Veronica Kelly is preeminent among the second generation of Australasian theatre historians who, from the 1980s, moved beyond the excavatory efforts of those who first drew attention to the long tradition of live performance in Australia and New Zealand and, while continuing to dig, started to analyze in an increasingly theorized manner the major professional live theatre industry in those countries before it was almost entirely wiped out by silent and then sound movies, by radio and the Great Depression, and wiped too from popular memory. This leads to another challenge: to introduce readers to texts they have never heard of and demonstrate that plays that survive today are not necessarily [End Page 202] those that the societies that first saw them discussed and in part modeled their lives on. A theatregoer between 1890 and 1930 would be astonished that the plays of Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw and (to them) unknown women are staged today, while The Sign of the Cross, The Prisoner of Zenda, A Royal Divorce, Monsieur Beaucaire, and Chu Chin Chow are (although operatic and musical versions have lasted better: Tosca, The Girl of the Golden West, The Merry Widow, and Kismet). Long before Kurosawa, audiences knew about Japanese samurai culture (The Darling of the Gods), thrilled to Pirates of the Caribbean equivalents (The Spanish Main), and suffered with gladiators played by Geelong-born, London-acclaimed Oscar Asche, "probably the boofiest bloke before Russell Crowe to perform masculinity in the [Australasian] region," as Kelly colloquially notes (112). Inevitably, the theatre historians have much basic story and character explaining to do and more, if they are to try to convey in writing and still images the effect of movement and dance, colorful sets, lights, and makeup, swirling costumes, and resonant voices.
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