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Reviews HELEN GILBERT, ed. (Post)Colonial Stages: Critical and Creative Views on Drama, Theatre and Pelformance. Hebden Bridge, UK: Dangaroo Press, 1999. Pp. 279· ,14·95 (Pb). Reviewed by Brian Crow, University ofBirmingham Helen Gilbert identifies the two main raisons d' eIre of this book as being, firS!, to expand the available commentary within a field that, though flourishing, has been restricted in its availability; and, second, to address a gap in postcolonial literary studies generally, which has more often concentrated on prose and poetry than on drama and theatre. In pursuit of these two aims, the contributions to this volume are designed to enlarge the established critical perspeclives beyond the restrictions of a narrowly literary drama criticism to focus on theatre, including popular forms, dance-theatre, and pageantry, and to challenge the biases of mainstream postcolonial theory, specifically by shifting the emphasis from the linguistic to the consideration of texts "physically embodied in the presence of a live audience" (2). Within this remit, Gilbert points to the diversity of critical approaches and range of topics and issues discussed, which include the examination of emergent nationalist discourses in colonial theatre, the place of indigenous and minority-group theatre in settler countries, interculturalism, syncretism, and gender. Imaginatively - though not entirely successfully - the editor has also included excerpts from creative scripts, partly to make them more widely available but also in the hope that their inclusion will "bring them into dialogue with the critical essays" (2). In practice, (Post)Colonial Stages has a rather limited engagement with mainstream postcolonial theory and its literary biases, something about which I am not particuhirly sorry. Also, though Gilbert sees the collection as bringing together consideration of specific artistic and critical practices inflected by Modern Drama, 44:1 (Spring 2001) 103 104 REVIEWS "a broadly comparable set of historical circumstances" and as thus allowing "opportunities for fruitful dialogue" (r), there are evident difficulties in establishing a theoretical framework that can productively embrace both an allegedly "postcolonial" condition as figured by a crisis in the life of a Quebecois transvestite drag queen and one represented by the drama of contemporary Nigeria or by the position of poor urban Jamaican women as dramatized by Sistren. How broad is "broadly comparable?" and where, even if these dramas are juxtaposed between two covers, is the "dialogue"? For all Gilbert's theoretical aspirations, and the attempt in her introduction to identify unity in diversity in the con.tributions, this is a collection that, lacking a persuasive overall theoretical framework, remains obstinately scattered in the extent and variety both of its interests and of its intellectual perspectives. This overall reservation aside, there are nevertheless some good things here, and at least some essays relate to each other in interesting ways, notably those that analyse the contradictions and tensions in the formation of identity and a sense of nationhood in a variety of theatre productions and theatrical pageants in various parts of the British empire. Sudipto Chatterjee looks at the ambivalences in nationalist discourse in nineteenth-century Bengali theatre, in which the elite both emulated British models and celebrated their emergent Hindu nationhood. Loren Kruger examines the uneasy dualism in Afrikaner ideology between the assertion of modernity and national statehood and the myth of a tribal attachment to the land, referring to a range of pageants staged between 1910 and 1952, as well as to plays by W.A. De Klerk (brother of F.W.) and Guy Butler. Veronica Kelly concentrates on one popular nineteenth -century Australian play, The Currency Lass, by the Irish convict/playwright Edward Geoghegan, teasing out the ideological functions and imaginary identities it offered the various constituencies that made up its audience . Stephen Johnson's piece is also about popular theatre, in the form of the "Tom" and Minstrel shows of Canada West, with their contradictory perceptions of fugitive slaves escaping from America. Taken as a whole, this group of essays offers us interesting new information, as well as insights into the function of theatre in the colonies as a site for the formation and working out of nationalist discourses and identity. Another identifiable group of contributions looks at different aspects of the politics of performance in relation to...

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