Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion (review)

Abstract

What is theatre? Where is Europe? When is contemporary? This engaging and very welcome volume (consisting of a foreword and introduction, followed by fourteen chapters) provides the reader with a series of original and provocative responses to these central questions and much more besides. Performing its status as critical companion, the volume does not purport to offer a canon-forming overview but rather to suggest specific means of negotiating the complex relationships between the tricky triumvirate of terms in the title within its broader aim of presenting new ways of writing and thinking about theatre.

This open approach is reflected further in the impressive breadth of material discussed, which includes mummers, theatrical borders, commemoration of the Holocaust, the agency of the performing body, the post-operatic theatre performed by and for children, and dance theatre. The volume's welcome lack of national categorizations, its resistance to any declaration of paradigmatic approaches, and its sensitive engagement with the relative academic, discursive, and sociopolitical positions and experiences of performance and spectatorship permit the emergence of coherent threads which are woven across the main parameters of the title.

The collection acknowledges the expansive parameters of theatre. Indeed, music theatre and dance theatre are not circumscribed in the book as token presences. Nicholas Till's lucid charting of the rejections, exorcisms, and returns of the operatic and post-operatic in the music theatres of Germany and Italy shares with Adrian Heathfield's exploration of the remoulding of relationships between the body, movement, and the social in contemporary dance theatre and dance performance demonstrate the interdisciplinary tensions and freedoms at play in the volume. Sophie Nield's call for a strategic broadening of theatre studies to enable the employment of a theatrical frame of reference to examine the sociopolitical (a move that would mirror the currency of performance as a term) maps a reading of national borders (as political realities not tropes) as inherently theatrical in their constructions of identity, particularly that of the refugee.

The book's detailed engagement with theatre made both by and for children is particularly timely. Andrew Quick's analysis of Walter Benjamin's "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theatre" finds compelling evidence, in Victoria Theatre's Ubung, of the child's gesture as a secret sign that resists continuities in order to perform a liberating disordering of conventional economies of representation. Such a reading is complemented by Bridget Escolme's detailed contextualization of the constructions of child spectators projected by a range of theatrical adaptations of folk and fairy tales.

The ambiguous position of the spectator as both complicit in make believe and witness to potential truths is explored further in two essays. Kear's sensitive analysis of the "theatrical literalisation of seduction"(118), in the disturbing paedophilic voyeurism constructed by Alain Platel's Bernadetje and the ethics of performance he ultimately identifies at work there, provides a provocative companion to Heike Roms's detailed discussion of Acco Theater Center's deconstruction of the politics of Holocaust commemoration and performance responses to the problematics of witness by proxy, transference, and fetishization. This anxious witness reappears as Sarah Gorman's frank engagement with her own spectatorial position reveals it to be reliant upon Western European ideology and triggers a critique of the dangers of a European identity that masks cultural difference.

The haunting of theatre by discourses and practices of mimesis is a recurring concern in the volume. Such considerations are at play in Nicholas Ridout's convincing argument that the work of the Socì etas Rafaello Sanzio (notably appearing in three different contributions here), the epitome of a European avant-garde, maintains a scholarly concern for representation at the very heart of the project. Ridout makes the illuminating suggestion that "theatre as trace of pre-rational magic . . . still has the power to offer a critique of post-magical rationality"(181). Joe Kelleher traces the historical play between different rhetorics...