The Challenge of World Theatre History by Steve Tillis (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Challenge of World Theatre History by Steve Tillis
• Jessica Nakamura

THE CHALLENGE OF WORLD THEATRE HISTORY. By Steve Tillis. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020. 320 pp. Hardcover, $119.99.

The title of The Challenge of World Theatre History reflects Steve Tillis’s dual approach that grounds his book: the challenge of producing world theatre history and the challenge it offers to our established conventions and understandings. Throughout, Tillis engages with conceptual issues at the center of theatre historiography to argue the urgent need for global inclusivity, making it critical reading for theatre educators. While the implicit emphasis in Tillis’s book is on teaching theatre history, his development of methodologies to produce world theatre history in later chapters may well be applied to the creation of scholarly texts.

In its challenge, world theatre history is as much about what has existed as it is about developing new ways forward. The first half of the book is devoted to the former: Tillis’s introduction identifies the “Standard Western Approach,” what he describes as the prevalent approach to theatre history education, well ingrained in survey classes, textbooks, and anthologies. To explore why world theatre history has been slow to be implemented, Tillis’s second chapter identifies and “rebut[s]” arguments against world theatre history (p. 32). In his third chapter, Tillis identifies the “historiographical fallacies” of the Standard Western Approach (p. 61). In these two foundational chapters, Tillis undoes the thinking behind this existing approach to theatre history, pinpointing the false assumptions about space and time [End Page 218] that underlie its historiography. He uses scholars from the long-established school of world history to support his claims, while revealing that the nascent field of world theatre history is years behind historiographical work elsewhere.

In the second half of the book, Tillis outlines new methodologies to producing world theatre history, methodologies that emphasize comparison and multiplicity. In his fourth chapter, Tillis identifies the basic units in world theatre history writing, theatrical events, and theatrical forms that lend themselves to comparative work. If the Standard Western Approach is based on assumptions about space and time, Tillis’s final four chapters develop ways of thinking about space and time that are conducive to considering the world. Chapter five reevaluates geography to move beyond the nation-state model. The final three chapters examine conceptions of time, with Tillis first offering a long-durée approach to theatre history (chapter six), exploring how we think of continuities and change (chapter seven), and reexamining how we conceive of historical periods (chapter eight).

With Tillis’s new methods, world theatre history emerges as a malleable construction. The last three chapters read as a methodological toolkit, with Tillis making multiple suggestions to highlight the openness of this historiography. In several of his models, for instance, Tillis provides attention to shifting spatial and temporal scales, calling our attention to the possibilities of scaling up and scaling down in geographical regions and views of temporality. These efforts reveal the flexibility available within world theatre history, while also highlighting a point that Tillis makes throughout: world theatre history makes for better theatre history. Or, as he explains it early on: the “disinclination toward” world theatre history is “self-defeating for theatre studies” (p. 32).

Along with identifying multiple approaches to world theatre history, the second half of the book shows Tillis modeling world theatre history making. When outlining new methods, Tillis is diverse in the examples he provides, moving frequently and easily across the globe. Tillis’s examples begin to demonstrate how we may start to produce world theatre history while also reaffirming Tillis’s insistence on the applicability of his methodologies.

The clarity and thoroughness with which The Challenge of World Theatre History argues its case makes it a valued resource in thinking through how to teach theatre history. The complaints that Tillis has are, sadly, not new, but his arguments are a delight for those of us working in “global” or “world” theatre forms—Tillis’s thoroughness at dismantling the logic of the Standard Western Approach is critical [End Page 219] in undermining its place as the status quo. As many of us reevaluate our curricula to center...