Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today. Edited by John Dillon and S. E. Wilmer. London: Methuen, 2005. Pp. xxv + 272 + 10 illus. £20 Hb

Reviews of plays by David Williamson, Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert, Robert Merritt, Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Alma De Groen, Dorothy Hewett and others map dening moments in which shifting coalescences of writers, actors, directors and audiences generated a distinctively new vernacular Australian theatre: physically energized, iconoclastic, comic, often housed in found spaces, frequently rooted in popular amateur white performance culture, but also conveying ... the emotional impact of public policy upon the recent history [and politics] of Aboriginal society (p. 338) These impassioned reviews offset Brisbanes disillusionment with current Australian reviews 319 theatre. [...]her abiding concerns emerge: what constitutes Australian theatre, the critics ethical relation to that theatre, and how its creativity might be sustained. Fensham and Varney end by suggesting that, while things looked promising for women writers and directors in the early 2000s, more recent years have seen a return to conservativism, with a decrease in works by women in major mainstream companies. [...]they make several calls for further action, including a focus on colour-blind casting, a more theoretically informed theatre, experimentation with theatrical form, more diverse representation of female subjects and an awareness on the part of mainstream playwrights of their power to galvanise public opinion (p. 337) some important calls which reinforce the rm location of this engaging and politically informed study in its political and social context. VR art is a place of Verfremdung(p. 139). [...]the complex interplay between installation, cinema and photograph in Forced Entertainments Nightwalks (1998) confronts the viewer with the reality of 326 reviewsnarrative as a construction upon a chaotic world (p. 42).