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  • Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia
  • Aoise Stratford
Margaret Hamilton. Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia. Australian Playwrights Series. Vol. 14. New York: Rodopi, 2011. Pp. 243, illustrated. $70.00 (Pb).

Sydney’s Cleveland Street is a grimy arterial thoroughfare connecting the city’s two main universities, the intensely urban inner west and the wealthier eastern suburbs, known for their parks and beaches. With its heavy bus traffic, smoky pubs, and run-down terraces, it is, for many, a place on the way to somewhere else. It is perhaps telling that this liminal, vibrant, and occasionally dangerous location was, until recently, home to the Performance Space, a theatre “committed to new forms of art practice” (<http://www.performancespace.com.au>) and a key venue in Australia’s post-dramatic theatre movement – the focus of Margaret Hamilton’s Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia.

Hamilton’s valuable and thoroughly researched book is the fourteenth volume in a series on Australian playwrights edited by Peta Tait, and it furthers that series’s important discussion of the political and aesthetic possibilities of Australian theatre. Here, the central object of inquiry is the work of four Australian artists and/or collectives – Open City, the Sydney Front, the Aboriginal Protesters, and Jenny Kemp – whose work in the 1980s and 1990s, Hamilton claims, caused “a significant shift in the nature and appearance of the stage in Australia” (16). The book considers the work of these artists under the rubric of post-dramatic theatre, the European aesthetic movement exemplified by the work of Heiner Müller. Hamilton’s book suggests that such aesthetics, while successful abroad, have largely been ignored by commentators in Australia, despite being a significant presence in Australian theatrical practice. Indeed, this book is the first to discuss, at length, the work of the Sydney Front, which toured internationally and [End Page 576] was a leading figure in the Australian avant-garde for nearly a decade. In her attention to critically marginalized theatre practice, Hamilton joins Australian scholars like Peta Tait and Helen Gilbert, who are working on postcolonial performance practice and physical theatre. And as a survey, Transfigured Stages fills in some of the blanks left by recent books like John McCallum’s very good and otherwise broad study, Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century (2009).

Hans-Thies Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre is necessarily central to Hamilton’s project, and in many respects, Transfigured Stages is, simply put, an application of Lehmann’s theoretical lens to a specifically Australian theatrical moment. In Hamilton’s reading, Lehmann proposes an “aesthetic logic of theatrical praxis ‘no longer dramatic,’ but not ‘beyond’ drama,’” which “resists the frames of dramatic logic organized according to historical traditions of narration to establish meaning” (190, 27). Instead, as Lehmann describes it, post-dramatic theatre employs the five aspects of performance – text, space, time, body, and media – to make the discord between text and stage a “consciously intended principle of staging” (145).

The book has six chapters, framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. The first four chapters address, respectively, one of the four artists or companies in question, providing a biography and descriptions of each person or group’s process and performances. Chapters then offer analyses of the work with emphasis on the various features of post-dramatic theatre as articulated earlier. Strong example is made of the Sydney Front’s Don Juan, which emphasizes a bidirectional relationship between actor and spectator and in which, as Lehmann’s theory stipulates, “the body’s visceral presence takes precedence over logos” (145). Chapters also offer additional, but sometimes frustratingly fleeting, references to a wide range of canonical critical theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, and Benjamin.

The chapter on the Aboriginal Protesters relies less on theory but makes useful, direct comparisons to European work and is also the most thorough in its claims for a specifically Australian political context for post-dramatic theatre. The chapter on Kemp, who is of growing interest, similarly offers brief but very insightful comparisons to Gertrude Stein and Robert Wilson. The author makes good use of interviews, particularly with Kemp and with members of the...

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