Editorial Comment

Abstract

Editorial Comment Joanne Tompkins Theatre has intersected directly with the contemporary politics of 2016 and 2017, such that two essays in this general issue reference Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton (2015) as a springboard to their arguments: Julie Ann Ward and Kailin Wright both use the musical as a way into their essays about multiple approaches to linking politics and performance today. Neither is about Hamilton per se, but both raise the American president's response to the Hamilton cast's post-curtain pleas to the vice president following one performance. This address—and the president's response to it on Twitter—appears to have galvanized many attending the performance about the function of the art form, while many more in the Twittersphere have engaged with both the cast's point and the president's reaction to it. As this event illustrates, the assumption that theatre is entertainment—and entertainment only—continues to be challenged, as the essays in this general issue do. It is perhaps then no surprise that Wright and Daphna Ben-Shaul in this issue also quote Hannah Arendt, who in The Human Condition argues the difference between personal and public, while reinforcing the significance of theatre as an art form that is deeply relevant to the political. This art form has, for the authors in this issue, provided a critical means of engagement with politics, and the politics of performance, from numerous perspectives and through diverse moments in history. The global transmission of performance from the past (illustrated on the cover of this issue) characterizes three essays, while the other three focus on the politics and performance of recent moments. Each one documents and methodically works through the capacity of performance to disrupt politics. The issue begins with Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon's exploration of Dion Bouci-cault's 1859 play, The Octoroon. They have discovered archival documents that challenge the understanding of the melodrama's ending: the play chronicles the effects of slavery in an antebellum America, but Boucicault rewrote the ending when, in 1861, the play came to a London that had already abolished the slave trade. Merrill and Saxon have overturned the assumption that this revised ending was the version used consistently within the United Kingdom by uncovering archival materials that demonstrate this not to be the case. In fact, they have discovered that multiple versions of the play were being staged at the same time, consequently begging questions about the circulation of differing narratives of slavery. The essay, "Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon," explores the various versions of the playscript, including promptbooks that have not been accounted for in the critical record until now, to argue the implications of these discoveries for a reading of the play, especially in terms of sexual desire, violence, and race, and its movement throughout the world defined by empires built on slavery. They frame this discussion against a backdrop of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's 2014 award-winning play, An Octoroon. As Merrill and Saxon explicate, a fuller understanding of the cultural history of Boucicault's melodrama provides a better context for An Octoroon, which retells the narrative of Boucicault's play. The original play is demonstrated to be as fluid and unstable as the Jacobs-Jenkins version of the narrative shapes it. [End Page vii] The next essay also examines archival documentation about global flows of performance, in this case from Australia to India. In "The Controversial 'Case of the Opera Children in the East': Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child," Gillian Arrighi explores a moment in 1910 in which Australian child actors were physically mistreated at the hands of the juvenile opera company manager, Arthur Pollard. The resulting court case, which took place in Madras, is fascinating in itself, let alone the extraordinary child performers (some of whom feature on this issue's cover) and their plight. More importantly, this case became an opportunity for the rewriting of Australian federal law in the form of the Emigration Bill of 1910, which aimed to stop the movement of children from Australia for performance or, it transpired, for any other reason, without an adult of European background...