Landscape and Identity in Australian Melodrama

Abstract

AbstractNationalist histories of Australian theatre have tended to class nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular melodrama as a tool of British imperialist culture. It is argued that the practice of importing ready-made scripts, most often from successful London productions, resulted in theatre that failed to describe local experience, while limiting opportunities for Australian authors who might, given the chance, have written convincingly about colonial life. Although scripts were frequently ‘australianized’ by relocating the action to recognizable local settings, this has tended to be seen as a superficial marketing ploy, rather than as the beginnings of a national drama. However, discussion of this issue has so far focused on the textual aspect of melodrama and there has been little attention paid to the issue of stage spectacle and, in particular, the sophisticated and highly illusionistic representations of the Australian landscape that were often the main selling point of these productions....