World Theatre: The Basics by E. J. Westlake (review)

In some ways, E. J. Westlake’s World Theatre: The Basics begins and ends with Peter Brook. She starts the introduction of her accessible and useful textbook with an oft-cited quote from The Empty Space: “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (1). She includes in the last main chapter, on intercultural collaborations, a critique of Brook’s Mahabharata production, which she argues was well-received by Western audiences but viewed as disrespectful cultural appropriation by many Indian artists. Therein lies the difficulty of any world-drama textbook intended for Western theatre students: How does one resist Eurocentric and colonialist understandings of a myriad of cultures and traditions, while at the same time frame those theatrical conventions in a way that Western students will understand?

Westlake makes deliberate and thoughtful choices to resist the trap of presenting everything in terms of Western theatre, but this tension remains throughout. She states at the beginning that she has decided “to omit most discussion of Europe and the United States except when examining ideas that have influenced artists elsewhere in the world and to emphasize the work of artists who are not descendants of Europeans” (vi). She has instead chosen to organize the work into eight geographical regions—the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas (Canada and South America)—with a largely chronological discussion of theatre traditions within each chapter. She has also chosen to focus on what she refers to as “a recognizable set of theatre conventions,” including narrative, costumes, playing space, and audience.

In a work such as this, it is important to narrow the scope of materials, as Westlake does, or risk the terrible textbook custom of long lists of names, plays, and dates that are meaningless to students. At the same time, however, it is arguably true that the recognizable theatre tropes she chooses to limit by are recognizable because they are Western conventions of performance. This is another example of the tension between needing to curate the material and unintentionally privileging Western definitions of theatre by means of that curation. Likewise, the section on aesthetics in the introduction begins with a discussion of Aristotle. There is no doubt this is the aesthetic guideline that students are likely to be most familiar with, but again, it foregrounds Eurocentric standards of theatre. How to select and structure materials were surely incredibly difficult tasks, and despite these issues, the text works admirably to respect cultures and art forms in and of themselves.

The structure of the chapters is clear and beneficial. Each begins with a historical overview of the region that focuses largely on political and social changes that helped set the stage or promoted formal theatre’s emergence. Given the likelihood that students may be unfamiliar with these histories and cultures, this inclusion is vital to help set the stage for the cultural import of the theatrical traditions. These histories often fold in complex theoretical notions in an engaging and approachable fashion. The discussion of the Middle East begins, for example, with an analysis of the Abydos Passion Play. Westlake both introduces the play, long a staple of theatre history classes, and cites scholars like Alan Sikes, who provide an important critique of historical appropriation of the Abydos ritual. In this moment, she is both providing information and a historiographical critique of the ways in which Western theatre historians have claimed performances as “theatre,” when the claim is tenuous at best.

Westlake states in the introduction that “[b]ecause the territory of world theatre is enormous, we will explore a few key examples; examples that can be contrasted and compared, but from which no universal ideals should be drawn” (2). This is both a true and nuanced statement, but can also be a bit frustrating for a textbook reader. Each chapter contains so much valuable information that I found myself...