Colonial narratives typically characterized the Pacific as a vast ocean interspersed with exotic South Seas islands, to be consumed by the Western gaze. Contemporary perspectives frame this geopolitical area as a diverse but interwoven web of cultural and kinship ties, connected by the ocean of which its people are guardians, thus marking it as a ‘sea of islands’ rather than ‘islands in a far sea’ (Hauʻofa quoted at p. 6). Diana Looser's excellent and timely book charts theatrical developments in this complex and dynamic arena.

Looser begins by defining the pliable yet distinct terms ‘Pacific’ and ‘Oceania’ (pp. 3–4), and goes on to provide a cogent and precisely drawn anatomization of the syncretic interweaving of theatrical representation with history, lifeworld practice, identity politics, and sociocultural concerns from a range of regions in Oceania. Although the theatre, drama and performance of Oceania have been hitherto underacknowledged by Western academics, they have been critiqued and analysed by scholars from the region. Looser invokes many of those Pasifika voices and pertinently references their work. However, Looser's own argument is the glue that binds this study together. She has carefully selected plays and performances from diverse sites – chiefly Hawai‘i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Fiji and New Caledonia – that ‘negotiate between Western and Oceanic aesthetic and epistemological frameworks’ (p. 18). Through a careful analysis of dramaturgical and performance strategies, as well as an impressive interpolation of a range of theoretical material from Dominick LaCapra's work on trauma to Freddie Rokem's notion of performance as a means to reframe history, Looser maps ruptures and sutures, and complex reckonings of time, space, place and meaning, charting similarities and foregrounding differences. At points she reinforces her argument using indigenous epistemological notions such as the spiral concept, a ‘Māori framework for historical understanding’ (p. 114).

Chapter 1 outlines the region's ‘hybrid [theatrical] genealogy’ (p. 7), and surveys the history and diverse character of dramaturgical and theatrical practices from throughout the Pacific, including the incorporation of traditional indigenous elements within stage plays. Although wide-ranging, this chapter lucidly establishes the territory to be traversed in the book. Looser's second chapter focuses on performance texts, including John Psathas and Robert Sullivan's oratorio Orpheus in Rarohenga, that figure or refigure, dismantle and challenge the pervasive colonial persona of Captain James Cook as purported ‘discoverer’ of numerous Pacific nations. Chapter 3 analyses five theatrical (re)interpretations of the New Zealand Wars. Here the viewing lens is Roma Potiki's cornerstone assertion, from her 1991 ADS article ‘A Maori Point of View: The Journey from Anxiety to Confidence’, that Māori theatre is ‘tino rangatiratanga [quintessential chieftainship, self-determination] in action’ (quoted at p. 111). Of particular note is Looser's (re)placement of Harry Dansey's complex and too often overlooked 1972 play Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross into the canon of Māori drama. Charting a different quest for self-determination, chapter 4 analyses the complex relationship between history and theatre in the work of Hawaiian playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and provides a female theatrical voice often missing in other parts of the book. Indeed, the theatrical texts dealt with in chapter 5 – works that respond to the 1987 coups in Fiji – articulate from an acutely masculine perspective, a point that Looser herself acknowledges (pp. 224–5). The plays detailed in this chapter, including Sudesh Mishra's allegorical work Ferringhi, demonstrate theatre's power to abstract – and hence confront – traumatic lived experience. An underlying theme in this volume is that compelling drama in the Pacific region has bodied forth from conflict; performances of Cook's contested place in Pacific history, Māori drama centering on war, Kneubuhl's January 1893 and the post-coups Fijian drama all deal with conflicts and their aftermath.

Looser concludes with the suggestion that future work might analyse an ‘expanded Oceania’ with ‘multiple diasporic expressions’, and examine Pacific theatre alongside other artforms (pp. 241–2). Undoubtedly this book has provided a substantial and distinguished platform from which such work might develop.