A Short History of Western Performance Space by David Wiles (review)

Reviews 159 mistress), she was thought of as a French actress, her surname being spelt as the Frenchified "Casares." As well as performing leading roles in Camus' plays, she played Nathalie in Marcel Came's famous 1945 film, Les Enfants du paradis, as well as major parts in plays by Genet and Koltils. However, Delgado argues that Casares always retained her Spanishness, and she performed in plays by the great Spanish dramatists of the pre- and post-Civil War period, Valle-lnclan, Garda Lorca, and Alberti. The cover of "Other" Spanish Theatres shows a tortured Casares performing in her fellow Galician Valle-lnclan's Comedias barbaras. This is one of many superb illustrations that complement the written text and give a real feel for what these other Spanish theatres actually looked like. "Other" Spanish Theatres is a must for specialists in the modem Spanish stage. However, its range - it deals with cinema and opera as well as cultural and sexual politicsand its depth make it a fascinating read for all students of modem Hispanic culture. There is much here, too, for readers whose interest in theatre and performance stretches beyond the borders of Spain. Delgado convincingly proves the case for moving her subjects to centre stage, from which they might displace some of what the author views as overrated Spanish dramatists. T he monograph will be the standard book on the subject for some years, and it will also open up to future researchers rich and diverse fields that are ripe for further exploration. DAVID WILES. A Short History of Western Pelformance Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. PP.ix-36 I , illustrated. $60 (Hb); $24.00 (Pb). Reviewed by Gay McAuley. University ofSydney David Wiles states at the outset that his history of western performance space grew out of his "frustration with commodity theatre" (I); in particular, with the notion exemplified in this kind of cultural practice that play and space are separate entities and that a given show remains an ontological constant, regardless of when and where it is performed. He quotes Mike Pearson's 199B manifesto about making "performances that fold together place, performance and public" as an indication of the kind of theatre that does not frustrate or send him to sleep, and he stakes a bold claim for his history (3). In keeping with his view that "the best way to understand the present is to look backwards ," he offers his analyses of historical performance practices as a means of assisting theatre artists to escape from their current entrapment in "spatial machines that grind out predetermined theatrical meanings" (4). Whether or not theatre artists are indeed going to find in this book the inspiration to seek the new ways of working invoked by Wiles, theatre scholars 160 REVIEWS will find it a feast. Meticulously researched, covering a broad sweep of performance history from classical Greece to modernist western Europe, lavishly illustrated with reproductions, original line drawings, maps, and diagrams, it presents descriptions and analyses of a wide range of performance practices. Some of these practices are drawn from the familiar terrain of traditional theatre history; others are rarely included in such work. It needs to be said, however , that the book will probably be enjoyed most by those whose training has included the kind of historical survey courses that Wiles claims have now fallen out of fashion in British universities, leaving students unsure of time lines and chronologies. Following the path opened by post-modem historiography , Wiles accepts that history is a construct, a narrative created from the perspective of the present in order to achieve certain goals. His "short history" is avowedly fragmentary, partial in both senses of the word, and it ostensibly eschews a grand narrative, although the structural similarities among his seven micro-narratives suggest that a repressed grand narrative can all too easily return to haunt the unwary postmodemisl. In his thought-provoking introduction, Wiles unpacks issues surrounding the temns of his title: "space," "history," and "perfomnance" (the fourth temn "western" does not rate much of a mention). He provides an illuminating account of historical conceptualisations of space from the classical, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, and modernist periods, drawing on Foucault and...