370 of isolated performances or essays.

Like Baker herself, this book will have appeal on many levels to many different audiences. Art historians will delight in Bakers whimsical drawings and paintings, which are reproduced so beautifully in this book. Scholars and students of feminism, performance, theatre, or gender studies will be intrigued and inspired by this book. Feminists working on the institution of maternity and motherhood from a variety of disciplines will nd much to think about in relationship to Bakers struggles with motherhood and post-partum depression. And nally, amateur cooks everywhere (myself included) will delight in Bakers subversive yet respectful use of food, her attention to cleaning up after the fact, and her ability to make edible shoes, babies, families and ladies out of cake, biscuits, and meringue. Jennie Klein section and the personal tone of Cases writing disrupt the stasis that such chapter headings might dictate, representing instead a theoretical space where [m]ore than interdisciplinarity, the evermore proximate relations between gender and performance yield both a new inquiry and a more encompassing sense of what might constitute performance (p. 102). The mytho-historical bent of Feminist and Queer Performance fosters a motile feminist subject that goes beyond simply the interplay between feminism and performance from within a disciplinary axis (p. 102). This position is taken up from the opening chapter, Queer Theory and Performance. Here, Case frames her seminal article Towards a ButchFemme Aesthetic with the memoir Making Butch: A Historical Memoir of the 1970s and the reexive essay Toward a Butch-Feminist Retro-Future, in which she returns, older and wiser, to the dramatic event of the butch seduction/bar ght with feminism (p. 49) experienced in her earlier career, in order to emphasise the dialogic intentions of the original text. Case revisits the scenario where she initially attempted to inscribe the queer dyke subculture (p. 63) into the feminist hearth (p. 3) and documents her personal experiences and interactions with melancholy and nostalgia in this endeavour. For Case, this is where the queer theorist may avoid stasis: by way of a class-specic, self-consciously gendered political program that situates the practitioner (p. 64) within the text, an intervention against the dangers of the increasing marketability of homosexual and lesbian identity in the years since the articles initial publication (p. 56). This critique is extended in the nal essay in this chapter, The Queer Globe Itself, in which Case refutes conceptions of globalisation as a genderless, sexless phenomenon (p. 86), analysing the development of pink dollar politics (p. 92) by of way of both the theoretical, through Miranda Josephs queer rethinking of Marxist capital, and the personal, in her camp-inected study of international lesbian tourism. Case begins Feminist Performance, in the same manner as the previous chapter with an analysis of the changing nature of feminist studies and disciplinarity itself, across her career. For Case, feminism and performance represent a postdisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary coupling, through which material practice and intellectual pursuits are fused into a complementary compound (p. 101). The essays that follow The Masked Activist: Greek Strategies for the Streets and Performing Feminism on the International

Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies by Sue-Ellen Case Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 198 pp, ISBN 978 0 230 53755 2 (paperback) Fiona Anderson Kings College London In its proximity to the 2008 reissue of her seminal text Feminism and Theatre (1988), Sue-Ellen Cases Feminist and Queer Performance problematises the notion of a collected essays, even refusing such a tagline and subtitling the volume Critical Strategies. In a selection of writings that spans Cases rst visits to San Francisco lesbian bar Mauds to the gendered cyberbody in the realm of immersive technologies (p. 185), Cases retroactive analysis reviews and contextualises her twodecades-long career. Cases introduction to the volume further accentuates the performativity of her writing, describing the essays as interventions in the politics of the moment, consciously inscribing the social agendas and critical strategies of the time (p. 1). In the division of the essays into three clear sections Queer Theory and Performance, Feminist Performance, and Gendered Performance and New Technologies Case at rst appears to have neglected her earlier commitment to forging a way out of the bipolarity of denitions the Aristotelian taxonomies of hierarchical difference (Performing Feminisms, p. 13). However, the variety of themes explored in each

371 Stage exemplify this post-disciplinary practice by splicing, for example, Greek and Brechtian theatrical modes and the writing of Virginia Woolf with contemporary international examples. This analysis does not, however, follow the path of a traditional theatrical canon and is further developed with historical analyses of Mexican, Chinese and Greek feminine experience in the domain of the everyday. Cases international examples of feminist performance wisely remain wary of criticisms of cultural imperialism and she is sure to highlight the tendency of terms such as intercultural [to] obfuscate the dynamics of capital and gender hierarchies at work in cultural trade (p. 132). The section ends with further historical reconsideration in The Screens of Time: Feminist Memories and Hopes, in which Case locates her strongly personal style in earlier feminist and psychoanalytic writings, most effectively in the application of Jacques Lacans objet petit a, where the I is an archive of the past and a site of possible identicatory streaming (p. 137). Case also brings Ernst Blochs theories of utopian function to bear on her historicising feminist analysis, as she struggles to imagine any kind of promising or feminist future (p. 142) in the current political climate, prefacing her engagement with themes of environmental decay and cybernetic avatars in the following chapter. In Part Three, Gendered Performance and New Technologies, Case explores the ways in which technological developments have necessitated a reconguring of international identity and spectatorship, creating a new cultural imaginary of the body, which we might call theatres of the esh (p. 150). This section draws on Cases Performing Science and the Virtual (2007) and facilitates dialogue as it suggests an imaginative route for feminist and queer performance writing in the digital age. By way of her strong writing style, Case leaves the over-determined space of an abstracted feminism for an international and multidisciplinary stage, foregrounding questions of race, class and sexual identity that lead into her more recent work on a non-essentialist eco-feminism, outlined in the introduction to this volume. Cases insistence on interactivity and performativity across disciplines and cultural borders throughout these essays demonstrates how her commitment to socio-political themes on an international scale is part of a broader praxis. The motivation for not subtitling this volume collected essays becomes clear: I tried to imagine how it would be if the past, if history [. . .] is actually here in the present, as is the future. Then we could not longer doubt the efcacy of past deeds because they would be helping to form the very shapes we see, and we could no longer doubt activism, as it brings the future into the present. In this way, I could imagine something like hope (p. 14). Fiona Anderson

Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 19952005 by Amelia Howe Kritzer Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, vii 239 pp, ISBN 978 1 4039 8829 4 (hardback) Sarah Grochala Queen Mary University of London In Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 19952005, Amelia Howe Kritzer proposes that there has been a reinvigoration of politically engaged theatre in Britain since 1995. According to Kritzer, while the familiar 1970s model of oppositional political theatre continues to hold some power, contemporary British playwrights face an altered political landscape, the deliberately vague surface of New Labour politics [which] has created an ideological vacuum that serves to disable activism and foster cynicism (p. 7). With the grand political ideologies of the past in decay, the political playwright faces a double challenge as drama must structure and dene a political landscape, before it can stake out positions (p. 7). This problem is further complicated by the fact that the audience cannot be guaranteed to recognise the political landscape mapped out for them or the positions taken within it. The book begins by offering a whirlwind history of British political theatre, while dening the relationship between theatre and politics. Kritzer gives a brief survey of the eld, touching on issues such as audience reception and the politics of theatre spaces. She also offers a skeleton outline of the material conditions of theatre production in Britain. The rest of the book engages with specic plays from the last decade, starting with Sarah Kanes Blasted in 1995. The plays are split into groups that exhibit similar concerns, such as Generational transition and the post-Thatcher working class or Terrorism. The plays are listed with a detailed synopsis alongside a brief consideration of their political signicance. Throughout, Kritzer claims political signicance for the plays of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and some of their contemporaries, whom Kritzer