Joanne Tompkins, 'Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre': Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 204pp. ISBN: 1403985626, AU $144.00

Abstract

Joanne Tompkins's book is a welcome addition to Australian theatre studies. It is nearly ten years since Veronica Kelly published her collection of essays by multiple authors in 'Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s', and since the publication of Helen Gilbert's 'Sightlines: Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre. Therefore a serious and comprehensive examination of the field is well overdue. The strengths of Tompkins's book derive from its focused approach to contemporary Australian theatre, the breadth of material considered and the attention given to important,genuinely radical, recent theatre. If you are looking for a survey of Australian theatre since 1979 then this book offers a useful, at times provocative, study in which Tompkins takes her cues explicitly and insistently from cultural and postcolonial studies.