Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love by Nicholas Ridout (review)

In this remarkably brave book, everything goes swimmingly, except perhaps for its final chapter. Until then, its arguments deploy a notably rigorous style of scholarship unafraid of combining multidisciplinary theorizing, detailed textual exegesis, micro- historiographies, dramaturgical deconstructions, dissections of contrasting critical perspectives, and more in a vibrant mix of intricate analyses. Hence, it performs some classy methodological innovations that impressively evaluate select transatlantic “amateur” performances between the 1890s and 2010s to produce a serviceable armory of political theatre dynamite. So Nicholas Ridout’s Passionate Amateurs is set both to delight and disturb a broad bevy of readers drawn in by its coolly disputative and delightfully rambunctious bent.

Chapter 1 announces a project that uses an updated Romantic anti-capitalism (11) as historic probe for an “artistic communism” (14) in Western theatre, which aims to test late-twentieth-century revisionist critiques of “community” by Jean-Luc Nancy and like-minded scholars. But its chief target is twenty-first-century performance as a “political act” that subverts turbo-capitalism by revamping distinctions “between work and non-work, poesis and praxis, the professional and the amateur” (17). In Ridout’s account, the amateur’s unpaid theatrical time becomes the foil to Marx’s “realm of necessity” because such nonprofessional “unconditional commitment” intimates far-reaching freedoms (29). So even though capital’s oppressive fiscal fug is now everywhere—but especially thickly in theatres—his investigation takes no unintended diversions in its search for truly heroic performance practitioners; its critical gyroscope is always set to point toward outstanding “passionate amateurs” (or honorary substitutes) who always swing for love, never money.

Ridout identifies three necessary theatrical conditions that generate the dynamic force of such selfless passion: “Work is somehow in question” as its codependence with leisure is “not taken for granted”; spectators are never presumed as merged into any form of community; and “people, things, and feelings from other times” must usually occupy the stage (11). Chapter 2 applies these lines of flight to Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play Uncle Vanya, detecting refrains of his dual career as medical doctor and theatrical writer (43–44). These become witty indices for the political and cultural stresses among Tsarist Russia’s professional classes and burgeoning proletariat masses, even as they conspired in the Soviet Union’s difficult birth. They afford Ridout a deep insertion of his refined critical scalpel and expose how fin de siècle theatrical labor could hover ambivalently to make alternate futures imaginatively graspable for audiences (53–54), thus, he proposes, opening up rich political perspectives on “a twentieth century that might have been otherwise” (56). This diagnosis aims to explode all binary notions of linear theatrical efficacy: what else, for example, besides the tragi-farce of robber oligarch capitalism might have replaced late-1980s actually existing communism at the globalized turn of the third millennium?

Following that profound revisionist promise, Passionate Amateurs’ broad thematic sweep becomes increasingly bold even as its main arguments gain in suppleness, subtlety, refinement, and authority. But to concisely review Ridout’s fleet-footed, trailbreaking, almost wild-ranging progress requires a scholarly sleight of hand, a reviewer’s oblique slip into mash-up metaphor. So please welcome chapters 3 through 5 as rounds in a free-for-all ideological wrestling match to decide the contours of earlytwenty- first-century theatre’s creatively radical political potential.

In round 3 corner left is Messianic Force, sharply up tight with Walter Benjamin’s 1928 vision of “secret” historical compacts for change between generations, itching to blast playtime and productivity apart to completely floor capitalist labor’s clock-in trickery (59). Corner right is Benjamin’s dreamy alter-ego Romantic Amateur, ripe for repurposing by Latvian theatre director Asja Lacis, professional artist turned untrained pedagogue (61). The pindown struggle forges revolutionary youth theatre as her late-1920s armature for generating a Soviet Union–wide Proletarian Children’s Theatre, making trouble for industrial communist empire-building by picturing its Taylorist schooling as a narcotic futurefix of...