Siting the Other: Re-visions of Marginality in Australian and Anglophone Canadian Drama.(Book Review)

edited by Marc Maufort. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2001. Hardback, US$49.95

Marc Maufort introduces this book as a `sequel' to his earlier collection of essays, Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama (Peter Lang, 1995). Just recently, he published another meaty critical anthology (co-edited with Franca Bellarsi), Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium (Peter Lang, 2002), which he positions as the `third phase of a trilogy' devoted to contemporary drama and multiculturalism in the (developed) English-speaking world (13). By any measure, these books collectively make a substantial contribution to scholarship in the field, bringing together new critical essays by highly-regarded scholars and, to a lesser extent, those not often found among the `usual suspects' included in such books.

While the reach of Maufort's overall project is impressive, the specific material he puts together and circulates for the critical market has less coherence than he suggests, a factor particularly apparent in Siting the Other where comparison between Australian and Canadian theatre is presented as the purpose and organising principle of the project. This is not to suggest that the twenty-two essays featured in the book have nothing to say to each other, but that their selection and internal arrangement, as well as their framing via Maufort's introduction, together betray some of the pitfalls of this kind of anthologising. Most obviously, the perceived need to balance the number of selections dealing with each country and/or with particular categories such as indigenous theatre seems to license the inclusion of work that really doesn't measure up to the generally high standard of critical and theoretical commentary. Albert Reiner-Glaap's account of Drew Hayden Taylor's career is a case in point, marshalling well-known details to give a descriptive chronology of the playwright's efforts that clearly speaks to a continental European audience as a basic introduction to one important player in Canadian drama. The division of the book into essentially Australian and Canadian halves, punctuated by a comparative essay at the beginning, middle and end, strengthens the impression that the contents have been conceived as adjacent rather than in dialogue. It is not surprising, then, that Maufort struggles to set up particular points of transnational contact in his introduction, resorting to historical similarities between the two countries' development of postcolonial theatrical forms as the raison d'etre for the project. I have no quibble with this starting point, but the editor needs to go much further to suggest potentially productive reading paths through this richly varied collection.

One of the most striking features of the book is the difference between the Canadian and Australian contributors' interpretations of their brief to discuss the concept of marginality/otherness, a contrast not noted in the introduction. In Australia, it seems, marginality is performed, represented, analysed and re-sited in a wide variety of theatrical forms and locations, not just in the arena of theatre scripted by playwrights concerned with issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality. In this respect, the Australian section is much more adventurous and ultimately more nuanced than the Canadian one. Peta Tait's excellent essay on queer bodies in new circus, Paul Makeham's fascinating account of physical, digital and site-specific performance in the work of Brink Visual Theatre, and Tom Burvill's equally adept ...