There are few dependable books in English on political theatre in India. Professor Bhatia's collection of essays, therefore, fills a long-felt need. She introduces the subject contextually, followed by four chapters chronologically examining key areas (British censorship of nationalistic drama, Indianizations of Shakespeare as an anticolonial statement, the Indian People's Theatre Association as a mass phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century, and Utpal Dutt's reinterpretation of Raj history in his play The Great Rebellion 1857), and concludes with a short epilogue on contemporary activist theatre by women. Most valuably for theatre historians, she places in the public domain many primary sources previously untapped in English, and unearths much secondary material that has escaped academic attention. Not least of all, she writes articulately and readably.

An unruly audience, comprising mostly working-class whites, attended a performance of William Shakespeare's Othello by the African Theatre on 10 August 1822. Instead of enjoying a thoughtful interpretation of Shakespeare, the crowd attacked the performers, stripping them of their clothing and dignity. The causes of riots included a growing presence of free blacks in public spaces, political debates surrounding franchise rights of propertied blacks, and the increasing social interactions between black and poor European Americans. The production of Othello was evidence of the African American contribution to evolving notions of national identities, while the Anglo-American's collective mob thinking reflected a consciousness that would become institutionalized by century's end. The riot marked another incident in the slow, painful demise of a theatre company, but the birth of theatre by African Americans.

One of the greatest challenges to teaching world theatre history in the United States is that the vast majority of survey history books spend two dozen chapters on the theatre of the West, giving the theatres of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East a single chapter each at best. In addition, there have to date been no comprehensive histories of African theatre covering the entire continent, Africa north of the Sahara being linked for cultural reasons with the Middle East instead of geographically with the rest of the continent. A History of Theatre in Africa, edited by the pioneer of African-theatre scholarship, Martin Banham, is an excellent, if uneven, redressing of those imbalances.

Vaudeville makes a sprawling subject. Under the social and commercial shocks that swirled around it, vaudeville could scarcely afford to be more innocent than it needed to be. In Blue Vaudeville, Andrew Erdman follows a single, generally naughty-but-nice strand within the huge volume of vaudeville performance.

Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata are recognized as the most influential creators of the contemporary Japanese dance form known today as butoh. Since its wild and avant-garde beginnings in the late 1950s, butoh has evolved into an established and appreciated art form throughout the world. Despite its popularity and strong influences on the international modern dance world, butoh only recently became an accepted subject for academic research in Japan as well as in the West. With the new opening of butoh research centers and archives—such as the Ohno Dance Studio Archives at BANK ART 1929 in Yokohama, the Kazuo Ohno Archives at Bologna University in Italy, and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archives at Keio University in Tokyo—serious scholarly attention has been given to the art of butoh's founders. However, the lack of firsthand sources by butoh artists reflecting their own work still poses great limitations for a deep understanding of the art form. Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within is not only the first full-length book in English about the master's life and work, but also offers a rare inside view of butoh.

The Federal Theatre Project . . . was a unique and influential experiment in American theatre; not just for its outspoken politics, but because it reimagined the very way that theatre was produced in the United States. For the first time in the history of the country theatre was subsidized by the federal government, a practice with widespread precedents in Europe and Asia, but one that was totally out of step with free enterprise business practice and a culture which had banned plays in its Second Continental Congress. (1)

So opens Barry Witham's case study of the Seattle Federal Theatre Project from 1935 to 1939.

Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.

Censorship is an intriguing lens through which to view theatre in the United States because it allows us to glimpse—at moments—how theatre participates in the life of a society in truly meaningful ways. These moments appeal to John Houchin, as I suspect they do to many of us who yearn to find significance in live performance and who toil in the backwater of vapid and violent film and television. Censorship, whether it be of Sapho or Angels in America, enrages and harms, but it also crystallizes the debate between those who believe the arts should support the normative culture and those who believe the theatre's obligation is to challenge authority.

Pity the scholar asked to review a biography of Kenneth Tynan; one finds oneself frantically searching one's pockets for aphorisms, witticisms, or—at the very least—a shocking obscenity or two. After all, Tynan was the critic who so memorably dismissed a popular musical as “a world of woozy song”; met the question, “Who are the new English playwrights?” with the sarcastic rejoinder, “Who were the old ones?”; and who cried out for new playwrights to invade the British theatre because he would “rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.” Then, of course, there is the famous first use of the word “fuck” on television and the staging of Oh, Calcutta! and the magnificent New Yorker profiles, not to mention the nearly singlehanded reshaping of British drama through the powerful combination of exhortation and satire. All in all, it is a lot for a reviewer to live up to, and while I have neither Tynan's wit nor ability to provoke, I do find myself able to produce one single Tynanesque observation about Dominick Shellard's Kenneth Tynan: A Life. This is that the book has been shockingly missubtitled.

Scholars and enthusiasts of the work of Edward Albee will be pleased to see this new volume of essays edited by Bruce J. Mann, the first critical collection of essays devoted to the playwright in more than fifteen years. Although it would be hard to judge from the past decade, in which Albee has undergone a renaissance of sorts with several new plays and several major revivals on Broadway (starting in 1994 with Three Tall Women, which earned him his third Pulitzer Prize, and ending most recently with The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia, which won the Tony for best new play in 2002), Albee had previously lapsed in critical and scholarly favor. This volume aims to capitalize on the recent interest in Albee's work by providing a current survey that pays specific attention to his newer plays, as well as his more obscure ones, and also includes new essays on his three classics: The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance. The volume concludes with an interview with the playwright, conducted by Mann in April 1999.

Both Philip Freund's The Birth of Theatre and Laurie O'Higgins's Women and Humor in Classical Greece deal with Ancient Greek drama. Freund, a theatre historian, attempts a fairly comprehensive survey of both Greek and Roman drama as well as its influence on postclassical theatre, with particular emphasis on the past century. O'Higgins, a classicist, offers what at first glance appears a far narrower exploration that might only be of interest to other classicists. Of the two writers, it is O'Higgins who crafts a readable study that resonates well beyond its ostensibly narrow subject, whereas Freund's book, geared toward a more general readership, is hampered by serious problems of presentation and organization that compromise his more ambitious work's usefulness.

In two compelling new books, each analyzing a sensational female star whose career peaked in the late nineteenth century, the multifaceted celebrity image becomes the historical prism refracting the social, political, and cultural dynamics of various performance contexts. Neither study purports to chronicle the star's entire life and document truths about “who she really was.” Rather, each focuses on a relatively brief, temporally circumscribed period of the performer's career and examines her complex public personae and their meanings to her American audiences. Ultimately, more is revealed about the values of those who consumed and exploited the star than about the star herself. The two celebrities at issue here, Adah Isaacs Menken and Sarah Bernhardt, separated in time by a generation, compare in intriguing ways, both as historical agents and as subjects of historiographical analysis.

In this brief but concentrated text, Rush Rehm attempts to go back to the “radical nature of Greek tragedy” (9), by which he means that he wants to go back to the roots, foundations, and sources of this ancient genre. Rehm carries out his plan in an unusual yet personal way: Dispersed throughout his study of the genre are his personal observations on such matters as the involvement of the United States government in Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Granada, Panama, East Timor, Israel, and Cuba. The events of 9/11 are also central to the later chapters. These political statements and forays aside, the author makes clear in his “Introduction: Timely Thoughts” that the “stage per se—understood as a place for artistic enactments like Greek tragedy—has lost much of its power and significance” (13). Rehm has an equally negative disposition to performance study, performance theory, and a modern stage that has departed from the challenges posed by the “original form of ancient tragedy” (17). Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World is a stimulating read and worthy of note.

Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage represents the distillation of decades of work by Carol Jones Carlisle on this eminent, but now largely forgotten, Victorian actress. The book is an impressive achievement, and one that will be of great service to the growing number of academics and students now working within the increasingly well-resourced field of Victorian theatre. As interest in the range of Victorian theatres develops, however, it is helpful to be reminded of the narratives that go to produce the spectacle of the legitimate and patent theatres. As Faucit's own family history demonstrates, that narrative was often far from legitimate itself, though it could, and in her case did, encompass a social elevation to the highest levels of English society.

I have no hesitation in saying how much I admire Jacky Bratton's New Readings in Theatre History. I consider it an essential guide to an understanding of modern theatre historiography, and it offers a cluster of apposite alternative approaches to historical research. That this book throws light into some areas of the early Victorian stage that are rarely investigated and even less frequently analyzed is a further gift. Bratton has a knack for identifying those marginalized, by gender or by theatrical task, from central discourses and in restoring to these now-distant sources a reclaimed significance. She hears the small voices and those whose contributions to the British stage were rarely, if ever, known to audiences in the capital or major centers. She has given us a superb study, vital to the practicing historian.

In their well-written and extensively researched book Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage, B. J. and Mary Sokol explore the connections between the legal world of Shakespeare's England and the ways he dramatizes legal situations related to marriage. The result is a thorough and interesting contribution to the growing field of “law and literature” studies. The book moves chronologically through the legal issues connected to the stages of marriage, from arranged and consensual matches to the effect of death on marriage. Each chapter has a similar structure: first, an explanation of the legal conditions for the particular topic of marriage, followed by a discussion of how those issues are dramatized in Shakespeare's plays.

Frederick Kiefer's Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters is a deceptively modest study, focusing on staged abstract representations and deities such as Spring, Time, Juno, and Ceres: “walking, talking personifications” (13). Kiefer presents case studies of individual personifications in particular plays, always speculating on their appearance in original stagings, and, most important, stressing their significance for contemporary and subsequent readings of the action. In the process, he compellingly argues for the significance of spectacle in Shakespeare's theatre. Though the length of the book might seem daunting, 138 pages are composed solely of impeccable notes, a meaty bibliography, and a useful index. The well-illustrated 220 pages of actual text are clear, jargon-free, learned, and convincing.

Paul Maloney's study of Victorian and Edwardian Glasgow's entertainment is part of the series Studies in Popular Culture, under the general editorship of Jeffrey Richards, and it benefits from the protocols of its social-history methodology. His approach to the halls has a welcome freedom from the constraints that dog theatre scholars whose disciplines have equipped them with subliminally insistent literary and musical criteria. Maloney is able to acknowledge the stereotypical, misogynistic, jingoist materials used by music-hall performers but still understand them as functional expressions of working-class attitudes that are counterhegemonic. In his argument, manner and style are read as signifiers before words, articulated positions, and character types. He asserts of Scottish music hall that “[a]s a popular entertainment format it did not articulate its social agenda but embodied it in its functioning and culture” (50). This is an important insight, one that not only circumvents the impasse presented to textual analysis by the bland and unrevealing songs and other materials that survive on the page, but also chimes with the latest research in the history of performance, which is beginning to emphasize the historicism of the embodied. We move toward the possibility of historical and theatrical methodologies jumping together, independently of literary judgments, and producing previously unavailable nuance and fresh insight.

The Theatre of the Book—first published in a cloth edition in 2000—is a groundbreaking work. It is an elegantly written and erudite book, with 129 pages of endnotes, a works-cited list of 42 pages, and 60 illustrations. As Peters states in the introduction,

Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr are two of Ireland's leading contemporary playwrights, and these books are the first full-length edited collections to be dedicated exclusively to their work. While both have been the subject of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and two monographs have previously been published on McGuinness, the volume edited by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan marks the first full-length book on Carr. Each book offers new essays as well as those previously published elsewhere. While both volumes treat a wide variety of the playwrights' oeuvres, and both approach the material from several theoretical perspectives, the book on Carr is more accurately named in that it focuses on theatrical productions and reception of Carr's work alongside analyses of her dramatic texts.