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Reviewed by:
  • Drama/Theatre/Performance
  • Lisa Jane Gaughan
Drama/Theatre/Performance. By Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis. . New Critical Idiom Series. London: Routledge, 2004; pp. 262. $90.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This book provides a timely intervention into the growing number of studies moving away from prior and arguably monolithic notions of "theatre studies" to the more heterogeneous notion of "performance." The authors are clearly engaged with the current challenges and opportunities that face the teaching of drama, theatre, and performance within higher education. In such a climate, it is not surprising there is no attempt to posit any kind of overarching theory of the areas in question, and the preferred approach is to survey the various debates and terminologies that have arisen—particularly over the last four decades of the twentieth century—leading, arguably, to the dissolution of the boundaries among the three key terms. In light of the challenges raised by these debates, this is a book that appears to take into account the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students studying not only drama, but contemporary visual arts—especially those from a sociohistorical and/or cultural studies perspective. The authors' construction of a comprehensive genealogical survey is thus both warranted and appreciated, in that it leads to a detailed focus upon where boundary lines have previously been reified or variably contested and where contemporary gaps, in both understanding and performative opportunities, arise.

The book's approach is in two parts, which are clearly defined in the introduction. The first is titled "A Genealogy," spanning two-thirds of the book and providing a succinct thematic summary of significant areas of debate. It opens with a short yet necessary exposition on the debate surrounding drama as an academic subject, then proceeds to track "the successive emergence of Drama, Theatre and Performance as academic paradigms" (2), from Dryden's dramatic criticism to postmodernism and performance. This first part can be divided into two sections again, with the first four chapters providing a historic basis for the ones that follow. These first four chapters will also provide a useful supplement to standard introductions to subject, such as Mark Fortier's Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, also published by Routledge. [End Page 164]

The turning point in this section of the book comes at chapter 5, which is suggested by the authors as a "turn to our present situation" (2). This chapter however, which is given significant prominence in the introduction and deals with "Women, Theatre and the Ethics of the Academy," seems rather meagre at only ten pages. Chapter 6, concerning "Performance, Art and the Avant-Garde," is especially useful; while chapter 7, "The Rise of Performance Studies," is extremely stimulating. Concluding this section, chapter 8, "Performance Studies: Some Basic Concepts," provides an excellent introduction to undergraduates embarking on any medium in the creative arts and leads the reader from the basics of ritual and play into the more complex issues of the nature of performativity associated with the postmodern condition and present-day debates surrounding the cultural process. Most pertinent and what the first section does extremely well is provide an extensive, well-chosen bibliography that directs readers to the major "players" in the theoretical arena, while abstracting their major points in a concise way without unduly distorting them through oversimplification.

The second part, "Keywords," is comprised of thirteen entries in eighty pages ranging through "Action" and "Defamiliarization and Alienation" to "Semiotics and Phenomenology" and is perhaps the section that is of particular use to undergraduates. It pays homage to the cultural-materialist approach of Raymond Williams's Keywords and Culture and Society and sets out to offer some clearer definitions of the associated vocabulary surrounding the terms "drama," "theatre," and "performance" and the unfixed nature of their meanings in any given social, historical, or cultural debate.

However, as with all such genealogical studies, there are inevitable gaps within the authors' own perspective that become particularly noticeable when examining the areas they have elected to focus upon in greater depth, compared with those that elicit a more generalized treatment. For instance, the opening paragraph of the book takes the familiar Lakoffian Metaphors We Live By approach to the authors chosen terms...

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