World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practices ed. by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (review)

This volume arose out of the Political Performances Working Group of IFTR, offering fourteen essays concerning political performances in Finland, the United Kingdom, Malta, Turkey, Belarus, Poland, Estonia, South Africa, India, and China. It is the last two that would be of interest to readers of this journal, although the entire volume is interesting and readable. At heart, by "political theatre" the editors here refer to theatre in response to political oppression and social injustice. The volume is divided into two sections. The first considers "the relationship between performance and activism" and the second concerns "current debates in and around political theatre" (p. 4).

In part one the Asianist will find two essays of particular interest. The first, Pujya Ghosh's "From Revolution to Dissent: A Case Study of the Changing Role of Theatre and Activism in Bengal," offers an historical analysis of playwrights Utpal Dutt and Debesh Chattopadhyay and the Naxalbari movement in the 1960s in Bengal. Ghosh posits that both artists emerged in the sixties as performers, activists, and intellectuals, using theatre to challenge the political and social status quo. They created a Bengali theatre that was "a component of civil society, a space in which political battles and future dreams would be reflected" (p. 40). However, as the seventies drew on, progressive politics began to lose their cultural heft. Ghosh then asks, "to what extent can an intellectual/artist with a left political ideology perform his/her 'political' role under the growing pervasiveness of the capitalist order?" (p. 41). The answer, of course, is "it's complicated," but she concludes that "the parameters of theatre and activism have indeed shifted from revolution to dissent," a paradigm that reflects much theatre in the world since the sixties (p. 51). Revolution seems no longer possible and merely pointing out a different path than the status quo is now the aim of political theatre, which ultimately requires us to rethink what the term "left" means in a political sense. As historical analysis, the essay is interesting and informative, as a critique of the history of political performance in Bengal; it offers a means by which to understand the ultimate lack of efficacy in theatre as a force for social change on the macro level.

A second essay from the first section, Julia Boll's "Making the Audience Cry: Witnessing Violence and the Ethics of Compelled Empathy" offers a fascinating exploration of two separate plays that each attempt to make an audience cry in response to atrocity. Boll compares the Belarus Free Theatre's 2012 production of Trash Cuisine (a play about state-sponsored violence and genocide) with Yael Farber's 2013 Nirbhaya, a play devised in response to the gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi. The latter piece was devised and workshopped in India under the direction of Farber, a South African playwright best known for her post-apartheid works that engage and deconstruct that nation's historic racial and gender traumas and explore the politics of witnessing and restorative justice. The play was subsequently toured to Edinburgh, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. An example of verbatim theatre, using the words and stories of witnesses, the play attempts to evoke empathy, horror, and ultimately tears from the audience. Boll's essay effectively explores the ethics of doing so, and Farber's role as an outsider engaging with an Indian atrocity; Boll then compares it with Free Theatre's show in one of the strongest essays in the volume about the role and purpose of the artist in dealing with political violence, making it as personal as possible, especially for those who have not suffered from it.

Lastly, one essay in the second section engages Chinese political theatre. Wei Zheyu's "The Touring Grass Stage: Staging the Site-Specific Dilemma of Globalization...