The Vapour Trail

In the late nineteenth century, the eastern end of Melbourne’s Bourke street, swarming with theatres, skittle alleys, and bars, abutted the city’s Chinatown. The stage entrance to the Theatre Royal was in Little Bourke Street, where the great majority of Melbourne’s Chinese population lived. A number of other Bourke Street theatres also had storerooms or dressing-rooms which backed onto Chinatown.

Children in doorway near Little Bourke St, 1900 (from Melbourne’s Chinese Museum: see here for more info)

According to Sophie Couchman, the Chinese Australian children who lived in Little Bourke Street often hung about for a glimpse of theatrical performers. When he was a boy in the 1910s and 1920s, Russell Moy used to mill around the back entrance to Her Majesty’s Theatre with his friends, for example, hoping for a sight of the razzle-dazzle chorus-girls as they got ready for a revue. ‘They were very good to us really’, he told an oral historian later in life. ‘They’d say “come in”, “come in””.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Suey Land, another Chinese Australian, used to hang about the entrance to the Theatre Royal. She was especially interested in attracting the notice of Maggie Moore, the Irish-American actress I wrote a post about recently, who emigrated to Australia in the 1870s. ‘Maggie Moore used to take notice of me and my sister and brothers’, Land told a reporter for the Herald in 1913. ‘She used to give me bunches of flowers, and I know I could point out now the room that used to be her dressing room. One day she gave my father a little perambulator, so that I could wheel my little brother around in it’.

These two vignettes are tantalisingly evocative. Surely they point to other connections between Melbourne’s everyday theatrical scene and the city’s Chinese community? I am reminded here of the image of a Melbourne pantomime gallery-audience from the 1870s which first appeared in the Australasian Sketcher, and shows a Chinese-Australian among the crowd. Also of a stray programme for a Sydney production of Alfred Dampier’s melodrama, Voices of the Night, at the Royal Standard Theatre in 1886. Along with an upper-class new chum and a larrikin, there were three Chinese characters in this Australian play – two of whom were played by Chinese actors, Lee Pang and Hi Lung.

Lee and Hi’s characters were supposed to be ‘denizens of Lower George Street’, the Sydney equivalent of Little Bourke Street. They appeared in a tableau set in a ’Chinese gambling house’ in Redfern, and were obviously played throughout the rest of the play according to the tradition of scurrilous (read ‘racist’) low comedy. Frustratingly, though, just as these snippets start beckoning to an intriguing role for theatre in the culture of Chinese Australians, my own knowledge of the evidence runs dry.

Reference

Australasian Sketcher, 21 Feburary 1874.

Sophie Couchman, ‘”Oh, I Would Like to See Maggie Moore Again!”: Selected Women of Melbourne’s Chinatown’, in Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul McGregor, eds, After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860-1940, Special edition of Overland 9 (2004): 171-90.

The Stage, 27 July 1886

When the playwright Dion Boucicault visited Australia in 1885, theatre managers told him everywhere he went that colonial audiences weren’t up to scratch. ‘You must not regard our audiences as if they were a West End public’, they said. ‘They range between Peckham Rye and Whitechapel’. Whether managers really told him this or whether Boucicault simply said they did is an open question – Boucicault was in the business of making up stories, after all, and not exactly the most scrupulous fellow in town. Either way, the rank snobbery of this statement almost takes the breath away. God forbid that one’s taste should fall somewhere between Peckham Rye and Whitechapel!

To the privileged Londoner exquisitely honed to social distinctions based on suburb (the kind of reader Boucicault was presumably addressing through this statement), the idea of living between the plebeian regions over the Thames to the south and the pulsing heart of the city’s East End conjured images of irredeemable vulgarity. It evoked people who chomped on food with their mouths open, who guffawed at dumb jokes and thought Uncle Tom’s Cabin at their local theatre was the best thing they’d ever seen. The theatres and music halls around Peckham were seen as dingy, gaudy places, given to coarse melodramas or full of people ‘ready to be pleased with dull songs, hoary jokes, stale sentiment, and clap-trap patriotism’. Those of the East End were more base and unwholesome yet, if the lurid posters advertising their content and snide reviews by bohemian critics were to be believed.

Dion B. and wife (Hutton Archives/Getty Images)

One of the reasons that Dion Boucicault looked down his nose at Australian theatregoing was the fact that all of the colonies’ key theatres in 1885 had to cater to socially heterogeneous crowds. The size of Australia’s population could not support anything like the network of neighbourhood venues one found in Victorian and Edwardian London, most of which drew a more locally-based clientele. The audiences attracted to theatres like the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel were not all of the one stamp, of course – London’s East End was more socially mixed than its reputation as a den of iniquity implied. But venues such as Brisbane’s Gaiety Theatre or Sydney’s Royal Standard Theatre catered to even more of a social melange. The dense workers’ suburbs of Spring Hill, Petrie Terrace, and Woolloongabba, honeycombed with boarding-houses and cottages on tiny lots, were all in easy walking distance from Brisbane’s Gaiety Theatre, located on the site of the old School of Arts in Adelaide Street. Going to see variety shows and the occasional melodrama at city venues like the Gaiety was an important part of one self-confessed larrikin’s life in the 1890s: he walked in from where he lived with his family in Red Hill. Such larrikins and others of little funds would buy seats for the Gaiety gallery, crammed up beneath the ceiling of the auditorium, sitting cheek by sweaty cheek beside other patrons on long benches high above the stage. But the Gaiety’s central location and the scarcity of other large-scale productions meant that Brisbane’s more affluent citizens also flocked to its shows, arriving by carriage or train and buying seats in the more spacious circles or boxes below.

When catering for this hotchpotch of patrons, colonial venues such as the Brisbane Gaiety or Sydney’s Royal Standard Theatre dished up a rich stew of attractions. This was also true of the various Theatres Royal in the larger cities: the barn-like Theatre Royal in Bourke Street, Melbourne, as with those in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney. It was not at all unusual for such venues to show opera one week and a blackface minstrel show the next, before switching to melodrama or light comedy. This heterogeneity presented difficulties for anyone wishing to categorise the social character of colonial audiences. Perhaps it was for this reason that English commentators were encouraged to speak derisively about them, reducing them all to a kind of gelatinous mediocrity. As the London critic Evelyn Ballantyne assured his readers in 1892, there were three qualities which summed up Australian audiences. Three things, and all of them started with ‘p’ – wait for it: Puritan, Provincial, and Philistine.

When I was at the University of London Royal Holloway for an Australian Studies conference not too long ago, the director of Jacaranda Theatre, Debra Low, spoke about her company’s performances of Australian theatre in London. She still had to contend with a certain snobbery towards Australian culture and theatre in London, she said. But a lot of it was in her head rather than expressed by the patrons who came to see Jarandah shows. I guess, as Australians, comments such as  Ballantyne’s still die hard – even if they were made as far back as the nineteenth century. It is hard not to imagine that Australian theatre is still being placed between Peckham and Whitechapel, even if one rejects the negative connotations attached to those localities. But that’s why I hope to catch a Jacaranda Theatre production when I next go to London for a Victorian Popular Theatre conference in April next year – to find out that most of it is in my own head, and thus exorcise the ghost of Dion Boucicault.

References
Thomas Anstey Guthrie in 1890, cited in Benny Green, ed., The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion (London: Pavilion, 1986), 34-5.

Evelyn Ballantyne, ‘Some Impressions of the Australian Stage’, Theatre (London) 19 (1892), 186.

Dion Boucicault, cited in Harold Love, ed., The Australian Stage: A Documentary History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1984), 102-6.

Ronald Lawson, Notes for a PhD Thesis, 1970, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, F407.

Ronald Lawson, Brisbane in the 1890s: A Study of an Australian Urban Society (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1973), 100