This is one of the most gorgeous books I have held for some time. It is a beautifully constructed, fully illustrated documentation of the interrelationship between empire, performing arts and production touring in Australasia, taking us from the turn of one century into the early decades of another. Meticulously researched, Kelly's study offers us a detailed cultural analysis of the ways in which commercial theatre translated from the West End to the ‘new’ Australia through key figures such as Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton. She explores the means by which theatre engaged with the cultural imagination, bringing stars of the stage and their lavish productions to eager audiences whose identity was entwined with the circulating images of empire and nation then current.

Whilst other studies which focus on the ‘commercial’ are often apologetic, Kelly assertively makes the links between the popular, the commercial and the modern. The Empire Actors makes a clear and rational connection between the ‘conservative’ and the innovative in theatre practice. Kelly's careful blending and blurring of the modern, modernity and the modernist is extremely useful in terms of the genuine intervention she is making into theatre history. The theatre is an industry predicated on the ability to capitalize quickly both on trends and on ‘marketable’ newness, as well as on the conservative impulse to indulge in nostalgia. Kelly careful breaks down the boundaries between what might be considered high and low art in order to show touring theatre operating at its culturally exploitative and commercial best. Practitioners like Asche, Brayton, Julius Knight and Minnie Tittell Brune were more than conscious of the zeitgeist and were in fact involved in the creation, as well as the circulation, of cultural trends.

With a full and detailed deconstruction of the role of design and the influence of orientalism, Kelly provides an intellectually challenging as well as stimulating account of the vibrant touring theatre culture of the time. Of particular use is her themed division of the research materials, where she approaches the same practitioners from very different conceptual frameworks. The sections on ‘Partnerships and Their Fortunes’ and on ‘Australasian Modernity’ are particular noteworthy, as is Kelly's take on Lily Brayton. She provides detailed analysis of her work as a performer but also as an astute and successful businesswoman who backed Asche, even after their separation and, possibly, against her own better judgement.

This really is a fabulous book, and very certainly not just for those interested in Australasian culture. The manner in which Kelly puts together her material and her argument is a model of new historiographic practice. Gone are the divisions of ‘types’ of theatre that prohibit an understanding of it as a burgeoning and live cultural industry. In place of such divisions, we are given an erudite and informed account, through the application of theoretical frameworks around cultural production, which genuinely locates theatre as a multilayered matrix of signifiers, carrying with them complex playings out of social and historical interactions around empire, nation, modernity and performance. The book should become part of any serious library and will also make a really useful intervention into pedagogy in theatre/performance history and cultural studies.