Rebecca Clode, 'Australian Metatheatre on Page and Stage: An Exploration of Metatheatrical Techniques' (London: Routledge, 2022)

Rebecca Clode’s Australian Metatheatre on Page and Stage is a detailed and thoughtful examination of how metatheatre has functioned as a tool for social and cultural critique on Australian stages since the late 1970s. Clode is a Canberra theatre-maker and Lecturer at Australian National University, whose 2014 PhD thesis forms the basis of this monograph. While metatheatre has been examined previously in Australian theatre scholarship, this is the first book to take the device as its primary focus, identifying the significance of both text-based and performance-based metatheatrical strategies in four key works: Dorothy Hewett’s The Man from Mukinupin (1979); Louis Nowra’s Royal Show (1982); Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988); and Peta Murray’s Things That Fall Over – an (anti-)musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio-as-coda (2014). This in turn provides new insights into how theme and dramaturgy align in these plays, in which Australian society is consistently portrayed as relegating its ‘Others’ backstage.