AustLit

'Across the last two years, perhaps due to the paucity of live theatre available during the shutdowns of the COVID pandemic, there has been a welcome surge in books dedicated to Australian plays – from Julian Meyrick’s lucid Australia in 50 Plays (2022) to Chris Mead’s meditation on new play development, Wondrous Strange: Seven Brief Thoughts about New Plays (2022). Chris Hay and Stephen Carleton’s monograph, Contemporary Australian Playwrighting: Re-visioning the Nation on the Mainstage, sits within this good company as an elegant, cogently argued scholarly work, which honours the long tradition of play scholarship in Australia while illuminating the profound and necessary changes that have occurred to the field of Australian performance since 2007.' (Introduction)