ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Kean's claim to 'convey to the stage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of an age long since passed away' is deeply embedded in the historical and visual imagination of his audience and in debates about the theatre as a legitimate venue for historical instruction. The archaeological proximity to Assyria is an aesthetic proximity that dramatizes possession of the past by inscribing it with culturally relative meanings. The chapter reviews that Kean's production of Sardanapalus illustrates the 'truth' upon which Pearson and Shanks's theatre/archaeology rests: artifacts are dynamic social actors that both articulate personal, social, and national identities. The outward show of archaeology within an apocalyptic vision of time reaffirms the iconography of Orientalism: the play parades the story of the passing of Eastern civilization encoded in the logic of Western progress. The fiction of archaeological presence and theatrical unity, Kean's Sardanapalus dramatizes a momentary fusion of complex and contradictory interests, narratives, images, and ideologies.
