Tawny fronts: Colonial whiteness, Orientalism and representations of Cleopatra on the Australian stage

Abstract

This article traces how notions of colonial identity have played out in theatrical representations of Cleopatra on the Australian stage in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries – focusing on culturally produced costumed bodies as a site on to which ideas of colonial whiteness, Orientalism and modernity are projected. These representations of the ‘exotic’ Other also absorb popularly accepted ideas of femininity and female power in the circulation of familiar visual tropes. In the temporal space of the twentieth century, Anglo-Australian’s dominant theatrical references shifted from those associated with its European colonial subject’s cultural origins to those of a more globalized and culturally diverse nation still struggling to decolonize its cultural edifices. Close examination of the costumed bodies of Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Brayton as two touchstone versions of Cleopatra on the Australian stage at the dawn of the modern period, reveals the nascent creation of an aesthetic and stylistic cultural vernacular that would slowly develop throughout the twentieth century in the circulation of meaning between costume, bodies and audiences. For the contemporary practitioner, this provides some insight into the historical context of stereotypical costume tropes in which Orientalist ideals are circulated, as well as drawing attention to a particular political and ideological aspect of the complex relationship between the performing body and performance costume.