This edited collection follows Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998), which, as the title suggests, mapped the landscape of Australian theatre and performance in the first half of that decade. Catching Australian Theatre in the 2000s provides an updated account of the trends and developments in the Australian performing arts since then. The structure of the book offers a broad inquiry, covering topics that range from recent Federal Government Arts funding policies and their effects, Indigenous theatre practice, youth theatre, the dramaturgy industry, regional theatre, the circus, and traditional and innovative performance forms. The book includes contributions from some of the most significant Australian theatre and performance scholars, including Geoffrey Milne, Peta Tait, Maryrose Casey, Joanne Tompkins and Laura Ginters.

Contributors are on the whole critical of the effects of reduced funding of the arts, as recommended by the Commonwealth Government's Securing the Future: Major Performing Arts Inquiry Final Report (1999). Milne notes that the funding structures of the 2000s have encouraged aesthetic innovation but have left the theatre industry ‘whiter, more Anglo, more city-based than fifteen years ago – and it has remained the “largely male preserve”’ (p. 41–2). Underpinning the controlled climate of mainstream Australian theatre in the 2000s is the increased access of ‘major performing arts’ to reliable government funding. Yet chapters seek to highlight the resilience of independent and regional theatre by celebrating the work of pre-eminent Indigenous theatre companies such as Yirra Yaakin, Kooemba Jdarra and Ilbijerri (Casey); regional Knock-em-Down Theatre and Just Us Theatre Ensemble (Carleton); youth theatre such as Corrugated Iron Youth Arts and Flying Fruit Fly Circus (Hunter and Bourke); queer and multicultural performance-makers such as William Yang (Carleton); and women playwrights and theatre-makers such as Noëlle Janaczewska (Tompkins).

Authors argue that the detrimental effects of the mainstreaming of public funding are felt by the ‘small-to-medium’ arts sector such as regional or youth theatre. As Casey writes of Indigenous theatre companies working in the 2000s, ‘none of them had ongoing funding and therefore all were limited in terms of their capacity to support the development of work and practitioners’ (p. 103). Yet in the most surprising chapter of the book, Kathryn Kelly notes that neoliberal funding models created a performing arts industry marked by precarity, flexibility and short-term commitments, but that this led to a significant growth in the profession of the dramaturge, whose skills and services were useful and easily amenable to the industry's rapidly changing conditions. She describes dramaturgy as ‘one of the growth practices of the post-millennial decade’ (p. 90), though she is reluctant to declare this an ongoing trend in Australian theatre culture. The precarity of the performing-arts sector more generally suggests that non-mainstream theatre and performance and its associated professions, including that of the dramaturge, will suffer in the long run.

Catching Australian Theatre in the 2000s provides an excellent pedagogical reference for studies of the relationship between arts policy and theatre practice, particularly for the growing number of courses in arts management and industry across tertiary institutions in Australia. It is particularly strong in the neglected field of regional theatre but also provides perspectives on how artistic and political global flows shape both Australian and international performance cultures in the twenty-first century.