Offered through the Palgrave Macmillan series Studies in International Performance, Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre seeks to ‘contribute to a framework for understanding why modern Indonesian theatre has never stepped beyond the shadow of colonialism’ (p. xv). Fitting nicely in that series, Winet offers the reader ‘a broad historical scope’ so as ‘to contribute a new approach vis-à-vis the prevailing frames of inquiry’ (p. xv). Drawing from phenomenology and performance studies, Winet delivers on this promise, setting forth an original framework though the judicious use of theory that illuminates rather than obscures.

At the outset, the author notes that ‘this should not be taken as a definitive or in any way comprehensive study’, as the focus throughout is on the Dutch colonial city of Batavia and its successor, Jakarta, ‘the “mainstage” of colonial and subsequently national culture’ (p. xv). The subtitle, ‘Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces’, reflects the work's content more accurately than ‘Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre’ in that nearly one-third of the book is taken up with theatre in colonial Batavia. Further, as the subtitle suggests, the overarching point of the work is that in each successive generation spectral hauntings of the past either undermine a stable identity or contribute to a disjunction between what practitioners say they are doing and what is delivered. Thus in the immediate post-independence era, for instance, French existentialism provided a dramaturgy used to proclaim a proud nationalism, just as French drama, popular in nineteenth-century colonial Batavia, asserted a way of being something other than Dutch.

Meticulously researched and building on the work of others who have carved out significant parts of the field (Cohen, Hatley, Teeuw), the book offers fascinating insights into each historical period. Because colonization commenced under the banner of the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) before the Netherlands became a nation, even the name chosen for their trading post, Batavia, invoked their own quasi-mythic past of resistance prior to nationhood, thus constituting the first ghosting. In his examination of postcolonial theatre, Winet consistently demonstrates how this pattern of ghosting continued into Sukarno's era, Suharto's ‘New Order’, and the present period of reformasi. In spite of the book's many strengths, there are times when the theoretical framework is greatly truncated, making it difficult to fully assimilate, as is the case in the introduction when the phenomenology of identity is explored via Deleuze and Guattari, Fanon, Levinas and Foucault, all in a scant few pages. This is a minor quibble, however, in an otherwise successful work, and may well have been due to the uniform page-length required for titles in this series. Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre is an important addition to the field of Asian performance, and is among the few works to argue for and map out an original analytical framework, making the book accessible to the reader unfamiliar with contemporary Indonesian theatre.