Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García and Martin Middeke (eds). 2021. Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan, xi + 288 pp., 1 illustr., € 58.84/£ 52.03/$ 63.32.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students considering concepts of affect and feeling in drama and theatrical performance. The specialists in this volume are thinking carefully about the ways in which philosophical concepts of energetic dynamism can be convincingly applied to theatrical performance. Affect might be the designated umbrella term but, crucially, theatre’s longstanding capacity for emotionalism is maintained. In the succinct and knowledgeable “Introduction: Thinking-Feeling Our Way”, the editors point out that there are diverse interpretations of affect within recent ‘affective turns’, and confirm the possibility of a multitude of ‘autonomous intensities’. While following Brian Massumi’s influential separation of affect and emotion, the editors, locate affect firmly within theory about the cultural meaning of “power structures and social narratives” – a position that offsets Ruth Leys’s main criticisms of affect theory (7). The book’s approach is especially valuable because it specifies that “affects, emotions and feelings” are evoked by texts and theatre production (8). I also advocate the use of multiple concepts to explain artistic purpose and performance reception and to accommodate contemporary forms, the historical development of the emotions (passion, sentiment etc.) and the distinctions made in other disciplines.

While expanded ideas of affect that encompass sensation and energetic flow might be ‘capacious’, and surmised rather than presumed, twenty-first-century theory does allow for sensory affect that engages thought and can be thought – even if only through reflection on physical sensation. Yet energetic flow across bodies is hardly the same process as a more intermittent arousal of subjective emotional feeling; and both seem different again to language about emotions. The possibility of both impersonal and personal processes happening in theatre and likelihood of spectator resistance and nonfeeling invites nuanced evaluations of affect – such as those offered in this excellent book. Contributors encourage the reader to reflect on the function of energetic effects as well as on emotional feeling in theatre – and therefore in society – in conjunction with a myriad of compelling perspectives on cultural significance. Conceptual approaches are orientated to an analysis of innovative twenty-first-century contemporary British drama that can be confronting and bemusing. Dramatic impact is thought and felt in relation to familiar theoretical sources: Ahmed and Butler to Latour; Berlant and Bennett to Ngai; Deleuze and Derrida to Nancy. The discipline-specific interpretation, however, is particularly welcome because it recognizes the complexity of theoretical claims for embodied affective and emotional effects within drama and theatrical performance. Examples are scrutinized and theatrical impact evaluated and fine-tuned so that, on the whole, the discussion substantiates the ways in which affect might become perceptible.

This book canvases how different types of affect and emotion are potentially experienced by audiences. The discussion allows for how affective flow cannot be assumed to mimic artistic intention together with the ways in which emotional feeling is described as well as expressed bodily in performance – reproduced by a performer. The theoretical alignment in this collection offers a way forward for scholarship even as the analysis grapples in places with whether bodily sensation and physiological feeling can be known, and how meaning can be attributed to affect. The analysis upholds the variability of affect and the need for clarification – even definition, given affect’s older meaning as emotional feeling.

In general, the book overcomes the disciplinary problem of how theoretical pronouncements of energetic movement in performance can so often seem amorphous, even imagined rather than shareable and verifiable. Some of the key points in chapters are briefly outlined here to convey the scope of the theoretical and theatrical interpretations. Mireia Aragay’s insightful interrogation of politicized empathy argues for an oscillation of thinking and feeling in response to theatre’s affective framing and specifically, to debbie tucker green’s hang. She acknowledges release but also repulsion, avoidance and non-catharsis as she contests general claims about empathy that contain misguided assumptions of universality and willing subjects, which override identity diversity and personal suffering. In his thoughtful exploration of love and its associated feelings, Korbinian Stöckl draws on sociologist Margaret Wetherell’s explanation of affect to explore how affect in performance might converge with a context through perception and intention even though affect might initially happen autonomously. Stöckl points out that this can also align with how the biochemistry of emotional feeling precedes the self’s cognition of it – as might happen with emotional feeling in theatrical performance – and his analysis looks to works by Lucy Prebble and debbie tucker green. Importantly, Lynette Goddard discerns an emphasis on strong emotional feelings such as anger and rage in the discourse about race relations that informs her exploration of the interactions between the characters in Idris Goodwin’s #Matter and Rachel De-LaHay’s My White Best Friend. In addition, Goddard considers the emotional impact of characters on audiences with Mojisola Adebayo’s The Interrogation of Sandra Bland. The larger point arising from Goddard’s analysis is that theatrical analysis needs to pay more attention to the contribution of public displays of emotional feeling as political resistance including for the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a similar vein, Marissia Fragkou astutely explores the politics of ‘mischief’ in feminist theatre that sets out to affectively disturb and emotionally disrupt. Fragkou deploys affect to encompass both the physiological and social impact of feminist theatre in which artistic intention ranges from the “killjoy” (127) tactics of Alice Birch’s Revolt! She Said. Revolt Again to the clever ‘tongue-in-cheek’ humour of Sh!t Theatre’s Letters to Windsor House. Cognitive meaning is illuminated by emotional tone while an affective reaction to mischief can be credibly accepted. Philip Watkinson contends that it is necessary to consider how affects are induced through abstraction and abstract form, which can generate anxiety as much as reflect it. This understanding that performance form will selectively elicit affective and emotional effects remains paramount. Martin Middeke usefully considers whether the transversality of affect corresponds with processes of transpersonal dynamism in theatre, which is sought by playwrights and associated with what he terms theatrical “architexture”. Middeke’s analysis encompasses the thwarted ambitions of youthful characters seeking work, love and a purposeful life in the dystopian settings of Penelope Skinner’s Eigengrau and Mike Bartlett’s Game.

It was heartening to find analysis questioning the way theatre actually complicates empathy and hope, as well as querying the value of reinforcing fear and despair – concerns that I have had. Clare Wallace probes how dramatic form might shape affect and emotion in several plays including Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information and James Fritz’s Parliament Square. Wallace suggests that affect, feeling and emotion are entangled within circuits that function in ways that can be either commodified or, alternatively, connected with (Spinoza-inspired) ethical action. She notes that even though the assemblage of, for example, Churchill’s script, might vary, the lack of a dominant vantage point remains significant, and she posits that the immediacy of sensation might remain hopeful whereas the depiction of extreme political acts such as self-immolation conveys political impasse. In exploring the affect of shock, Liz Tomlin illuminates the way bodily affect differs from emotional feeling and therefore from catharsis in postdramatic work in general, and specifically in Anthony Neilson’s drama. Tomlin suggests that the shock effect of contemporary work is more sustained than Hans-Thies Lehmann finds with tragedy. In a masterful discussion, Cristina Delgado-García sets out to emphasize the centrality of affect and emotional feeling within political theatre that grapples with democratic processes and their contradictory ambiguities. Delgado-García acknowledges a longstanding resistance to analyzing emotional feeling because of emotive manipulation within popularism as well as the emotional and affective slipperiness of audience reception, and draws on Mouffe to reiterate that there needs to be attention paid to emotional feeling as a key political concept. Delgado-García elaborates on how the textual significance of emotion and affect in David Grieg’s reworking of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women was undercut in production. I wish for more analysis about how production can revise the emotional politics of a play.

Julia Boll considers affects arising from breathing and emotional ideals of happiness to be metaphoric of Barad’s “quantum entanglement” (218) of human lives in her critique of Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath, a drama featuring desperate workers and sudden environmental collapse. The commodification of felt experience may offset but not negate the wish for happiness – itself always a promise. In exploring fear-inducing ‘objects’ associated with ends, that is, the end of the world and the end of empathy in theatre, Mark Robson finds that layers of affect rest on structures of identification to convey political significance. In emphasizing Jean-Luc Nancy’s contention that the condition of affect is relational, Robson adds that affect becomes like contagion and potentially conveyed in the dramatization of violence and post-catastrophe events. Clara Escoda explores how the sticky and negative qualities of affect and aspects of the emotions are illuminated by Kae Tempest’s Wasted about young characters unable to change their lives. While the porous and precarious qualities of the play reflect the characters’ lives, Escoda also finds the converse possibility that affective exchange might encourage mutual care. Political theatre must do more than reflect impasse and despair.

Although there are prominent performance studies scholars mentioned in this book, there was less direct engagement with the disciplinary work that has been illuminating ‘affect’ to date than I anticipated. The volume does reiterate that dramatists and theatre artists remain preoccupied with the evocation of emotional feeling regardless. It demonstrates how to credibly interpret intangible dynamism in performance, and in a specific theatrical context, in order to extract philosophical and political significance. The reading of this book unfolded as a process of discovery that was affirming and fascinating because explanations of affect did not subsume the significance of emotional expression.

I felt completely on the page with this book’s explanations of affect on the stage. Analysis needs to encompass how drama and theatrical performance can evoke different types of affect, visceral sensation and emotional feeling while continuing to present imaginative language for the emotions. I greatly enjoyed reading this book.