ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the field of rehearsal fiction—an excellent form, to observe anxiety, as it has proven fertile ground for cultural production. It examines an example from the West Indies alongside a New Zealand exemplar. The chapter aims to take rehearsal fiction to be a narrative, on stage, on screen or in print, which recounts as an inset narrative the rehearsal of a play. The fictive rehearsal might be an evocation of rehearsals that really did take place—the best known Australasian example would be Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, dramatized in Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. Rehearsal fictions are common throughout postcolomal cultures, where they function as a working through various forms of cultural anxiety. Many of these are Shakespeare rehearsal fictions, part of the larger field of what Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins call "counter-canonical discourse," or talking back to the received theatrical canon.
