Alan Read. The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss. London: Routledge, 2020, viii + 342 pp., £120.00 (hardback), £34.99 (paperback), £29.74 (ebook).

Two years into the pandemic, a book about loss appears as topical as it gets. Published in April 2020, the genesis of Alan Read’s The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss began much earlier, of course, and so COVID-19 only features as a cross-reference in the book’s index. However, Read’s deliberations on how the “capitalocene” (2) produces ever more precarious forms of existence reverberate with renewed urgency in the present moment and will no doubt continue to do so in a post-pandemic world. As the author intimates by way of introduction, the notion of performance per se is predicated on “the shaky foundations of loss,” from Aristotle’s lost theory of comedy to debates about “the live and the mediatised, that which loses itself at odds with that which endures” (2). More recently, such debates have gained currency with regard to live-streamed or digital performances, which have often been termed second-rate experiences, a poor substitute of the “real thing.” But even though its title may suggest otherwise, the primary focus of Read’s study is not on theatre or drama in a narrower sense. Instead, The Dark Theatre forms a companion piece to, or critical reappraisal of, his earlier monograph Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993). It certainly helps to be familiar with Read’s prior work, as The Dark Theatre revises various earlier assumptions about the interventionist potential of performance.

As his grim title hints, many things, Read feels, have taken a turn for the worse in the meantime. The Dark Theatre is a nod to his time at the helm of Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, a neighbourhood theatre originally based in the South East London Docklands, during the 1980 s. The theatre permanently closed in 1991 in the wake of the area’s major redevelopment, and this is also where Read’s argument begins. His book calls out the harm done by the successive encroachment of gentrification, positioning itself as “an open-ended repair book of ‘rends’ in the cultural fabric that call for work to be done in resistance to the confident prognoses to the closed book of capital that announces no such work is needed or necessary” (3). In the process, Read offers up a politics of performance that takes seriously the agencies of communities and functions as a “loss adjustor” (1), identifying and, eventually, also working to redress social inequities.

The Dark Theatre is subdivided into two parts. Part one, “The Loss Adjustor: Collateral Damage in the Capitalocene,” develops the local history of Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, which eerily foreshadowed the following decades of systemic privatisation and attendant erosion of communities. Always thinking through the intimate intertwinement of performance and place, Read’s study thus disavows Peter Brooke’s “purist” (and colonialist) “fantasy” of theatre as “Empty Space” (27). Chapter one, “The Dark Theatre: Bankruptcy & the Logics of Expulsion,” lays the theoretical groundwork for the following pages, and Read here uses the case of his own “lost” theatre to articulate “a general theory of expulsion, a logics of loss” (19). Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception” – another concept that has been reviewed during the pandemic – he explores how “displacement and decampment” brought about by large-scale gentrification “is precisely one everyday example of what became unexceptional politics” (23). In chapter two, “The Eruption of the Audience & the Dictatorship of the Performatariat,” Read revises his earlier optimistic projection of how “lay theatre” might lay the foundation for a larger “eruption of the audience” and, with it, a more democratic concept of performance (62). What has emerged instead, he argues, is a “dictatorship of the performatariat” (62). Read traces this phenomenon through a number of reality television shows, beginning with the 1974 The Family but also addressing more recent exemplars such as Strictly Come Dancing (2004), Come Dine with Me (2005), and other forms of “low-brow” entertainment. In all of these formats, he writes, “an apparent ‘freedom’ for cultural expression is exposed as merely an interlude” and, in fact, marks “the precondition for further subjugation” to the public eye (62).

Chapter three, “All the Home’s a Stage: Social Reproduction & Everyday Life,” concerns the domestic as a site of performance, showing how the boundaries between the two are increasingly porous. Read offers a detailed discussion of the 2004 performance project Die Familie Schneider, in which ticket holders were afforded the uncomfortably voyeuristic thrill of “observing” the eponymous family in their domestic surroundings in a Whitechapel residential area. In addition, the chapter examines a court case against Tate Modern, where dismayed residents – many of them celebrities – sued the museum because visitors on its viewing platform routinely took pictures of their surrounding apartments. In this case, Read writes, the fraught relationship between the domestic and performance transformed into “a crime scene” (147), effectively depending on the law to distinguish one from the other. Ironically, but as a testament to the weight of Read’s argument, this blurring of the two spheres was caused by a standoff between two extremely affluent parties (Tate Modern and the neighbouring residents) and, as such, marks a direct consequence of gentrification. What shows from this chapter alone is Read’s flexible definition of “performance,” which elsewhere draws on theatre plays, opera, and film, but also video installations, in-situ political protests, or the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, to name but a few examples. Whilst more often than not this broad lens yields a number of enlightening and also surprising insights – such as in the case of the Tate Modern’s viewing platform – occasionally, the argument’s immediate relevance for the context of theatre becomes fuzzy.

Via a brief interlude entitled “Dreadful Trade: The Vertigo of Attractions,” Read leads into part two, “Living Currency: Scenes from the Last Human Venue.” This second part of The Dark Theatre assesses “the affective charge” of various productions which Read, for different reasons, terms “precarious performance” (163). Beginning with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank and the following global financial crisis, he proposes “the more elusive but perhaps sustainable sense of a ‘living currency’” that “recounts and resists from what has become dead-serious show-business of our precarious lives” (163). Chapter four, “Irreparable State: Compensations of Performance,” is the most explicitly theatre-focused part, as Read traces the notion of “living currency” through close readings of various productions by the Italian director Romeo Castellucci. Chapter five, “Arrested Life: Ecology of the New Enclosures,” critically examines Judith Butler’s work on the performative character of assemblies, extending it “with a close-eye trained on the expansion of the collective to meet the kinds of radical inclusion that would be the test of any viable socialist endeavour” (204). In chapter six, “Cultural Cruelty: Extraordinary Rendition & Acoustic Shock,” Read recounts how Christopher Brett Bailey’s 2016 production Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight left him with tinnitus and hearing impairment. He reads his own experience vis-à-vis a High Court case in which a violinist at the London Opera House claimed damages for permanent acoustic shock he suffered during rehearsals. Such cases, Read suggests, figure as a form of “cultural ‘cruelty’ [. . .], where non-performance of various kinds comes as a consequence of those who would maintain, sanction or enhance violations of the human right to expression” (231).

The book’s final chapter, “Poor History: Field Notes from a Fire Sale,” productively contrasts two major fires in recent London history: the 2015 fire at Battersea Arts Centre and the 2017 Grenfell Tower inferno. Read’s juxtaposition throws into sharp relief not only the radically different kinds of loss experienced but also the diametrically opposed responses by municipal officials. While, in the case of Battersea Arts Centre, commentators could easily mourn “whose creations were disrupted, whose efforts were rolled back years” (272), such sentences ring hollow in the case of Grenfell. And whereas Battersea Arts Centre was quickly refurbished and re-opened its doors in 2018, Grenfell Tower still stands as a haunting reminder of systemic political ignorance, irresponsibility, and neglect. In this way, Grenfell Tower “demands attention as a sobering reminder as to any kind of meaningful relation we might wish to forge between practices and politics” precisely because they have become “unexceptional” (268). Again, this chapter appears somewhat tangential to the context of theatre. The author himself anticipates just that, asking “what might any or all of this have to do with theatre [. . .]? I might be tempted to say nothing. And why should it? What possible claim could performance make on our divided attention” (295) in such catastrophes as Grenfell? In many ways, Read’s tour de force takes to task the performance of politics as much as it envisions a politics of performance.

Much of The Dark Theatre chronicles Read’s creative process. Take, for instance, a passage where he, needing a break from writing in the National Art Library, strolls through the Victoria and Albert Museum. Originally looking for a video installation, he has a chance encounter with Edgar Degas’s oil painting The Ballet from “Robert le Diable” (1871), which then prompts him to think about the spatial intertwinement of performance and class as operating both within Degas’s picture and via the painting’s relation to other artworks in the museum (118). In a similar vein, the book records Read’s biography as an activist. His prose is sometimes dense, layered with numerous theorists and cultural references, and sometimes conversational in tone. Throughout, however, his writing is infused with a lyrical anger that befits his topic. Ultimately, and appropriately in this case, Read poses more questions than he gives answers to, and imparts some of his anger – but also some of his optimism – to the reader. In any case, The Dark Theatre is a challenging and timely study that will not only be a compelling read to scholars interested in theatre and performance studies, but also resonate with cultural studies in general.