Singapore's extraordinary economic success, taken with a cultural ideology of “authoritarianism lite,” have inspired imitation throughout Asia and the developing world. Many in the West viewed the 1994 caning of American teenager Michael Fay (for spray painting cars and stealing road signs) as a model of effective crime prevention. In the midst of his campaign to run the United States more like a business, Ross Perot named Singapore his “favorite country.”

Performing Democracy sets out to explain the energetic growth of diverse community-based theatre, to explore its various approaches and challenges, and to promote its sustainability. The impressive range and sheer number of projects discussed in these twenty-three essays make the book a valuable introduction to what editors Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus see as an international movement to “involve, mobilize, and politicize” audiences (1).

In this invigorating analysis, Matthew H. Wikander weaves together themes of hypocrisy and sincerity in acting, plays, criticisms, and antitheatrical theories. At issue is how critiques of theatre, termed “antitheatricalism,” have used differing and even contradictory approaches to acting and performance. According to Wikander, there are fundamentally three kinds of antitheatrical critic. First are those who, following Plato, admonish theatre’ pretense and its association with play-acting, immorality, and deception. Next are those contemporary critics, particularly new historicists and feminists, who claim that all human action is merely a social performance, “with its attendant inability to distinguish hypocritical from sincere performance.” To such scholars, performing onstage is merely a facade, since acting is little more than an imitation of social constructs. Finally, there are the critics who, following Rousseau, “cherish sincerity and prize inner self” (xix). Such critics dismiss theatre and performance as shameful exhibitionism. From this perspective, those who believe in human volition and the presence of an essential, inner sincerity believe also that presenting the private self onstage is reprehensible. Wikander stakes out a “middle ground” between the theatrical and the antitheatrical, asking: “must we throw out the baby of sincerity with the bathwater of antitheatricalism?” (xix–xx). Wikander’s analysis traverses several selected moments of theatre history in consideration of the “problem of identifying acting as hypocrisy and stigmatizing actors as hypocrites,” as well as examining “the idea of slanders against actors, slanders that particularly privilege the value of sincerity and set it in opposition to performance of all kinds” (xxi).

One might wonder if there is anything new to be written about the work of Harold Pinter. Other than Brecht and Beckett, there may be more volumes of criticism on Pinter than any other playwright of the twentieth century. The difference is that Pinter is still very much a living and evolving artistic force in today's theatre, not only as a playwright, but as a screenwriter, director, and actor. Despite some minor flaws, The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, a collection of critical essays edited by Peter Raby, accomplishes the purpose stated in its brief foreword: to “provide an introduction to one of the world's leading and controversial writers, whose output in many genres and roles continue to grow.”

This volume is primarily a collection of eleven interviews with distinguished actors, directors, and producers who have brought Eugene O'Neill to the stage. In addition to interviews with James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander, Michael Kahn, Jason Robards, Theodore Mann, Arvin Brown, Len Cariou, Theresa Wright, Gloria Foster, Edward Petherbridge, and Fritz Weaver, Yvonne Shafer contributes a seventy-page introduction describing the work of earlier actors and directors that enables the book to span the entire production history of Eugene O'Neill's plays on the professional stage. This perspective makes a valuable contribution to O'Neill studies, which is heavily concentrated on the plays as literary texts.

The art of acting is hard enough to describe when it is in our midst. In view of the difficulties, we in theatre studies usually make our lives easier by assuming that opera and ballet are the property of other disciplines. Consider the problems, then, of dealing with this broad topic across a thousand years of history and the whole Mediterranean world, when we have but a handful of references in treatises devoted to rhetoric or poetry, some paintings of scenes (reinterpretations of originals) and other equally problematic forms of iconography, models of masks but not the actual objects worn, playtexts often in the form of fragments (lacking stage directions but sometimes accompanied by bookish commentaries), some puzzling scraps of musical notation, a set of inscriptions, and precious little more, with nothing faintly resembling a treatise on acting. Without attempting an overview, Easterling and Hall have gathered together twenty essays under three headings: the art of the actor, the professional world, the idea of the actor. Each essay is a rigorous attempt to salvage something of substance from the wreckage.

Despite an increasing awareness that the history of English theatre must necessarily encompass the study of those actors who were not stars and who worked in the provinces and suburbs rather than in the West End, there is still a comparative dearth of information about such players. Philip and Susan Taylor write that “for every actor about whom much is written and recorded, there must be at least 100 over whom the waters of time have closed without trace, but without whose contribution the theatre would not exist” (xv). In what Peter Thomson, in his foreword to the volume, describes as “an act of recovery” (x), the authors have lovingly and painstakingly documented the life of Philip Taylor's great-great uncle, the provincial tragedian Jonathan Dewhurst.

For those of us who write about modern Greek theatre the major problem is not to prove its value but to find ways to let others know about it, which primarily requires overcoming the language barrier. Since most of the plays written in Greek are never translated into English or any other “major” language that would attract widespread critical attention, most often we are forced to write for two audiences: the local specialist and the non-Greek generalist. For the first, we tend to narrow down the focus to the point where the generalist who lacks the background necessary to engage with unknown texts is lost. When we write for the generalist, we open up the lens too much to appeal to the local specialist. This dilemma characterizes Stratos Constantinidis’s Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism, a study that tries to balance the author’s scholarly ambitions on the one hand (to write a new account of modern Greek theatre) and the demands of his readers on the other for something more general that does not cram in names, dates, and titles.

The problem with much postcolonial theatre theory in the West, as Catherine M. Cole points out in her introduction, is that it is “dominated by literary analysis of European-language written texts,” while much of the performance in Africa occurs in the form of “non-textual expressions in so-called indigenous languages” (7). How, then, is the theatre theorist and historian to study the concert party of Ghana, a twentieth-century traveling popular theatre, a comic variety show “that combined an eclectic array of cultural influences,” including, but not limited to, Al Jolson, American movies, Anansesem (Ghanaian “spider stories”), “highlife” music, African-American spirituals, and others in which there is no literary text but there is most definitely a performance text?

When surveying books on Czech theatre on a library shelf, one is likely to be surprised to see how many there are. After all, the Czechs form a small nation—ten million all in all—whose independence, before the vast tides of twentieth-century history swept over it in 1939, lasted no more than two decades. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that for this nation the strong bond between theatre and politics has lasted since the dawn of its literature in the eighteenth century. It seems something of a miracle that by 1920, two years after the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia, its theatre found itself in the mainstream of modern European drama and that it moved, within the next twenty years, into the avant-garde of its contemporaries. Against this briefly sketched background in his introduction, Jarka M. Burian pitches his discussions of the creative artists whose work raised international awareness of their nation's theatre and, above all, that “other,” nonverbal language of the stage: scenography.

At first glance, Freddie Rokem's violent yoking of two unrelated events, the French Revolution and the Shoah, seems a bit odd. Rokem has good reason for linking plays treating these disparate subjects, however: both phenomena encourage a view of history “as a series of tragic failures of basic human values” (1) and, as such, the two are viewed dialectically. (In postwar theatre, the Terror has often served as a metaphor for the horrors of World War II.) Issues of representation also seem to make the coupling of these events unusual. While the French Revolution's self-conscious spectacularization seems to lend itself to theatre, the subjective, occluded suffering characterizing the Shoah nearly defies representation. This contrast would seem to present opposing challenges to playwrights, yet, frequently, dramas about the French Revolution and the Shoah employ similar metatheatrical devicessuch as plays within playsto present their histories.

One of the more original developments in contemporary theatre at the end of the twentieth century was the reactionary mode of playwriting to emerge from Britain’s younger generation. London and Edinburgh audiences, particularly, saw some of the most groundbreaking and influential movements in British theatre to be produced since John Osborne’s provocative debut of Look Back in Anger in 1956. In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Aleks Sierz contemplates the theatrical debuts of many young writers and the artistic contributions by directors, designers, and actors involved in each of their often scandalous new works. The brazen portrayals of violence including rape, murder, and incest as well as drug abuse, homosexuality, and the ruthless use of language made for a controversial new mode of writing. The young playwrights who brought these appallingly poetic stories to the stage were simultaneously reacting to the post-Thatcher, postconsumer, cultural climate of the 1980s and locating the theatre as an uncensored medium for which to write. The plays form an aggressive, provocative, sometimes obscene, and usually highly entertaining corpus that Sierz situates as one of the most influential theatre movements of the late twentieth century.

From the first glance, this is a beautiful book. Its cover is provocative, offering the image of Dario Fo's face stretched across the spine of the book, seemingly held in place by buckles and cables that extend across the front and back cover. The inside of the book contains one stunning presentation after another, including a wide variety of photographs of Dario Fo and Franca Rame in performance or at work, as well as drawings and paintings by Fo himself, paintings by the great masters Leonardo da Vinci and Jacapo Tintoretto as interpreted by Fo, and others by Piero della Francesca and Giotto as altered in Fo's adaptations. Moreover, the layout of the text is beautifully designed. The staff of Aperture, and particularly Yolanda Cuomo, the book's designer, have executed its presentation masterfully.

Alan Ayckbourn is one of the more successful—and undervalued—British playwrights to have emerged in the postwar period. As a director, not only of his own work but of others’ (Arthur Miller described his production of A View from the Bridge as definitive), he has proved himself a sure-sighted man of the theatre. Paul Allen’s biography begins with his upbringing by his mother—his parents separated shortly after his birth—and takes us up to the triumphant performances of House and Garden, the two plays presented concurrently in real time with the same casts at the National Theatre in London in 2000.

Leslie Hill and Helen Paris intend that Guerilla Performance and Multimedia “prove a valuable resource to fellow artists on both practical and creative levels,” and they hope to “help artists get their hands on more funding to make their work.”

At the beginning of his contribution to Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens, Vic Merriman reminds us why Irish theatre has had a profile out of all proportion to the small, relatively sparsely populated island from which it hails. “Irish drama’s claim to social significance,” writes Merriman, “rests on the pledge that in acts of theatre something more than box office, or the reputation of an individual artist, is at stake. Theatre is part of a broader cultural conversation about who we are, how we are in the world, and who and how we would like to be” (54). Underlying most of the contributions to this collection—and they are diverse, coming from theatre artists, academics, and journalists—is a concern (sometimes fully articulated, sometimes implicit) that changes in Irish society over the past decade have eroded the conditions that once made Irish theatre “something more than box office.”

William Tydeman's volume brings together a wide selection of materials constructing a “theatrical history” of the Middle Ages. The focus is on Western Europe; the temporal boundaries are more or less the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of “markedly Renaissance forms in Italy”thus, some one thousand years. The individual sections, each preceded by a brief introduction penned by an associate editor, provide the signposts for this documentary history: “The Inheritance” (Nick Davis), “Latin Liturgical Drama” (Peter Meredith), “Extra-Liturgical Latin and Early Vernacular Drama” (Lynette Muir), “England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales” (Tydeman), “France” (Muir), “The German-Speaking Area” (John E. Tailby), “Italy” (Michael J. Anderson), “The Low Countries” (Elsa Strietman and Muir), “The Iberian Peninsula (Including Majorca)” (Louise M. Haywood), and “Traditions of the People and Folk Drama” (Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard). These titles unequivocally indicate the scope and the limits of the volume: classical inheritance, the development of liturgical drama within the Roman Catholic Church, and popular religious drama in the vernacular in nine medieval regions. This general historical trajectory is complemented by the extant records about the costumes, audiences, staging, actors, directors, props, contracts, correspondence, and “eye-witness” accounts. Over seven hundred documents of varied length have been compiled from the manuscripts or copied from other reference books on the topic of medieval drama and theatre.

Inspired perhaps by the centennial of the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, or by the critical excitement generated by the current wave of Irish playwriting, an unusual number of historical analyses of the Irish theatre have emerged in the last few years. The better of these texts reflect the trend in both theatre history and Irish studies to challenge the assumptions of earlier historical narratives by analyzing the work of previously marginalized individuals and groups, and by including feminist, materialist, or postcolonial perspectives in their analyses. Yet while a growing interest in pre-twentieth-century Irish performance is emerging into print, few Irish theatre history surveys look farther back than the 1870s, focusing instead on Irish drama’s dynamic influence on modern theatre—and modern Ireland—throughout the twentieth century. While it’s a long way from Smock Alley to the Abbey, and while modern Irish theatre was invigorated by global influences as well as local traditions, Ireland’s rich theatre heritage created important artistic and material precedents for its twentieth-century stage. Christopher Morash’s A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 performs a great service for the field by linking the modern Irish theatre to the country’s earlier theatrical traditions, reminding us that Irish drama was enriching the lives (and sometimes enraging the tempers) of Irish audiences long before The Playboy of the Western World.

In 1998, Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke published Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Informed by contemporary gay and lesbian studies, the dozen or so essays in this pioneering anthology cast new light on the lives, same-sex relationships, and desires of a number of historically important actors and actresses from Edwin Forrest to Mary Martin. Taken as a whole, Passing Performances argued persuasively for sexuality as an important factor in the on- and offstage lives of the actors the volume scrutinized. In passing, so to speak, it also offered a perceptive account of sexism and homophobia in American theatre and American culture in general from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

The aim of this superb volume is a deeper understanding of physical gesture in European drama and art. Rarely does a collection approach a topic with such commitment and clarity. At a time when theatre historiography construes bodies as cultural constructions or as signifiers of power relationships, these authors delve into the communicative potential of bodies in motion. The eight essays are uniformly incisive in their analyses, convincing in their arguments, and elegant in expression. Each contributor sets in motion a different set of problems and critical perspectives, use of sources, and analytical strategies. Within these variations, a common concern for the performative qualities of gesture (beyond linguistic or pictorial referentiality) gives the volume its organic unity.