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THEATRE COSTUME, CELEBRITY
PERSONA, AND THE ARCHIVE
EMILY COLLETT
ABSTRACT
This essay considers the archived costume in relation to the concept of the
celebrity performer’s persona. It takes as its case study the Shakespearean costume
of Indigenous actress Deborah Mailman, housed in the Australian Performing Arts
Collection. It considers what the materiality of the theatre costume might reveal and
conceal about a performer’s personas. It asks to what extent artefacts in an archive
might both create a new persona or freezeframe a particular construct of a
performer. Central to the essay are questions of agency in relation to the
memorialisation of a still living actress and the problematisation of persona in terms
of the archived object. Can a costume generate its own persona in relation to the
actress? And what are the power dynamics involved in persona construction when
an archived costume presents a charged narrative which is very different to the
actress’s current construction of her persona?
KEY WORDS
Costume; Archive; Deborah Mailman; Indigenous; Memory; Shakespeare
COSTUME IN THE ARCHIVE: A CHARGED OBJECT
In this essay I consider the archived theatre costume in relation to persona studies and what the
materiality of costume might reveal or conceal about the celebrity performer’s persona(s). Can
an archived costume have its own persona? What complexities arise when the charged
historical narrative of an archived costume is at odds with a current persona? And in the
following case study of Deborah Mailman, what happens when the framing of a living
Indigenous actress’s costume constructs a persona that is quite different to the one that the
actress currently constructs for herself?
A costume worn by a performer live on stage is remembered in particular ways – and
many in the audience might focus more on the performer’s stance, physicality, and verbal
prowess than what they are wearing. But once a costume is archived, it is staged and framed
differently, becoming an artefact in and of itself. The costume might then be understood to be of
a different cultural value and resonance in relation to the performer. In this article I am
interested in asking: what does the examination of a three-dimensional object bring, as opposed
to two-dimensional source material (image and text), to persona and theatre scholarship?
Whilst there are existing models in persona studies which draw from text, film, photography,
and social media, there is as yet less study of three-dimensional objects.
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I take as my case study the performance costume worn by the Indigenous Australian
actress Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in Bell Shakespeare’s 1998 production of King Lear, which
is kept in the Australian Performing Arts Collection in Melbourne. Mailman is renowned for her
early-career stage appearances and in the last decade has become renowned for her character
acting in contemporary Australian television drama. I shall begin by setting out some of the
archival context of analysing performance costume in relation to persona. I will explore first
how material culture and costume scholarship are useful in understanding the costume as an
object and examine the politics of the Performing Arts Collection. I then focus on Mailman’s
costume itself and interrogate how it sits within and without its material and theoretical
framing. I am interested in the silences surrounding Mailman’s archival narrative and what her
archive costume suggests about persona construction.
Recognition of the research potential of objects is a major preoccupation of material
culture in the form of object and museum studies, and has intensified in importance since the
1980s; as has been noted, “[f]ar more than documents, things have a special kind of immediacy
… in a way a written account cannot” (Deetz 1980, pp. 375-6). Having established the
significance of three-dimensional research material during the 1990s (see, for instance,
Kavanagh 1987; Fisher 1991; Leone & Little 1993; and Corrin 1994), more recently, material
culture studies have highlighted how objects can communicate individual and collective
identity, due to their integral role in our daily lives. As Ian Woodward argues, “We are defined
as people not only by what we think and say, but by what material things we possess, surround
ourselves with, and interact with … All of these material things help to establish, mediate and
assist us in the performance of our personal and social identities” (Woodward 2007, p. 133). In
examining the ways in which methods for the study of material culture could advance our
ability to find new knowledge, Kate Smith and Leonie Hannan suggest that “[r]ather than
continuing to look through objects ‘to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or
culture – above all what they disclose about us,’ historians are starting to look at things per se
and what they do more broadly” (Smith & Hannan 2017, p. 49). Or, in other words, “[o]bjects
offer scholars another form through which to examine human expression” (Smith & Hannan
2017, p. 47). Contemporary material culture, then, has moved beyond a purely semiotic
appreciation of objects and now understands objects as a valid resource for gaining knowledge
about the people with whom the object interacted. But what does this mean in the realm of
theatre costume, which is about role play and might be reflective of the character more than the
performer, or suggest a persona which depends on a blurring of both performer and role?
Lisa G. Corrin explores the relationship between artist and museum, where a growing
trend in artist curated exhibitions resets the focus onto museum practices themselves which, in
turn, explores not what the objects mean but how they mean: by shifting the way an audience
interacts with an object, the object activates new connections, new information, and new ways
of thinking. Corrin’s study illuminates the wide scope of information, or life stories, a single
object can communicate when it is activated in this way. To use Phillip Fisher’s turn of phrase in
Art and the Future’s Past, “[t]he life of Things is in reality many lives” (2017 [1991], p. 436).
According to Corrin, through a material culture lens we can establish the research value and
cultural resonances of three-dimensional objects and explore how a performance costume can
communicate multiple individual and collective histories. At the same time, the framing of the
costume can suggest more nuanced details about the wearer of the costume’s identities, or
personas. A three-dimensional object is inherently active as a tool designed, made, used,
collected, and archived by individuals informed by personal, institutional, and cultural
ideologies. Studying the framing of a single object activates the process of ‘how’ it means –
through the action of each of its lives and the individuals who interacted with it. What sort of
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information can performance costume-as-object relay about the personas attributed to that
performer and the cultural majority at a particular time?
Performance costume scholar Donatella Barbieri has developed a methodology which
argues that the archived costume, “a complex, charged object”, is a lens through which to better
understand the archive in which it is kept. The costume highlights the “genealogies of ideas”
discovered through the object’s materiality, alongside the functionality and performativity of
the object in its original context, by using external evidence and biographical information (2013,
p. 282). Veronica Isaac has expanded on Barbieri’s work by uniting “approaches from dress
history, theatre history and material culture to offer a specific methodology for the investigation
and analysis of theatre costume” (2017, p. 115), offering a detailed analysis of the material
object combined with extensive biographical research. Her analysis of celebrity actress Ellen
Terry’s 1888 Lady Macbeth ‘Beetlewing Dress’ resulted in detailed multiple histories, and the
notion that theatre costumes carry “the ‘memories’, or ‘ghosts’, of their previous wearer(s),
acting as ‘surrogates’ for the bodies that once inhabited them” (2017, p. 118). Barbieri and
Isaac’s work draws on the theories of haunting and spectrality articulated by Carlson (2003)
and Luckhurst and Morin (2014), which investigate the ways in which an actress’s role and
previous role-holders can influence and shape the actress’s persona. The study of archived
costumes brings yet another complexity to the idea of a performer’s persona where it
figuratively exists embedded within the costume. How does the performance costume carry
within it the ‘ghosts’ or ‘surrogate’ of the body or bodies who wore it? How does the persona
suggested by the costume and framed by other historical and contemporary contexts mutate
over time? How much of the persona constructed by the actress at the time of the performance
is retained? What overlays are there of reinventions of persona? What framing of persona does
the archive itself bring and can those multiple personas be narrativised? And can a costume
acquire its own persona overshadowing the persona of its wearer(s)? These questions have
only just begun to be asked and often presume that the performer’s costume has been archived
since her death. Mailman’s costume was archived while she was and is still living.
COSTUME AND PERSONA
In theatre, understanding celebrity persona requires consideration of a performer’s onstage
roles in relation to the offstage persona(s) which make up public perceptions of individual
identities. Kim Barbour recognises professional, personal, and intimate registers of performance
in the creation of online persona (see Marshall & Barbour 2015, p. 5). Melanie Piper uses a stage
analogy to understand American comedian Louis C. K.’s complex on-stage, on-screen, and other
public/private personas (2015, p. 14). Study of the archived performer’s costume suggests a
more complex model for persona, especially if the performer is indigenous.
One of the most enduring markers of the onstage persona of any celebrity is their
costume, a material object which acts as a full or partial body mask that the performer can
adopt and remove like a second skin in order to play their professional onstage role. Kylie
Minogue’s famous gold hot-pants, for example, in the same performing arts archive as
Mailman’s costume, have cultural resonance because there is a living memory of her appearance
in them and of her persona as a pop star and iconic female celebrity. The celebrity status of the
person is embedded into the garment, which as an object “can stand for particular features of a
person, in the absence of interpersonal contact” (Woodward 2007, p.137). But costume also
suggests the performer’s intimate, private persona not just in terms of shape, size, and cut but
also in the physical traces imprinted onto the costume’s materiality in the form of wear and tear,
stains, and other marks. The on and offstage aspects of persona are manifest in the celebrity
theatre costume and are inextricable. Deetz has argued that “[t]he artifact is the material
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correlate of the individual” (2017 [1980], p. 376). In other words, the ‘ghost’ of each persona
lives in the garment and in their reliance on one another they converge to create a single and
fully dimensional surrogate for the performer’s body. But again, with performance costume,
how much involvement does a performer have in the design? Mailman, as an Indigenous actress
breaking a taboo about Cordelia as a white princess as well as a taboo about Indigenous
actresses playing Shakespearean roles at all, certainly did not have as much choice or control
over the design of her costume as Minogue did.
In addition to the histories a celebrity theatre costume surrogate might or might not tell
about the private, public, and professional lives of the performer, it might also reveal a story
about the production for which it was worn, and of the hands that made, sourced, or art-finished
it. It offers details on the company and collaborators who created the production, the theatre
venue(s) the production played at, and the audiences who saw it. Finally, the costume reveals
information about those who kept, collected, donated, and, ultimately, archived it. As such, a
celebrity costume can contain within it a particularly nuanced account of a specific point in time,
giving a detailed picture of the constituencies for whom it was created, something of the
zeitgeist of its moment, as well as the persona generated by, or attributed to, the celebrity who
wore it.
In her essay exploring how the social theory of Michel Foucault can be applied to fashion
studies, Jane Tynan suggests “[i]f material things become articulate only within a field of
knowledge, then discourse can demonstrate how these objects become carriers of social and
cultural meaning” (2016, p. 186). Applied to the celebrity costume, this idea explains how it is
only upon entering the archive, as a place suggesting ideologies of study and research and the
seriousness of the item’s cultural value, that a persona for the costume in its own right is
activated and the object can communicate the importance of its wearer(s) and/or the ‘social and
cultural meaning’ of its time of creation. In relating the fictional life of a warrior’s sword, Fisher
describes the entry of the object into a museum as “a fourth form of access. Now it is looked at,
studied, contrasted with other objects, seen as an example of a style, a moment, a level of
technical knowledge, a temperament and culture” (2017 [1991], p. 437). The object has gone
beyond its initial function and purpose, beyond being collected as a sacred object or treasure,
and is now seen as an artefact, a receptacle of knowledge and marker of culture, and in this case
can be treated as a way of understanding a performer’s persona both at the time of wearing and
at the time of viewing. Of course the contemporary persona of that performer, if still living, may
have been reinvented since the time the archived costume was worn as is the case with Kylie
Minogue, whose hot-pants remind us of her youthful stage persona and sex appeal as measured
against the mature, elegant celebrity singer who is equally well known for surviving breast
cancer. Mailman’s costume, however, is more complex in the questions it poses. Mailman has
not performed in a Shakespeare play for some considerable time and prefers contemporary
roles in which her indigeneity is not colonised, marginalised, or erased.
Marshall has described celebrity culture as an “explanatory tool” for the discourses of
contemporary society, stating that “[c]elebrity in and of itself is fascinating because of the way it
can describe significance and value in contemporary culture” (2013, p. 157). In their
introduction to persona studies as a potent area for scholarship, Marshall and Barbour assert
that the celebrity persona inhabits an “active negotiation of the individual defined and
reconfigured as social phenomenon” (2015, p. 9). From this we can usefully understand how a
celebrity persona, existing within a celebrity culture, is created as a socially reflexive agent.
Understanding celebrity persona as constantly in reflexive negotiation with its creators and its
social receivers is also important in the activation of the celebrity costume. I am proposing that
both the celebrity persona and the archived celebrity costume are markers of their time and
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place of creation and exist in dialogic relation to one another. When a celebrity costume ceases
to function as a working garment and crosses over into an archive, the cultural value of that
costume is newly activated – sometimes problematically.
THE POLITICS OF PERFORMING ARTS ARCHIVE
Established in 1975, the Australian Performing Arts Centre (APAC) is “Australia’s largest and
most significant specialist collection documenting the nation’s performing arts heritage” (Arts
Centre Melbourne 2018) and holds over 680,000 items, presenting exhibitions and displays at
the Arts Centre Melbourne. It has an online catalogue which contains approximately ten percent
of the collection and a dedicated centre which researchers can visit by appointment. The
collection is divided into Dance, Theatre, Costume, Comedy, Broadcasting, Vaudeville and
Variety, Circus, Magic, Music, Designs, and Photographs, as well as the Arts Centre’s public art
collection, and essentially grew from two founding acquisitions: the J. C. Williamson Theatre
Archive and the Dame Nellie Melba Collection. J. C. Williamson Ltd was the dominant theatrical
company in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their archive
provided a rich source of Australia’s mainstage theatrical history. That history is a white settler
history with a colonial narrative of nation-formation and largely contains information on white
settler theatrical practices. The contemporary highlight of the collection is Australian actress-
turned-singer Kylie Minogue, who donated a vast selection of her stage costumes from tours as
early as 1989 up to more recent stage events from 2011. Minogue features prominently on their
website, and their free 2016 Kylie On Stage exhibition drew over 250,000 visitors, went on
regional and national tour in 2017, and is still touring at the time of writing. The theatre
collection, to which the costume at the centre of this article’s investigation belongs, is described
as the “largest and most diverse part of the Australian Performing Arts Collection” (Arts Centre
Melbourne 2018). The collection focuses on personal and company contributions from
Australia’s dominant theatre history across drama, comedy, magic, musical theatre, puppetry,
vaudeville and variety. Within the context of this archive, the celebrity Indigenous actress
Deborah Mailman’s costume sits within the dramatic theatre category – but at the same time
disrupts it.
If we consider the suggestion by Marshall et al that “persona studies is a technique that
is fundamentally a study of agency” (2015, p. 290), one has to ask in relation to an archived
object: whose agency do we mean? Who is the donor? Who makes decisions regarding archival
acquisitions? And why? Can a costume create a persona of its own? Once in the archive, who has
agency over the construction and dissemination of a version of the celebrity persona through
the framing of the object in question? Thinking of how objects can assist in negotiating
individual identity within social groups, Woodward suggests:
[t]he fact that one has exclusive control and ownership of an object is the crucial aspect
mediating the boundaries between self (who controls the object) and the other (who
doesn’t). In this way, possession of the object affords cultivation of identity, sometimes
irrespective of an object’s aesthetic or functional qualities. (2007, p. 135)
Chris Fowler goes further when relating material culture to understanding social class structure
and states that “social institutions exist, which play an ideological role in policing identities and
maintaining particular relations between identity groups” (2010, p. 359). In considering the
performing arts archive as a research tool for the study of social, cultural, and political
information, it is important to recognise inherent problems with this transfer of agency and the
institution’s role in ‘policing’ identities.
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An archive is generally understood to be built on a principle of linearity which is more
often than not historical; however, within this perceived linearity there is a disjunct between
the time of an item’s acquisition, the time of its creation, and the time it becomes available to the
public. Is a newly acquired costume which was designed and made in the late nineteenth
century considered a new item, or an old one? Similarly, a sometimes complex donor lineage
exists within each costume’s linearity and adds important information to the story the object
now tells. This lineage can alter the specific history pertinent to the object and must be
recognised as part of the performer’s story.
As well as the conscious and unconscious bias of curators, the restrictions on funding
and the capacity of archival storage force strict acquisition rules onto the curator. They must
rigorously question the cultural value of each costume in relation to the significance of the
wearer, the designer, the production and the producing company. As a result, many valuable
costumes are rejected to the great regret of the curators and their teams, and the selected items
then sit within particular curatorial frames dependent on the person(s) responsible for
decision-making. Consequently, bias has been common, intentionally and unintentionally,
creating gaps in the knowledge base the institution is responsible for. In the primary performing
arts collection of a post-colonial nation this has generated absences and omissions and resulted
in the under-representation of marginalised ethnic groups – particularly Australian Indigenous
performers and performance cultures. In the case of the APAC, where their starting base was the
acquisition of assorted items from J. C. Williamson when it closed in the 1970s, they inherited
their collection from a company started by a white American man which was then managed by
an assortment of white British and white Australian men. It is clear that the APAC inherited a
collection with a particular bias, the original owners of which had already practised their own
forms of cultural censorship.
Although their focus is on archives of two-dimensional, textual records and
documentation, in The Silence of the Archive Thomas et al describe how “it has become more
accepted that archival silences are a proper subject for enquiry and to view the absence of
records as positive statements, rather than passive gaps” (2017, p. xx). This idea could be
applied to archives of three-dimensional objects. Johnson compares the silences to a ghostly
voice, or emptiness in an archive, which, when examined, proves to be charged with the energy
of what is missing (2017a, p. 105). Speaking of white settler societies in particular, Eilean
Hooper-Greenhill argues that new approaches to communication and learning in art museums
and archives gives communities the opportunity to re-remember their histories, where
“[f]ormerly silent voices are being heard, and new cultural identities are being forged from the
remains of the past” (2000, p. 563). Johnson relates this even more closely to the artefacts
themselves, whereby studying existing bias and resulting silences in an archive is “allowing
records to speak with new voices” (2017b, p. 149). But can an absence be viewed? And how can
it be filled? Whose communities are being referred to here? These are fraught political issues
given that indigenous cultures understand knowledge to be living memory passed from
generation to generation. To many indigenous cultures the idea of the archive and the
assumption that a life can be captured are alien and oppressive concepts.
Scholars increasingly ask “how do we use these things to produce new knowledge?”
(Leone & Little 1993, p. 362). Johnson suggests the answer lies in the idea of ‘sense-making’,
which for an archival researcher equates to an active, user-focused, approach with “an emphasis
on multiple contextual voices rather than the finding of a universal monolithic truth” (2017a, p.
107). Smith and Hannan agree, explaining that “[o]bjects (like events) can be understood and
interpreted only through engagement with ‘multiple sources of data (texts, objects, quantitative
data, lived experience, and hands-on knowledge) acquired in a multi-sensory fashion, firmly
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grounded in and maintaining a credible link with existing knowledge’” (2017, p. 57). In other
words, the researcher seeks puzzle pieces from a diverse and complex range of sources in order
to better understand the object at large, as well as the potential meaning of any gaps or silences,
before piecing them together to create their own ‘sense’ of a story. The performer’s costume as
object could be an important focus of a ‘sense-making’ approach to gaining new knowledge
relating to celebrity persona. The question of agency needs to be posed in relation to the
archival construction of the celebrity performer’s persona, the cultural value attributed to the
object, and the politics of the archivists’ decision-making. In these respects, Deborah Mailman’s
costume as archived in the APAC, certainly challenges a lot of new archival theorisations as well
as assumptions about the community that the sense-making researcher/interpreter might
originate from.
DEBORAH MAILMAN: CORDELIA’S COSTUME IN KING LEAR (1998)
Fig. 1: Production photograph of Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in King Lear, Bell Shakespeare
Company, 1998. Photographer: Jeff Busby. Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts
Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Deborah Mailman, born in 1972, recognises both Indigenous Australian and Maori heritage
from her father and mother respectively, but is widely celebrated and self-identifies as an
Indigenous Australian actress. As the first Aboriginal actress to win the Australian Film Institute
(AFI) award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in Radiance, Mailman is at the forefront of a
pioneering generation of Indigenous actresses. Her career was forged through theatre and she
created her role in Radiance in a 1998 Queensland Theatre Company production. Although shy
as a child, Mailman realised a passion for acting and worked hard to develop a career in the
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performing arts (Purcell 2002, pp. 3-28). Radiance launched her on-screen career and gave her
a public status. Mailman is now held in great esteem and is fondly welcomed into the living
rooms of many Australians through television series such as The Secret Life of Us, Offspring and
Redfern Now. Her persona is of an actress with a disciplined work ethic who focuses on serious
roles, rarely does interviews, and keeps her family and private life out of scrutiny. In the last
decade, as her professional status has become increasingly distinguished, her public and
professional personas have melded to form the image of a feminist activist and a role model of
the progressive Indigenous working woman.
In an interview with fellow Indigenous actress Leah Purcell, Mailman has discussed her
initial feelings of alienation within the film industry, and the time it took after winning her AFI
award to believe she actually deserved it rather than thinking “[o]kay, yeah, give it to the
Aboriginal girl because it’s the right time” (Purcell 2002, p. 15). Early in her career, Mailman
was careful to pursue an identity as an actress first and foremost, in order to establish strictly
professional credentials, which meant she de-privileged her identity as an Aboriginal woman in
a white-dominated public and professional arena. In fact, much was made in the media about
the significance of her AFI award in relation to her ethnicity, but Mailman was wary of the
discourse and of the pressure to become representative of her community, fighting a private
struggle to negotiate her position as an actress in the Australian creative industry sector. In the
last decade she has no longer felt the need to remain silent about her Indigeneity, and she now
privileges her Aboriginal origins before professional actress, and is accepting of her role as a
creative pioneer: “I’m an Aboriginal woman who is an actor and it’s taken me a long time to kind
of reverse that kind of description. It’s like. No. My whole being is Aboriginal woman. That’s
who I am and I’m fucking proud of it” (Purcell 2002, p. 28). Although hesitant at first to take on
the persona ascribed to her because of prejudicial attitudes, Mailman understood the
importance of her success, the changes in industry and public perception that her professional
profile has brought about, and became proactive in cultivating her pioneering Indigenous
persona. She embraced the challenge and responsibility of forging a new celebrity persona and
deploying it as a force for cultural transformation.
The APAC online catalogue has just five items attributed to Mailman: her costume for
Cordelia in King Lear comprising a robe and hat; a photograph and transparency of her wearing
this costume in production; and a poster for the 2004 Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC)
production of The Sapphires in which Mailman performed. Her costume for Cordelia was
designed by celebrated architect and theatre designer Peter Corrigan and was worn by Mailman
in Bell Shakespeare Company’s celebrated 1998 production of King Lear directed by Barrie
Kosky. The long coat, or robe, of mixed garish pink faux fur features a train and a large fold-over
collar which is fixed with strings of fake pearls draping down the torso. The long sleeves are
straight, but have been sewn around at regular intervals like a quilt which gives the impression
of a medieval maiden’s puffed sleeves. The colour of the fur has been broken down with orange
and brown paint or dye which mottles the surface texture and softens the visual impression of
the coat. Soft and textural on the outside, the inside of the robe is unlined inside the arms and
bears the marks of repeated use through a build-up of grime on the train and multiple repairs
across the garment.
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Fig. 2: Robe (front) worn by Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in King Lear, designed by Peter
Corrigan. Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Fig. 3: Robe (back) worn by Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in King Lear, designed by Peter
Corrigan. Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
The accompanying headpiece is covered in pale pink velvet and sat on Mailman’s head
like a wide court-jester’s hat, with fake pearl edging and six large jewel ornaments swinging
from underneath its flaps. The production photograph shows the hat sitting low on the
forehead, with long sides curving down Mailman’s cheeks framing her face, as did the hats on
her character’s sisters’ heads. Her smudgy whiteface makeup is highlighted with red lips, bright
pink eyes rimmed in black, and double painted eyebrows which both accentuate her eyes and
alter her facial expression. The pink of her coat in the light of the archive is a gentle baby-pink
with flashes of orange, but under stage lights the pink becomes bubble-gum sweet, popping out
at the viewer and appearing more luxurious than the cheap fabric actually is. Faux fur coats in
muted tones featured on multiple characters in this production, yet the quality of colour
featured on Mailman’s makes her appear almost lewd in her virtue as the honest daughter of the
King. In a review of the original performance Kate Herbert suggests you ‘‘[i]magine Texas Chain
Saw Massacre colliding with the cartoon South Park and a Hollywood musical with gorgeous
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costumes and you have an inkling of the cacophony of styles” (Herbert 1998). The style was
deliberately mixing allusions of settler colonies and imperialism in a manner that culminated in
the domination of an aesthetic of the grotesque. The politics of Mailman’s whiteface is what
strikes the researcher of today.
I am mindful of Smith and Hannan’s theory that “[t]he first meeting with a text or an
object is an inadequate indicator of future insights; long held assumptions can result in hasty
conclusions” (2017, p. 52), but I am using the three-dimensional object of Mailman’s costume as
a launching off point to examine the potential of this area of study. Writing about an object
cannot be separated from critical thinking about it. Therefore, the act of writing activates critical
engagement with the meaning of the object, which, as Smith and Hannan argue, may uncover or
highlight new and different connections and meanings, but may also further mystify and deepen
contradictions. What kinds of knowledge about an Indigenous woman can be presumed by
white viewers, for example?
BELL SHAKESPEARE AND MAILMAN’S COSTUME IN PERFORMANCE
The Bell Shakespeare Company was founded in 1990 by the acclaimed Australian actor John
Bell and enjoys considerable fame. It is Australia’s only touring Shakespeare Company, and has
a well-earned reputation for taking risks by developing contemporary adaptations of the
classics. In 2001 the company worked with the APAC to establish the Bell Shakespeare Company
Collection, which holds a selected array of documents and records, and a small number of
costumes. It was in these early stages of developing the collection that Bell Shakespeare donated
Mailman’s costume to APAC.
Mailman was not the only racially diverse actor cast in the production of King Lear,
which also included Croatian actress Melita Jurisic, Japanese actor Kazuhiro Muroyama, Russian
actor Rostislav Orel, and French actor Christian Manon. Much has been made of the choice to
cast Mailman as Cordelia, although Kosky refused “to admit any deliberate intent towards
Mailman’s role” (Farrell 2017, p. 35). Rachel Fensham argues that Kosky has been more than
evasive, stating that “with very little ‘cross-racial’ casting in Australian theatre critics were
hard-pressed not to consider this Aboriginal presence as a provocation” (qtd in Farrell 2017, p.
35). Philippa Kelly observes that “Mailman’s Aboriginal Cordelia remains a singular and largely
token mark of multiculturalism on the Australian Shakespeare stage” (Kelly 2005, p. 227). There
is no doubt that casting Mailman in a canonical English play, re-worked as only wild-child
director Kosky could do, “provokes a post-colonial reading. [Mailman’s] body draws attention to
corporeal differences between Cordelia as fair daughter and Lear as white-skinned fleshy old
man” (Fensham 2009, pp. 97-8). Indigenous Australians have been notable in their absence
from Australian Shakespeare productions, so the comparison between Mailman’s and Bell’s
bodily presence alongside each other on stage is significant. Kosky’s King Lear presented a
white man playing a father to an Indigenous daughter, in an English text brought to Australia by
white settlers, and in a play essentially about colonisation and landownership. For some it was
radical. However, many Indigenous communities find the continued performing of
Shakespeare’s productions on Australian stages an uncomfortably colonial phenomenon.
Mailman’s onstage persona, Cordelia, is the innocent heroine in King Lear, who holds
true to her morals and is banished from the kingdom as a result, whilst her two sisters deceive
the king in order to win his favour and seize his land. Fensham critiques the production as “a
serious interrogation of the excesses of power at play in male bodies”, and examines how it
“transgressed taboos in the text, and white culture, that normatively secure transmission of
male power” (2009, p. 74). By viewing this reading alongside the understanding that King Lear
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is about ownership and division of land, Mailman’s costumed body acts symbolically as a vehicle
for both patriarchal as well as colonial power, topics which are very resonant in Australia. The
Hollywood glamour of Mailman’s fur robe sits at odds with prevalent representations of many
indigenous women, and the garish materiality of her robe and matching headpiece contradict
the period silhouette and modesty of her character. Mailman’s whited-up face and court-jester
styled headpiece could therefore be read very ambiguously, as having clothed her in symbols
suggestive of settlers. The costume acts as a grotesque mask that actually highlights her
Aboriginal body and draws attention to the colonisation of body and land and body as land.
Without Mailman’s body the costume has no Indigenous signifiers and could be seen as a further
oppression.
Although all of the actors in the production wore whiteface make-up, white make-up on
a white face reads politically very differently to white make-up on an Indigenous face, on an
Australian stage, in a Shakespeare production. Indeed, not so many years later, such an act is no
longer deemed appropriate or acceptable. Similarly, a headpiece reminiscent of a court jester’s
hat on an Indigenous body reads very differently to those worn on her fellow actors’ white
bodies. Mailman’s costumed body in this production could not have been more transgressive,
but not in ways perhaps that Kosky intended. With the benefit of hindsight, his directorial
concept in itself can be read as an act of oppression.
Fensham believes the powerful dramaturgy of Kosky’s production works to “unmake the
‘classic body’ of Shakespeare” and then contends that Mailman’s “corporeal presence is less
significant than the difference that her realist acting gives a non-abject identity from the other
bodies on stage” (2009, p. 74). I would argue that it is not possible to separate her corporeal
presence in the framing of her costumed body from the dramaturgy, nor from her realist acting.
The ultimate sacrifice of Cordelia, an Indigenous woman in whiteface make-up, to a white
Australian King Lear in a battle for land and power, transgressed the boundaries of
Shakespearean tradition. Mailman’s costumed body transgressed the social norm of public
representations of Indigenous women’s bodies. Neither Mailman’s, nor the audiences’,
politically charged experience of Cordelia and her role in Kosky’s production could have existed
without the specific framing provided by her costumed body.
The political landscape of Australia in 1998, the year Kosky’s King Lear premiered and
the year Mailman received her ground-breaking film award, included the first National Sorry
Day, now known as the National Day of Healing, on 26 May. This date marks twelve months
from the government tabling a report that recognised past mistreatment of Aboriginal people
and was introduced to raise awareness amongst politicians and the general public regarding the
Stolen Generations, in response to then Prime Minister John Howard’s lack of action. Kosky
expressed surprise at the reaction to his racially diverse casting, but critical analysis of
Mailman’s involvement in particular reflected a contemporary white Australia grappling with
the implications of its colonial settler past and the position of Aboriginal Australians in
mainstream society. Mailman’s costumed body focused the narrative on an interrogation of
landownership and on Australia’s problematic history but, at the same time, Kosky arguably
also objectified Mailman with his directorial concept.
MAILMAN TODAY VERSUS THE POLITICS OF THE ARCHIVE
It is significant that, unlike Minogue, Mailman did not herself own and donate her archived
items. The costume was a gift of Bell Shakespeare in 2001, along with the robe worn by John
Bell as King Lear in the same production. The APAC online catalogue entries for each of the
costume’s two parts are factual and brief and not supported by any accompanying documents or
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information – this is perhaps unsurprising, given that Mailman is still a working actress rather
than an historical figure. Or it may mean that Mailman herself wishes to make no comment. The
photograph, transparency, and poster are listed online without an actual image of the archived
objects, just as a textual record.
Tellingly, it is not possible to ascertain how many Indigenous actresses are represented
in the APAC nor who they may be, as their catalogue is currently organised in a way which does
not allow for specific search options of ethnicity, country of origin, or even ‘actor’ or ‘actress’. A
search in APAC’s online catalogue using the term ‘Indigenous Australian’ returns 37 results
(from a collection numbering in excess of 680,000 items). Deborah Mailman is the only
Indigenous performer who appears as a specific catalogue entry in the online database –
through the coat and headdress this article is examining. However, unlike items such as those
donated by Minogue, the only way to find Mailman’s costume is to search for it specifically. The
remaining entries are batches of documents relating to theatre productions and non-specific
costume and set designs. These results highlight a significant systemic erasure in the archive
itself. The inclusion of Mailman in a searchable system is anomalous, then, and is transgressive
in relation to the collection’s historical origins. Mailman’s costume, paradoxically, has become a
transgressive celebrity presence in the Australian national performing arts collection and that
presence has little to do with the reasons it was donated in the first place. At the time, Mailman
was feted by the dominant culture for reaching the heights of a Shakespearean role on a
mainstream stage – the donation of her costume attested to her arrival as an actress. But
Mailman has made her name and built a following through playing Indigenous roles in gritty
political television dramas, where her Indigeneity is unambiguously celebrated and affirmed.
Both Johnson and Fowler question the bias of cataloguing systems in document archives
which can silence and suppress materials through their catalogue descriptions (Fowler 2017;
Johnson 2017b). Fowler considers whether archives are “deliberately or inadvertently
perpetuating the value systems of those rich and powerful individuals who created the records
or institutions which hold them” (2017, p. 55). They raise interesting questions about
contemporary cataloguing systems and whether they are evolving in their methods for choosing
what is important and necessary to catalogue about an archival entry, and what limitations
search systems might place on which voices are active and which are silent. At the time of
writing, APAC’s cataloguing system is silencing many marginalised voices, but informal
communications with staff associated with the collection indicate an awareness of these issues,
and an active desire to develop archival and cataloguing systems to better address them. Their
collection is certainly growing, intentionally, towards a more inclusive representation of the
nation’s performing arts communities.
Mailman’s archival framing constructs a persona which is inseparable from the politics
and aesthetics of Shakespearean plays and productions and freezeframes her at a point in time
about which she is interestingly silent. How is it that only Mailman’s and John Bell’s costumes
were donated or perhaps selected by APAC? What are the reasons they were chosen to the
exclusion of all others? This decision, significantly, appears to place Mailman as an actress on
par with John Bell, one of Australia’s most celebrated Shakespearean actors, which is a high
accolade, but the politics of framing, or erasing, her through John Bell and Shakespeare are
deeply problematic. If the archival measure of success for an Indigenous woman is performing
Shakespeare, how does the silence of that Indigenous woman in relation to her archival persona
trouble the attempt to colonise her?
Basic records from the APAC indicate that Mailman’s costume has been exhibited once
in the Arts Centre foyer as part of the exhibition A Dream of Passion: The Bell Shakespeare
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95
Company, in 2001-2002. APAC’s 2015 exhibition Rough Magic: Celebrating 20 Years of Bell
Shakespeare included production photographs but not the actual costume itself. Thus far, then,
material relating to Mailman in the collection has been exhibited only in relation to celebrating
the company who donated her costume, and the politics of her costumed body were not
addressed or problematised in these exhibitions.
If we look to Mailman’s celebrity persona as it stands today in relation to the persona
generated by the archive, there is a chasm between them. In 2017 Mailman was awarded an
Order of Australia Medal for Services to the Arts and as a role model for Indigenous performers,
and she is also, at the time of writing, a Trustee of the Sydney Opera House. Mailman’s decision
to identify as an Aboriginal woman first and foremost is integral to her negotiation of her
private, public, and professional personas. When Mailman’s appointment to the Screen Australia
Board was announced in March 2019, her public statement was as follows:
2018 was such an [sic] wonderful milestone for Australia’s Indigenous screen creators as
we celebrated 25 years of being in control of our stories, and without doubt Screen
Australia has been a constant collaborator, partner and of course investor. It is essential
all Australians see themselves on screen and we are able to hear our stories told in our
voice, from our unique perspective. I am excited to be joining the Screen Australia Board
at this time when the industry is energised and the demand for our work both locally and
abroad is growing. (Screen Australia 2019)
Mailman’s resume includes a long list of nominations and awards and clearly demonstrates her
success as a highly respected actor for film and television. For the most part she has left behind
her work on the stage. We could speculate, through her archival persona, that she has moved on
from theatre because the available roles are ethnically limited in their scope. Instead, Mailman
has utilised her celebrity status to create a powerful public persona which she uses to enact
change, speak about socio-political issues, and make a positive difference in her social
environment.
CONCLUSION
Mailman’s costume as an object and its framing narratives problematise the archive by
generating its own Shakespearean persona which Mailman herself has not sought to pursue or
promote in more recent times. Studying archived celebrity costume in this way suggests new
and important paths for persona studies. Mailman’s costume highlights the complexities of
persona studies in relation to ethnicity and the archive, and its position and framing within the
archival context reveals that, paradoxically, it incorporates both erasures and transgressions.
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1: Production photograph of Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in King Lear, Bell Shakespeare
Company, 1998. Photographer: Jeff Busby. Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts
Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Fig. 2: Robe (front) worn by Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in King Lear, designed by Peter
Corrigan. Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Fig. 3: Robe (back) worn by Deborah Mailman as Cordelia in King Lear, designed by Peter
Corrigan. Courtesy of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.