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

Abstract

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