Memorialization, Memorabilia, and the Mediated Afterlife of Ada Reeve

Abstract

This paper explores the differing levels of control over representations of Ada Reeve's mediated and ‘ghosted’ afterlife. Confessional memoirs that strategically frame the star persona for posterity provide her with the most immediate control. However, the star can become recruited to new assertions of cultural nationalism, which desire to claim coherent genealogies, public celebration, and commemoration of a star's afterlife. This, paired with nostalgic desires for past ‘golden ages’, also mediates strategic interests in her imbricated identity. Similarly, the star's mediated afterlife inevitably becomes susceptible to repositioning by theatre managements, the media, family, fans, and the public when their revisionist agendas make new assertions for the star's image after death in various immediate political and social contexts, and as communal encoded memory. Martina Lipton is Research Fellow (Australia) at the University of Warwick and Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She has published several articles in Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies on pantomime and popular theatre performers, and her paper ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ is in A World of Popular Entertainments: an Edited Volume of Critical Essays (2012).