Denise Varney's new book is Volume 13 in Rodopi's excellent Australian Playwrights series. It provocatively asks: what is the enduring impact of the late 1960s upon six Australian drama and performance writers who have had continuous careers up to the present? She periodizes the ‘sixties’, in an Australian context, as c.1958–74, an era ranging from orthodox naturalism to increasingly stylized drama and performance. As series editor Peta Tait points out, the work of Varney's chosen playwrights has travelled a long way in forty years and ‘scholarly analysis of [their] later drama is long overdue’ (p. 11). In the 1980s and 1990s, Rodopi and/or Currency Press devoted monographs to four of these writers’ earlier writing, yet very rarely do these early scholarly analyses apply to what they have produced since.

Political and social contexts are persuasively established in three preliminary chapters, especially chapter 2, ‘The Australian Performing Group and Its Legacy, 1968–2008’. Varney's six playwrights each had long or brief links with the APG, and each has had a continuing subsequent influence on Australian theatre. After a neat general career summary, each writer is placed according to a particular stylistic, thematic or temporal heading. Thus David Williamson's moral satires are situated in ‘The Howard Years’ and Alma De Groen's in ‘Parallel Forty-Year Female Narrative’. A perhaps surprising selection is the less prolific Richard Murphet in ‘The Wounded Subject’, followed by ‘Jenny Kemp – On the Edge’. The better-known Stephen Sewell's political and internationally oriented works are placed in ‘The State of the Nation’.

Varney shows how some of her subjects’ later interests were seeded earlier, but required changes in Australian society, theatre practice and funding policy to develop fully. A typical case study is ‘John Romeril: The Asian Australian Journey’. His ‘break-out’ play, The Floating World (1974), concerned one Australian's bitter experience of ‘Asia’ as a Second World War Japanese prisoner of war. But later plays like Miss Tanaka (2001) and his masterpiece Love Suicides (1997), drawing upon eighteenth-century Japanese master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, reflect a more comprehensive engagement with Asian–Australian relations on many levels, including that of theatrical style.

Radical Visions charts these ‘sixties’ writers’ increasingly confident mastery, following global impulses, of different theatrical genres: the relatively orthodox spoken-word drama of Williamson, De Groen and Sewell; Romeril's puppetry and visual theatre; and the hybrid, post-dramatic performance styles of Kemp and Murphet. Their later theatre-making is carefully situated in relation to their engagement with ideas of nation and the world, engagements in which they continue as active creators.