by Moonlight, on the Banks of the Thames at Richmond’. Like the best of the advertisements, this broadside both reveals and hides the storyline. Submerged in its hype is the puzzle of Mr Fisher’s plot. Is ‘the counterfeit’ of the title a bogus nugget of gold used to trick investors, or could the counterfeit be Sidney Phillips, known afterwards by his real name, Martin; or perhaps the counterfeit is his illegitimate half-brother Jasper Jones (both roles performed by the ubiquitous Mr Fisher)? The broadside promises a happy ending in which the principal character is ‘shown the way out of serious difficulty’ and a ‘startling intelligence putting an end to the counterfeit’. This production was accompanied by music especially composed by E. Thomas esq. of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society.

Poster from the Argyle Theatre of Varieties
Poster from the Argyle Theatre of Varieties, Birkenhead, England, Monday, 25 April 1910
Birkenhead, [England]: The Theatre, 1910
broadside; 89 cm
Ephemera Collection (Sref 792.7094271 C697)
Playbill for Wild Australia

Patrons could witness the play and its denouement from a box seat for a mere three shillings, or for sixpence in the gallery. Compared with prices in London 50 years earlier, the Glasgow prices for a box were cheap.

Mr Fisher, who according to the broadside was quite a prolific playwright as well as an actor, seems to have slipped from standard reference books. I wonder if he ever visited the Australian goldfields and if his ‘Tale of the Times’ tempted any members of his Glasgow audience to try their luck.

Sometimes these ephemeral pieces come with their own adventure stories. Each week from 1890 to 1930, staff at the Argyle Theatre of Varieties in Birkenhead, Liverpool, placed the printed poster of that week’s show in the theatre’s vaults for safekeeping. The Argyle was bombed early in World War II and the entire poster record was retrieved from the ruins by a leading British collector of theatrical memorabilia. The Argyle collection remained in the collector’s possession until his death in 1993.

In 1994 the National Library was able to purchase 22 of the Argyle posters, all of which had identified Australian connections. It is a splendid set, composed entirely of text in high Victorian type and having great visual appeal.

From these posters we learn that, in 1890, the Argyle audiences applauded the ‘Renowned Australian Wonder, Professor William Woodhead, the Musical Marvel!’, who

performs on Seven or Eight Musical Instruments at one time vis: the Harp, Concertina, Bass Drums, Imitation Side Drums, Bells, Cymbals, Triangles, Fairy Bells, Silver Tubes, Musical Glasses and Melophonian.

In 1893, red, blue, yellow and green lettering proclaimed the ‘First Appearance in Birkenhead of the Moscows, the Australian Wonders and Living Marionettes’. And in 1897 Mr Harry Atkinson, the ‘Australian Orpheus’, first gave his ‘Marvellous Imitation of Musical Instruments’. The Australian Orpheus returned to the Argyle on 14 December 1914 with the same enduring act.

The Argyle presented a steady stream of Australian comics, female and male. Australian comedienne Miss Amy Horton, performed in 1895; and Miss Alma Obrey, Australia’s ‘Representative Comedienne’, played the following year. Bert Danson, ‘Australian Comedian & Patterer’, appeared in 1907, and Ed. E. Ford, ‘The Australian Sundowner, President of the Face Trust’, followed in 1910.

By the turn of the century steam had replaced sail and, as the travelling time between Australia and Europe diminished, entrepreneurs began to promote ‘real’ Australian experiences in place of the dramatic fantasies of the previous era. A 1914 broadside invited audiences in Middlesbrough to experience Wild Australia in the flesh. The broadside advertised ‘The Great Sensational Wild Australia Show’ in which the

Men and Women are not Professional Performers, but are the Real Rough Bush Men and Women from the Cattle Plains of the wildest part of Australia.

Playbill for Wild Australia, Empire Palace of Varieties, Middlesborough, Monday,
7 December 1914
Middlesborough, [England]: Empire Palace of Varieties, Middlesborough, 1914
broadside; 101 x 36 cm
Ephemera Collection (PA Broadside 2
)

There is, of course, stereotyping at work here. ‘Australian men’, we are told, ‘are expert in stock whip and lasso’—an image that can be traced through to Chips Rafferty and which has its apotheosis in the resourceful and tough Crocodile Dundee.

Australian girls of the Wild Australia show are ‘expert shots’ capable of surviving in a rough environment. But, in another act, Mabel is ‘the dainty little girl’ and Malfe ‘the clumsy boy’, comic gender-biased caricatures that persisted well into the twentieth century.

Wild Australia cost sixpence for the cheapest seat, no increase on the Theatre Royal’s gallery price 100 years earlier.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Australian playwrights began to write about the Australian experience and to export their work. Of the 650 plays estimated to have been written in Australia in the nineteenth century, only 176 dealt with an Australian subject, setting and characters. With the coming of Federation, however, the Australian voice grew stronger and, between 1905 and 1913, 15 Australian plays were produced here to good runs.

Outstanding was the record-breaking On Our Selection by Beaumont Smith and Albert Edmunds, based on the ‘Dad and Dave’ stories of Steele Rudd. On Our Selection arrived at London’s Lyric Theatre in August 1920, playing an initial run of 31 performances. The Library has a broadside for the 1912 New Zealand season of this show. It features the face of Dad (played by Bert Bailey) against a background of a homestead in the home paddock, an unmistakably Australian image. This broadside is an early example of a mix of text and visual image in the progression towards the modern poster where image is predominant.

Theatre historian Katharine Brisbane suggests that by the 1920s the confidence of the Australian theatre was dwindling and only vaudeville and low comedy remained a bastion of ‘unselfconscious Australianness’. Vaudeville gave 16-year-old Henry van der Sluys his start as a singer in 1908. Three years later, when touring New Zealand, van der Sluys changed his name to Roy Rene and adopted his distinctive make-up—a white painted face and a black painted beard—a face that launched a thousand posters.

On his return to Australia, Mo played at the Sydney-based Fuller Revue Company. It was here that he met producer—comedian Nat Phillips. Phillips had already developed a successful comic character called ‘Stiffy’. The pair teamed up and so the ‘Stiffy and Mo’ duo came into being. They were a smash hit at the Bijou Theatre, ‘the home of good clean vaudeville’ in Melbourne, as well as in other Fuller theatres. The National Library holds an early 1920s Bijou Theatre poster of Stiffy and Mo. The poster shows equally large images of both comedians, and has only minimal text. Stiffy parted from Mo in 1925 after Mo was sacked in Adelaide for vulgarity. They came together again briefly in 1927, and then split, this time for good, in 1928. Phillips died in 1932.

Mo‘Strike Me Lucky’continued in vaudeville and later in radio. He did his last stage work in 1949–50 in McCackie Mo-Ments at the Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane, a show based on his very successful radio show The McCackie Mansions. Mo died in 1954.

Mo’s face with its suggestive leer, popularised by Martin Sharp’s 1970s image, has become an enduring icon of the Australian comic tradition. But the much earlier ‘Stiffy and Mo’ poster reminds us that the comic inspiration was not Rene’s alone. The Library’s poster draws our attention to Nat Phillips’s comic creation, and to the fact that Phillips was an equal partner with Mo on the Australian vaudeville stage of the 1920s.

There are many other gems in the Library’s collection of broadsides, playbills and posters, all showing some aspect of Australian endeavour, and all waiting to be ‘discovered’ and interpreted by researchers of Australian theatre and popular culture.

ANN NUGENT is a Canberra-based freelance writer

Playbill for Stiffy and Mo, Fullers' Bijou Theatre

Playbill for Stiffy and Mo, Fullers’ Bijou Theatre
Sydney: Edward Lee, [c. 1916—1928]
broadside; chiefly colour illus.,
101 x 39 cm
Ephemera Collection (PA Broadside 16)
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