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3 - A Colonial Audience Watching Othello at the Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

Joanne Tompkins
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Julie Holledge
Affiliation:
Flinders University of South Australia
Jonathan Bollen
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Liyang Xia
Affiliation:
Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo
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Summary

Chapter 3 investigates colonial actors’ performances on the 1841 opening night of the Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide. The Queen’s is the oldest extant theatre on mainland Australia. Its establishment reflected the South Australian colony fashioning itself as a colony of free settlers. We delve into the performance possibilities in this imported, Regency-style venue which opened with Othello, performed when race relations were particularly volatile. While we do not lose sight of the staging of the black body, we focus on corporeality in the shape of the audience. We reconstruct a culture of spectatorship across the auditorium by producing responses of the distinctive 1841 audience of Adelaide. The aim was to make in the Queen’s, and the rest of Adelaide, a better version of Britain, against the suppression of indigenous peoples, a matter that took on an even more macabre setting after the theatre’s closure, when it became the court that adjudicated on frontier politics. The performance laboratory for this chapter worked in conjunction with artists, actors, and a set designer to model an Othello for 1841 to consider audience responses to it at a time when race relations were topical.

Type
Chapter
Information
Visualising Lost Theatres
Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces
, pp. 66 - 95
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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