Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre, Joanne Tompkins

Abstract

Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre, Joanne Tompkins (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Joanne Tompkins has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian playwriting of the last forty years or so and she is a subtle and attentive reader of play texts. Her book, Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre provides illuminating analyses of a wide range of Australian plays written since the second world war, situating them in relation to issues concerned with space and place that have come to the fore in Australian political thinking over the same period. The book makes fascinating reading but performance specialists should be warned that, although the title refers to Australian theatre, its focus is in fact Australian playwriting, and Tompkins does not consider the plays in performance apart from an occasional remark concerning the set design for a particular production.