- Title
- Australian Child Actors on Early-Twentieth-Century Touring Circuits
- Creator
- Arrighi, Gillian
- Relation
- Touring performance and global exchange 1850-1950: Making Tracks
- Relation
- Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003055860
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Unhindered by Australia’s expansive geography and its location on the globe, large dramatic troupes of Australian children toured the Southeast Asia and Tasman regions from 1880 through to 1910. They contributed to the international transference of recent “hits” from London and New York, with Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas and Edwardian musical comedies prevalent in their popular repertoires. Virtuosic singing, precisely honed dancing skills, and precocious comic ability were the hallmarks of the child performers employed by the most successful troupes, which were numerically dominated by females.2 Many were from homes without familial links to the entertainment business and then, as now, professional teachers of dance, singing, and elocution supported their entrée to the entertainment business, particularly from the 1890s through to 1910. J.C. Williamson (1843–1913), the Asia Pacific region’s leading theatrical impresario at the turn of the twentieth century, employed many children annually for his firm’s spectacular pantomimes and drama productions. Williamson did not participate directly in the business of touring children’s troupes in the Tasman and Southeast Asia regions, but he believed that Australian child performers were the best in the world.3 When he negotiated the Australian tour of the London production of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird in 1912, a play that called for two child leads and, in Williamson’s re-visioning, numerous children in the cast, he refused to import child actors from London, stating “I can get all the children we require, and the cleverest in the world at that.”4 Children were thus a commodity in the national and international business of theatre, they could be identified at an early age, nurtured and trained, imported and exported, and their commodification served economic interests—Williamson held that “the child interest” in a play always appealed to audiences and made a play a “striking success.”5 For Williamson, the Australian entertainment industry was the global centre for producing child actors of the highest calibre, and throughout his ascendant career the American-born entrepreneur maintained an industrial space for child actors that extended to the provision of specialised in-house training.6 This attitude to child actors was prevalent in the industrial practice of other theatrical entrepreneurs of the region, such as Harry Rickards (1843–1911), a British comedian and music-hall performer who established the Tivoli variety theatre circuit in Australia and New Zealand in the 1890s, and the early twentieth-century production team of Clyde Meynell and John Gunn. Then as now, of the many children who undertook stage training in their early years and enjoyed a measure of success on the professional stage, some made the transition to an adult career, while many others did not.
- Subject
- Australian child actors; child performers; theatre; entertainment industry
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1475536
- Identifier
- uon:49586
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781003055860
- Language
- eng
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