Peter Kenna was one of several Australian playwrights who came to prominence in the wake of the extraordinary success of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955). Like the plays of Richard Beynon and Alan Seymour, other writers associated with the promising but ultimately disappointing theatrical developments of the late 1950s, Kenna's works followed the pattern that had worked so well for Summer of the Seventeenth Doll: tight naturalistic construction, a contemporary and distinctively Australian domestic setting, and a credible and often comic conversational style. After the encouraging response to his first professionally produced play, The Slaughter of St. Teresa's Day (1959; published in 1972), Kenna, like Lawler, Beynon, and Seymour, went immediately to England. While Beynon and Seymour moved away from writing for the theater to work in British television--and even Lawler, during and after his long expatriate period, struggled to meet the expectations aroused by his playwriting debut--Kenna...