This book makes an excellent contribution to theatre scholarship at a time when the profile of the Australian playwright seems to be slipping into curious abeyance at the hands of ‘the devising team’. In Enright's case, this is a particularly fitting tribute because, as so many of the impressive field of scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners the editors have assembled in this collection point out, collaboration was the approach he prized above all others when it came to creating the text. Whilst the volume concentrates debate on Enright's theatre and screenplays (in forensic summary articles by Veronica Kelly, Jack Teiwes, Jane O'Sullivan, Mary Ann Hunter, Adrian Kiernander, Felicity Plunkett, Julian Meyrick and Pender and Lever themselves), its overarching ambition is to acknowledge the full range of the playwright's accomplishments, and to acknowledge his legacy as an actor, director and, in the case of the series of personal recollections by George Ogilvie, Sandy Gore, Karen Vickery and Terence Clarke that comprise the second part of the book, a teacher and collaborator.

Pender provides a useful biographical summary of Enright's career, reminding the reader that he achieved at the very highest level in almost everything to which he put his hand. She cites the recurring themes of ‘family and the plight of the young’ (p. 21) as being the common thread that links most of his work across genre and form. The articles that follow elaborate upon these projects and interrogate the recurring thematics in order to account for the work's impact. These important essays are critical debates that do not quail from engaging with his works’ flaws or contested reception. Fitzpatrick acknowledges the anodyne mega-musical entity The Boy From Oz became in its Broadway transfer, and how this departed from the darker biography of Peter Allen that Enright originally offered to Australian audiences. O'Sullivan critiques Enright's portrayal of women across his theatre oeuvre; Hunter concurs that an elision of female perspectives occurs in the film adaptation (Blackrock, 1996) of his complex stage play for young people, A Property of the Clan (1994), but points out that his texts have been used extensively by youth theatre groups to instigate discussion about precisely the sorts of sins of commission and omission to which O'Sullivan refers.

The overall achievement is a rigorous and comprehensive assessment of Enright's legacy by a first-class field of contributors who ensure that a towering figure of Australian – and international – musical and social-realist theatre is given his due without being paid the disservice of obsequy or hagiography.