BOOK REVIEWED: Modern Theatres 1950–2020, edited by David Staples with drawings by David Hamer. New York and London: Routledge, 2021.

Alain Badiou, in “Rhapsody for the Theatre” (1990), divided the world into societies that have theatre and those that do not. Those in the former group, he observed, “know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event.”1 Badiou, in his essay, places fairly rigid limits on what constitutes theatre, but I think we can allow these “strange places” to encompass all kinds of live performance, both visual and auditory. All live performance must occur somewhere: there must be a performance venue, and these venues are, indeed, strange places. They exist within a society, yet separate from it, temporarily isolating a fragment of the population to watch or listen to a specifically created work of art. The venues—theatres, opera houses, concert halls, and the like—have...

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