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Reviews for the Convict Theatres of Early Australia:

'It is a sublime achievement'
Australian Drama Studies Association Journal

Jordan has produced a magnificent work of excavation and scholarship full of great stories with fascinating characters…[in this] story of how British theatre came to Sydney, Norfolk Island, Emu Plains and elsewhere. Often he is obliged to work from chance reference and fleeting glimpse, but even this reveals a remarkable amount of organised entertainment… Jordan modestly fails to highlight just how much of this wonderful book is his own original research, and the rest is a careful checking, correction and reassessment of what was known before. If any volume working from such fragmentary and inconclusive evidence could be said to be definitive, this is it.  
Australian Book Review, February 2003

Australia has a rich theatrical history. This handsome book documents the early theatrical efforts of convicts in the colony of NSW. The publisher claims that the first forty years of European theatre have never been the subject of intensive inquiry. This book fulfils its promise. It is a well-researched and entertaining exploration of the early theatre. It was often thought that early theatre was an initiative of soldiers and settlers, but Jordan shows that it was the convicts who produced the early theatre.
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Volume 89, June 2003

As much a work of literature as of research and reference, it tells a gripping – at times quite unbelievable – tale with an elegantly wry sense of humour. It is a style that masks the heavy weight of scholarship that underpins it. Nowhere are the fruits of Jordan’s painstaking archival researches more apparent than in the appendices, where each of the convicts and soldiers known to have played a part in early theatricals have been accorded a biography. [The publication] of Convict Theatres in Sydney and in London are a tribute not only to the convict thespians themselves and the Australian and English publishing houses that have enabled their history to be told, but also to a fine scholar whose research has been properly recognised on both sides of the world.
Uniken, University of NSW, Sydney, March 2003 

Jordan’s meticulous research has led to a richly informed and readable account of this hitherto neglected area. He fascinatingly connects the colony’s early theatre spaces, acting styles and repertoire with those of England at the time, deducing plausible conclusions about the colonial experience where specific evidence is often scant. Throughout the book, the factual and conjectural information is constantly enlivened by Jordan’s eye for his huge cast of characters, including the straggling settlement of Sydney itself, which he considers ‘must have been a place of stupefying boredom, dominated by its work routine.’
Bibliofile, Adelaide, August 2003