The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre by Martin Banham (review)

unplanned obsolescence. As patterns of work change, so must the structure of play. Bauman points out that "the extensive festival calendar of traditional , agrarian Europe was ill-suited to the need of the emergent capitalist economic system for regular, disciplined labor and the rational accumulation of capital." Roger Abrahams extends this insight to contemporary America. In our secular, post-industrialist society, the time-out-of-time offered by the vacation, the weekend, and the "happy hour" have supplanted festival's function of ritual release from the demands of the workaday world. Festival, as a seasonal, communal holiday in an agricultural calendar, has broken up, and festive behavior has been more evenly spread out over a fifty-two week year in order to accommodate a forty-hour work week. Has festival become a cultural artifact, an endangered species of human experience only fit for anthropological investigation and commercialized nostalgia? Such "Ash Wednesday reflections,' as Goethe calls them in his travelogue on Roman Carnival, are left unconfirmed by Time Out of Time. Still, the book stands as a valuable, panoramic source of raw data, provocative theory, and inspiration on the unique form of communal play called festival. Scott T Cummings Of Related Interest The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre Martin Banham, ed. Cambridge University Press; 1104 pp.; $49.50 (cloth) Cambridge has brought out a compulsively readable theatre companion -meatier, better written, and more attuned to contemporary developments than its competition. It has been designed, writes the editor, Martin Banham, to "acknowledge the dynamic interaction of performance traditions from all cultures in present day theatre." This it does superbly. The Guide contains comprehensive essays on theatre in all parts of the world-from Albania to Zimbabwe-" any country," says Banham, "with a significant theatrical past or present." Banham's wise policy is to give generous space to topics rarely discussed in theatre encyclopedias. After his contributors cover Medieval theatre and mime, they loosen up to discuss male impersonation, pornography, fireworks, and performing animals. There are short pieces on the cafe concert , Cuban bufo, hunger artists, and turlupinades. Biographical entries include Durang and Duras; E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dustin Hoffman; LeComp242 te, Le Gallienne, and Roland Le Fartere, the thirteenth-century p6tomane. The best articles retain the writer's personality (Banham says he encouraged diverse styles) and make the Guide unabashedly opinionated. Contributors will tell you what is Byron's worst play; lament the split between academic and journalistic criticism; gripe about the museum-like Comedie Franqaise; and speculate on reasons behind Albee's decline. This sharpness, together with the book's considerable humor, keep the Guide lively and, most important, fun to browse through. No book of this kind can satisfy everyone, and it's customary for reviewers to complain about omissions. I wouldn't bother were the Guide not so extraordinary that the smallest lapses are glaring. Criticism, theory, direction, and design each receive thoughtful essays; why doesn't translation ? If Bread and Puppet merits individual attention, shouldn't The San Francisco Mime Troupe, too? I found D.H. Lawrence, but looked in vain for Henry James. And where is Gertrude Stein? The gains far outweigh the losses, though, and ensure the Guide's preeminent place in theatre reference. Where else but here can you learn how turn-of-the-century German strongman Eugen Sandow died? (After a career hoisting cart-horses and grand pianos, he unsuccessfully tried to lift a car out of a ditch.) Marc Robinson Jordan Tamagni is ManagingEditorof PAJPublications. Ann Daly is a contributing editor of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies. S&ott T Cummings is Associate Editorof Theater Three. 243 ...