Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of Australian theatre productions by internationally-renowned director, Barrie Kosky. Now a prolific opera director in Europe, Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage accounts for the formative years of Kosky's career in Australia. This book provides in-depth engagements with select productions including The Dybbuk which Kosky directed with Gilgul theatre company in 1991, as well as King Lear (1998), The Lost Echo (2006), and Women of Troy (2008). Using affect theory as a prism through which these works are analysed, the book accounts for the director's particular engagement with – and radical departure from – classical tragedy in contemporary performance: what the book defines as Kosky's 'post-tragedies'. Theatre studies scholars and students, particularly those with interests in affect, contemporary performance, 'director's theatre', and tragedy, will benefit from Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage’s vivid engagement with Kosky's work: a director who has become a singular figure in opera and theatre of international critical acclaim.