Playing Australia: Australian Theatre and the International Stage ed. by Elizabeth Schafer and Susan Bradley Smith (review)

Reviews ELIZABETH SCHAFER and SUSAN BRADLEY SMITH, eds. Playing Australia: Australian Theatre and lhe International Stage. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2003. Pp. ix + 230. €50, US$63 (Pb). Reviewed by Alan Filewod, University ofGuelph The Litle of this book of essays on Australian theatre's international reciprocity is a triple play of meanings: Australia is variously explored as played space, played history, and cultural export playing "to" the world. Susan Bradley Smith and Elizabeth Schafer introduce the volume by wondering why "Australia suffers from being dominantly imagined more in geographical, natural and physical termS rather than conceptual and creative ones" (2). To answer this, they have assembled a cluster of case studies, historical inquiries, critical readings. and interviews that, taken together, offer a persuasive argument that Australian theatre has always enacted nation though processes of international exchange. In this, the book is a welcome departure from conventionalized models of postcolonialism that define culture through the differentials of power between imperial centre and colonial margin. By examining cultural transmission as reciprocal, the articles in this volume open investigations into the way that colonial histories are complicit in the construction of imperial regimes. When I first picked up the book, I was puzzled by the elisions in its use of "international" because, with only one exception, the authors are concerned primarily with the relationship between Australia and a very small area in the centre of London. It is here that an implicit fourth "playing" emerges. In the three sections of the book, the editors have packaged the articles to examine ways in which Australia plays to Australia, ways in which colonial Australia played to the imperial centre, and ways in which contemporary Australia Modern Drama, 47:3 (Fall 2004) 546 Reviews 547 plays to the world stage. The fourth "playing," the deep structure of the book, reverses the journeys of the nineteenth-century troupers who voyaged abroad to play the empire, as Australian theatre scholarship migrates to the British academy. The result is a somewhat closed conversation between a handful of Australian theatre academics and a handful of British academics and critics with an interest in Australian theatre, mediated by a smaller group of Australian academics working in British universities. The project of the books comes into focus when re. ad as a retracing. This is a critical feature of the book, which, if it seems to belie the promise of the title, makes it particularly valuable to students of imperial cultures. While it could be argued that Australian theatre has a more significant presence in continental Europe, North America, and (most perhaps importantly) Asia, the focus on the lines of transmission and reception between Australia and the West End-Fleet Street centre of the theatrical empire offers opportunities for detailed and nuanced investigations into the historical processes through which nation and empire are reciprocally productive. The opening article in the volume sets the ground for questions that recur throughout the book. In "Millennial Blues: Racism, Nationalism and the Legacy of Empire," Helen Gilbert builds on her substantial contributions to the study of postcolonial theatre to examine the play of race, whiteness, and nation at signal moments of Australian theatrical nationhood. She situates her powerful argument that Australian theatre has always enacted fantasie·s and anxieties of whiteness in the context·of the racialized subtexts of the 1999 referendum on republicanism. Her conclusion that the present challenge for Australian theatre (and theatre studies) is to "dilute the cultural power of whiteness by embracing heterogeneity and difference" establishes the principal 'trajectory of the essays that follow (26). All of them, in their various manners , engage with the ways in which"Australia" has historically encoded and enacted a raced national space. And in this, they answer the editors' opening question with the suggestion that the Australian, understood in "geographical, natural and physical temns," has always been a racialized construct, itself a creative act and conceptual practice. How this came to be materialized and naturalized as "AustraHan" culture is the subject of Susan Croft's chapter on women's school plays in the late nineteenth and·early twentieth centuries and of Julian Meyrick's analysis of British theatre innuences on the post-1945 professionalization of the Australian...