This thesis introduces three emerging Australian playwrights, Lally Katz, Ben Ellis and Kit Lazaroo, who are interrogating the politics of culture, identity and gender through the application of magic realism to theatre. This thesis contends that magic realist theatre offers a public site for the cultural mediation of binaries: self and other, margin and centre, life and death, western and non-western, pragmatic and spiritual. Australia, because of its history, geographical location and cultural positioning provides a fascinating case study.