How are masculinities enacted in Australian theatre? How do Australian playwrights depict masculinities in the present and the past, in the bush and on the beach, in the city and in the suburbs? How do Australian plays dramatise gender issues like father-son relations, romance and intimacy, violence and bullying, mateship and homosexuality, race relations between men, and men's experiences of war and migration? "Men at Play" explores theatre's role in presenting and contesting images of masculinity in Australia. It ranges from often-produced plays of the 1950s to successful contemporary plays - from Dick Diamond's" Reedy River," Ray Lawler's" Summer of the Seventeenth Dol"l, Richard Beynon's" The Shifting Heart" and Alan Seymour's" The One Day of the Year" to David Williamson's" Sons of Cain," Richard Barrett's" The Heartbreak Kid," Gordon Graham's" The Boys" and Nick Enright's" Blackrock." The book looks at plays as they are produced in the theatre and masculinity as it is enacted on the stage. It is written in an accessible style for students and teachers in drama at university and senior high school. The book's contribution to contemporary debates about masculinity will also interest scholars in gender, race and sexuality studies, literary studies and Australian history.

This book about the work of actor director John Bell is essential reading for anyone interested in Australian theatre and in Shakespearean performance. Adrian Kiernander lucidly explains how, for over five decades, Bell has revived and reinvented theatre in Australia with his interpretations of radical new drama and particularly his innovative approach to staging Shakespeare's plays.

This is a full-length study of the renowned French theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine, and her company, the Theatre du Soleil. Mnouchkine is recognized as one of the first women directors to achieve an international reputation and her productions, spanning from Shakespeare to contemporary drama, have been widely acclaimed as being in the forefront of twentieth-century theatre. Having worked with Mnouchkine's company in 1985, Adrian Kiernander was in a unique position to observe her directorial style and working methods. In this fascinating study, Kiernander analyses the elements which inform Mnouchkine's work as well as the input she has had on modern theatre. The book includes an interview with Mnouchkine, a chronology of her productions and theatre career, and is illustrated with photographs from productions.