Review of Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre. By Joanne Tompkins. London: Palgrave, 2006; Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place. Edited by GayMcAuley, Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2006; and, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australian Theatre. By Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo. London: Palgrave, 2007.

This trio of new books focuses on how space and place inform understandings of performance, although they are concerned more with cultural geography than with abstract spatial semiotics. Arguably, the dominant concern of representation in postcolonial nations, such as Australia, becomes geography – shared, and yet contested. Indeed, Romeo Castellucci, in a personal conversation, once claimed that ‘the concept of geography, the richness of space’, could lead to another mode of making theatre in a country like Australia. It is this proposition that these books interrogate