Late in 1999 the Commonwealth of Australia's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts released Securing the Future, the final Report of the Major Performing Arts Enquiry chaired by Helen Nugent (commonly referred to as the Nugent Report). The operations of the committee and the findings of the Report occasioned considerable public debate in the Australian arts world in the late 1990s, as the Enquiry solicited and analysed information and opinion on the financial health and artistic practices of thirty-one national major performing arts companies producing opera, ballet, chamber and orchestral music as well as theatre. The Report saw the financial viability of Australian live performance as deeply affected by the impact of globalization, especially by what elsewhere has been called ‘Baumol's disease’ – escalating technical, administrative and wage costs but fixed revenue – which threaten the subsidized state theatre companies of Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth with their relatively small population bases. The structural implementation recommended a considerable financial commitment by Commonwealth and State Governments to undertake a defined period of stabilizing and repositioning of companies. Early in 2000 both levels of Government committed themselves to this funding – in fact increasing Nugent's requested $52 million to $70 million – and to the principle of a strengthened Australia Council dispensing arms-length subsidy. In an economically philistine political environment, these outcomes are a tribute to Nugent's astute use of economic rhetoric to gain at least a symbolic victory for the performing arts sector. In 2000 New Zealand arts gained a similar major injection of funding, while a commissioned Heart of the Nation report, advocating the dilution of the principle of arm's-length funding through the abolition of the national funding organization Creative New Zealand, was rejected by Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Hone Kouka's historical plays Nga Tangata Toa and Waiora, created and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, one set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the other during the great Māori urban migrations of the 1960s, provide fresh insights into the way in which individual Māori responded to the tremendous social disruptions they experienced during the twentieth century. Much like the Māori orator who prefaces his formal interactions with a statement of his whakapapa (genealogy), Kouka reassembles the bones of both his ancestors, and those of other Māori, by demonstrating how the present is constructed by the past, offering a view of contemporary Māori identity that is traditional and modern, rural and urban, respectful of the past and open to the future.

Since 1980, the term ‘marae theatre’ has been used to account for attempts within the Māori cultural renaissance to produce new plays which draw on the protocols of the marae, the traditional physical centre of the tribe. The marae, however, has been seen as an arena of performative interaction, quite independent of any element of play production. The 1998 revival for marae performance of Songs to the Judges by white playwright Mervyn Thompson, dealing with issues of Māori sovereignty and land rights, eighteen years after its first performance for a liberal urban audience, addressed a totally different audience in a radically altered mode of address. Marae communication is symmetrical, with local people and visitors following strict protocols, and actors performing to the authority and approval of the host marae. There arise familiar issues of cultural constraints, property and appropriation, mobilized with a special intensity here in the use of actual utterances of historical Māori resistance leaders, transposed into other mouths. The Western concept of performance itself is brought into a state of crisis, as are the foundations of a ‘postcolonial drama’.

Theatre created by Pacific Islanders is perhaps the most recent significant development in New Zealand theatre of the 1990s. Exploring this new phenomenon within a concept of diaspora, productions, producers and themes are linked to notions of displacement, home, and disruption on several levels. Three recent plays and productions are examined: Think of a Garden by the Samoan-American John Kneubuhl, which explores memory as the basis of diasporic identity; Home Fires, a collaborative production between Pacific Island and Ma°ori artists in which a new kind of syncretic theatrical style transcending specific cultural codes was developed; and Tatau – Rites of Passage, a performance created by the Christchurch-based group Pacific Underground and the Australian community theatre group Zeal Theatre which explores the notion of ritual reincorporation – involving actual tattooing on stage – as a means of transcending diaspora and repairing the ruptures caused by it.

A consideration of identity formation in contemporary Australian multicultural theatre is offered through a re-assessment of the unsettled (and unsettling) constructions of Australia as ‘home’ in the work of three playwrights. William Yang's Sadness disrupts a localized perception of home, space, and cultural communities to amalgamate two disparate communities (the queer/homosexual community in Sydney and the Asian-Australian, or ‘Austasian’ community) into a reconfigured Australian identity. Janis Balodis's The Ghosts Trilogy uses many actors who play across the unsettled lines of history, amid numerous voices, homes, and homelands that indicate the enormity of what ‘Australia’ comes to signify. Noëlle Janaczewska's The History of Water constructs a way of locating the self by means of a metaphoric home as each character establishes herself on a psychic plane rather than choosing the strictly physical locations to which she has access. In their interrogations of home and homeland, these plays challenge assumptions regarding identity, disrupt notions of the ultimate ownership of land/culture by anyone, and problematize the idea of settlement as it is currently articulated in Australia.

Hailed as an ‘unruly masterpiece’, John Romeril's The Floating World is one of the few ‘new wave’ Australian plays representing Australians and their Asian ‘others’ to be restaged periodically since its première in 1974. Paying particular attention to productions of the play that have used Japanese theatre forms such as kabuki and bunraku, this article focuses primarily on the ways in which the spectacle of race has been coded performatively by different directorial approaches, and how various significations of race have been interpreted by the critical establishment. The fascinating stage history of The Floating World is treated as a barometer of Australian theatre's response to the challenge of representing cultural conflict, during a period marked by public debate about the desirability, and inevitability, of Australia's political, economic and cultural ‘enmeshment’ with Asia.

The field of contemporary youth-specific theatre in Australia is one of change and, in some cases, anxiety. While Drama Studies continue to grow in popularity in schools, previously conventional developmental paradigms have become less mandatory for theatre for, by, and about young people outside the school context. Instead, ‘new generation’ approaches in youth-specific performance are placing greater value on young people's own preferences in cultural activity. Yet this development is being tempered and further complicated by a cultural ‘generationalism’, particularly in larger arts organizations as the youth sector becomes a more integral part of marketing strategies for the future. The resulting ambiguity in the representation, value, and positioning of young people and youth-specific arts in Australia's theatre industry is considered by focusing on Magpie2, a former youth-specific company attached to the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Magpie2 ceased operation in 1998 after experimenting with a ‘new generation’ approach to theatre for young people in the State Theatre realm. Both the artistic policy of Magpie2 Director, Benedict Andrews, and the critical reception of his two productions in 1997, Future Tense and Features of Blown Youth, demonstrate how competing systems of cultural value characterize the field of youth-specific theatre in Australia.

A feminist analysis of the repertoire written and directed by women within mainstream Australian theatre at the end of the millennium reveals that, in spite of thirty years of active feminism in Australia, as well as feminist theatre criticism and practice, the mainstream has only partially absorbed the influence of feminist ideas. A survey of all the mainland state theatre companies reveals the number of women making work for the mainstream and discusses the production politics that frames their representation as repertoire. Although theatre has become increasingly feminized, closer analysis reveals that women's theatre is either contained or diminished by its presence within the mainstream or utilizes conventional theatrical genres and dramatic narratives. Feminist theatre criticism, thus, needs to become more concerned with the material politics of mainstream culture, in which gender relations are being reconstructed under the power of a new economic and social order.

Rock ’n’ Roll Circus promotes an expectation of performance that is energetic, challenging, irreverent, and sexual. Their 1998 production in Brisbane of Sweetmeats follows the company's earlier work, such as The Dark, which established its reputation in Australia for idiosyncratic physical theatre with an acute awareness of its erotic potential and appeal. A close analysis of the construction of (sexual) desires and erotic energies in Sweetmeats illustrates how the study of sexuality is also the study of what may appear to be non-sexual. Interactions are a key to an appreciation of this form of physical theatre, whether they are between body and body, human and apparatus, sexual and non-sexual, desires and anxieties, and straight and queer. Lines of demarcation are blurred and superfluous. This analysis of Sweetmeats in performance makes use of Peta Tait's investigation of sexed bodies in physical theatre, and Elizabeth Grosz's (re)conceptualization of lesbian desire and its generation through contact between surfaces. Grosz's approach is particularly applicable to a form of theatre which relies on the energy of physical contact between performers, and between performer and apparatus. The latter is exploited effectively in Sweetmeats such that a circulation of multifarious, strange desires (and anxieties) permeates the production, in some sense ‘queering’ it.

Indigenous Australian theatre company Kooemba Jdarra's production of Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The 7 Stages of Grieving (performed by Mailman) presents us with a series of stories about grief, grieving and loss. Mailman adopts the position of a ‘nomadic performer’ moving between stories and personae, refusing to embrace a singular character position, instead weaving the performance together through her use of slides, photographs, story and song. The performer claims and marks the space and empowers herself through her control over representation. The stories told often use autobiographical references, however, the style of the work positions the performance piece as a pastiche of stories about Aboriginal grief and grieving rather than an attempt to tell ‘true’ stories. This analysis interrogates the ways in which the spectator is invited to question his/her understandings of, and responses to, the concepts of grief and grieving, and to further question the issue of belonging in Australia, given the past and ongoing oppression of the Indigenous peoples of this land.