Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:26:43.281Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 197 pages.

from Book Reviews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2019

Nicholas Ridout
Affiliation:
Misha Hadar, University of Minnesota
Get access

Summary

Nicholas Ridout's Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (2013), recently published in paperback and made open access by the University of Michigan Press, is an ambitious contribution to the scholarship on labor and performance, as well as to the wider scholarship on the political potential of theater. The book's development of the theme of labor and theater is not, as its title might suggest, research into the world of nonprofessional, applied, or community theater. Instead it is a materialist historiography that offers a critical treatment of wage work in (primarily) twentieth-century Europe by discussing a range of theater plays and productions, but also of a film (and theater in it) and a piece of theoretical writing. Passionate Amateurs focuses on the relation between work and nonwork, often moving away from theater to discuss how this relation materializes, for example, in the figure of “the professional” or in changes to the university and the social function of the scholar.

In pursuing this line of inquiry, Ridout finds moments in theater where structures of wage work both become apparent and present opening points to possible resistance and subversion. For example, he sees Godard's La Chinoise (1967) not as foreseeing the events of May 1968, but, following the film's group of amateur theater-makers cum revolutionaries, as both making visible and challenging the Fordist organization of work. From the Nanterre campus students in the film, Ridout launches into a discussion of work and the university system in 1960's France and “its transformation from a site of scholarly privilege into the edu-factory” (101), illustrating this turn's dramatic effect on course material and teaching. Throughout the book Ridout offers wholly original insights into theater and politics, which allow for a reconsideration of the material and affective relations between performers and audience while also exploring the potential for intervention through a Benjaminian concept of history and time. Ultimately, his inquiry is about a unique vision for a communism in theater.

This, we might say, is not easy work. Ridout weaves together theoretical, historiographical, and critical accounts of multiple provenances into a is precisely because of its speculative daring that the collective movement practice Marchart analyzes avoids the pitfalls of representation with which Malzacher wrestles in the volume's lead essay.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×