The very model of a modern...? reflections around The Empire Actors

Veronica Kelly's The Empire Actors is a scholarly and fascinating examination of how ideas of modernity, and the concept of modernism, were imported to Australia and New Zealand from the 1890s to the 1920s, a period in which the `foundations for twentieth century global entertainment…' were laid. 1(1) The medium through which Kelly explores this transfer is the production of costume dramas in the commercial theatre. These evocations of past events and personalities were a contemporary popular entertainment which she cogently describes as `one of the mass forms fulfilling the traditional need for affective connection with imagined pasts'. (3)