Veronica Kelly’s research while affiliated with University of Queensland and other places

During their first Australasian tour in 1909-1910, Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton produced costumed 'recitals' of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in the town halls of Sydney and Melbourne. While the landscape has been privileged as the major site of the Australian settler imaginary and its labours of familiarisation, settler investments in their built urban spaces have been less studied. The social and political specificities of these two major colonial buildings - their choices of architectural rhetoric, sitings in urban space and histories of civic use and access - frame the meanings of Asche's spare mise en scene for Shakespeare's play. The text of Julius Caesar, itself a resonant meditation on the titular character as historical 'ghost', becomes additionally 'haunted' (in Marvin Carlson's phrase) by audience knowledge of the history and typical usages of the politically contested structures in which it was encountered. As he had done for Beerbohm Tree's lavish 1898 production, Asche performed the role of Mark Antony. Yet for his 'recitals' in these Australian found spaces, where he both used and obscured the architectural features of the magnificent interiors, his aesthetic rather engaged elements of modernist bare staging and lighting ideas familiar from the work of Poel and Copeau.