The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights ed. by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (review)

Reviews 50 3 Argentina, 1967), and Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden [La muerte y la doncel/a, U.S';Chile, 1990], all three works frequently studied as pan of the Southern Cone's canon of "repression plays." In the final and critically central chapter, Gladhart turns her attention to (non-)perfonnance itself as coercion and - especially relevant to the dilemma regarding the staging of torture - as a means of approaching that which is unrepresentable. Four plays in which perfonnance is "both demanded and denied" (192-93) are briefly examined: Bennan's Esta no es una obra de teatro ("This Is Not a Play," Mexico, 1975); Gambaro's El despojamiento ("The Striptease," Argentina, 1974); Jose Ignacio Cabrujas's Acto cultural ("Cultural Ceremony," Venezuela, 1976); and Isaac Chocr6n's La revolucion ("The Revolution," Venezuela 1971). The chapter ends with a discussion of Gambaro's Informacion para extranjeros ("Infonnation for Foreigners," Argentina, 1973), a site-specific yet still unstaged work that blurs any distinction between staged perfonnance and experienced reality. Plays such as Informacion take audience- perfonner complicity to the extreme and bring Gladhart's study full circle, back to its introductory comments regarding the coercive demands that performance places on perfonner and spectator alike. The ambiguous "blue leper" of the book's title the schoolgirl actress in the blue dress who shouted "leprosa" during the author's first Latin American theatregoing experience. and who was neither blue nor necessarily leprous yet certainly more than both in that spectator's remembered experience - floats throughout Gladhart's text to remind the reader of the "play of unassimilated excess" (12) wherein "the space of perfonnance absorbs the non-dramatic or non-theatrical reality and obliterates or erases it," resulting in perfonnances that are "potentially dangerous for both perfonner and spectator" (13). Gladhan has produced a thorough, well-reasoned, and well-written study that will be of interest to the general theatre reader as well as the Latin American specialist. The Leper ill Blue raises questions about the coercive force of perfonnance that resonate with all who study theatre and its myriad negotiations. ELAtNE ASTON and JANELLE REINELT, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xx + 276, illustrated. $54·95 (Hb); $19.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Jen Harvie, University ofSurrey Roehampton The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights is an excellent companion. Most importantly, it achieves factual and intellectual coverage without enforcing intellectual and creative containment. Its coverage REVIEWS - of playwrights and of historical, cultural, and political contexts in particular - makes it useful to a readership ranging from theatregoers to students and scholars. By not circumscribing the ideological challenges of its contents, it invites those readers to engage creatively and critically with its subjects. The Companion provides excellent coverage across the twentieth century in its analysis of cultural and institutional contexts ofmodem British playwriting, as well as of identities that structure the experiences - of nation, "race," class, motherhood, and sexuality in particular - of·British women playwrights and their many audiences. It is appropriately self-reflexive about its terms especially "British" and "playwrights" - and is organized in a way which both fulfils and problematizes the expectations its title raises. Following a brief chronology juxtaposing theatrical and broader sociopolitical events and an introductory chapter by Aston and Reinelt entitled "A Century in View," Part One, "Retrospectives," provides the Companion's main "history" chapters. Keenly self-reflexive, these chapters are, more accurately, historiographical rather than historical; they are also refreshingly different in their subjects. Given that a great deal has already been published on suffrage theatre (21), Maggie B. Gale's and Susan Bennett's excellent chapters concentrate on the otherwise neglected periods of the 1920S-1930S and the t950S respectively. Both persuasively argue, after Alison Light in her 1991work Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, that "feminist work must deal with the conservative as well as the radical imagination" (qtd. in Gale 23) and examine in fine detail some of the most popular - and realistplays by women from these periods. The final chapter in this section, by Michelene Wandor, provides a useful overview of the t970s. Part Two, "National Tensions and Intersections," engages with...