Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company

Pollard's Lilliputian Opera Company was series of professional children's troupes, first established in Launceston, Tasmania, in May 1880. Established by James Joseph Pollard, over the next thirty years several members of the Pollard family operated troupes under the same or similar names, travelling through Australia and New Zealand and later the Orient and North America. Juvenile performance troupes In the mid 1870s, James Pollard, a former organ maker and piano tuner, had formed a local musical group called Pollard's Orchestral Union, based around the musical and performing talents of his 18 children. After 1880, his Lilliputian Opera Company included other juvenile performers and developed an extensive and highly successful program of performances of comic opera and musical items, travelling throughout Australia and New Zealand. Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow suggest that the genesis of the juvenile performance of opera, of which the Pollard troupe was but one manifestation, can be found in Richard D'Oyly Carte's experiment with a children's performance of HMS Pinafore over the London Christmas season of 1879–1880. The novelty of talented youngsters performing theatre and variety "transmitted ...ideas about youth and empire, cleverness and the future" and made this form of theatre extremely popular. Dr Clay Djubal suggests it was a Melbourne juvenile performance of HMS Pinafore that influenced Pollard. Years later, Daphne Trott (who like many of the performers adopted the surname Pollard as a stage name) recalled; "As a child actress... I had to know thirty six operas by heart. Once I played the part of an old sheriff with side-whiskers, although I was only twelve at the time. One of the side whiskers came off before the audience, but that, of course, made it all the funnier."