Institutional Theatrics makes a precious contribution to research about post-wall Berlin theatre and to an analysis of arts policy. Policy remains a minority concern in anglophone theatre scholarship despite the very valuable work produced in recent decades by a range of scholars including UK-based Joshua Edelman, Stephen Greer, Jen Harvie, Baz Kershaw and Lourdes Orozco. Nevertheless, scholars interested in socially engaged theatre as well as theatre and politics will find much food for thought in Brandon Woolf's discussion of ‘performance as policy’ (p. 19). Influenced by Theodor Adorno but also by the policy and performance theories of George Yúdice, Toby Miller, Judith Butler and Shannon Jackson, Woolf forges this fruitful concept to grasp how infrastructural conditions determine theatre practices and, conversely, how the latter also contribute to reproducing and transforming a cultural landscape subject to chronic restructuring and fiscal retrenchment.

This approach is put to work most directly in Woolf's introductory discussion of the protests surrounding Chris Dercon's controversial tenure as head of the Volksbühne theatre, but also in Chapter 1 where Woolf discusses the equally contested demise of the Schiller Theatre in 1993. These chapters offer valuable insights into how cultural producers and their constituencies mobilize to performatively contest (successfully in the Volksbühne case) governmental decisions. An analysis of how actual works interact with policy agendas is found in Chapter 3, which, like the first chapter, brings historical depth to the analysis while shifting it towards an examination of independent (but still state-funded) theatre projects in Berlin's so-called ‘free scene’ (p. 101). The focus here is a project called Volkspalast (2004), which refunctioned the building that had served as the seat of the parliament of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) before its controversial transformation into a cultural complex including a museum, which would partly erase this socialist history. Volkspalast countered the restorative nostalgia of both those supporting and those opposing the transformation of this landmark building through a series of cultural events featuring performance projects playfully interrogating the public function of such spaces in post-wall Berlin. Chapters 2 and 4 have a more indirect relation to policy as Woolf discusses performances alongside the cultural leadership of theatre directors and producers. However, through rich analyses of a Frank Castorf staging of Bertold Brecht's Baden-Baden Lehrstück (2010) and andcompany&Co.'s (Coming) Insurrection (2013), the author provides detailed accounts of the distinct culture fostered by Castorf and his collaborators at the Volksbühne as well as of debates and campaigns relating to the infrastructural problems (cuts and precarity, among others) of the ‘free scene’ after the 2007–8 economic crash. Like Chapter 3, the inclusion of the significant but under-discussed andcompany&Co. will broaden anglophone perspectives on German theatre.

On the whole, Woolf paints a sympathetic portrait of Berlin's contemporary theatre-makers, producers and allied politicians who, at best, are presented as the ‘good guy[s]’ and ‘hard-core freak[s]’ making the ‘craziest ideas’ happen (p. 118). However, beyond fetishizing and romanticizing some of these cultural figures, the analysis tends to blur distinctions between policy and management and, by extension, policy and culture on account of the influence of Yúdice's managerial conception of politics and culture. As a result, Woolf's sophisticated analysis can fall prey to a form of cultural–managerial voluntarism which undermines the critical currents of his prose. While leaders and collectives can effect institutional change and influence policy makers, claims to agency are sometimes overinflated or become synonymous with expedient (but hardly transformative) pragmaticism. For example, according to Woolf, the famously edgy culture of the Volksbühne under Castorf, which the latter and Woolf himself tend to present as politically subversive, was enabled by the state's decision not to cut the theatre's funding, i.e. to maintain the (desirable) status quo. By contrast, in the case of the Schiller theatre, Woolf seems to suggest that a management-led restructuring, job cuts and all, rather than the theatre's complete closure would have spurred a desired institutional transformation. The value of a piece of scholarship lies also in the contradictions, silences and disavowals that open a space for interested readers to think and question. Woolf's generous and well-researched book does just this and will remain required reading for anyone interested in contemporary German theatre, socially engaged performance and arts policy.