Review of Playing Australia: Australian Theatre and the International Stage, edited by Elizabeth Schafer and Susan Bradley Smith

Abstract

Playing Australia is both interestingly helpful and interestingly problematic. In its consideration of multiple ways in which Australia may be played on stage, it provides thoughtful, vigorous and important interrogation of what it is that playing Australia might mean for the conceptualisation of identity or nation, and it offers often richly different kinds of information about performers, performance, dance, the way scholars are thinking currently about past and present Australian drama and performance, the effects of playing Australia within Australia, and its impact abroad. At the same time, Playing Australia manifests, in certain respects, a surprisingly blinkered gaze.