Catherine M. Cole

Trickster theatre: the poetics of freedom in urban Africa

is also a focus of Chapter Five, one of the strongest chapters. Because Bial deploys evidence so effectively, with excellent attention to language and a keen eye for dramaturgical detail, at a few points in earlier chapters I wanted to see more specific examples. However, the breadth of evidence expands and his analysis deepens with each chapter. In Chapter Five, he analyzes three Job plays alongside theological and scholarly discourse on the Book of Job suggesting that the biblical story presents unique challenges with respect to balancing spectacle, sincerity, and irony. The most successful adaptation, J.B. (1958), achieved this and, in doing so, showed ‘that it is possible to perform reverence from a place of doubt’ (134). Bial argues that this interplay between faith and doubt, inherent within the scriptural narrative, is one reason that Job’s story, more than any other biblical narrative, ‘allows the theater to come to terms with the kind of calamity and suffering that characterizes the modern American experience’ (139). Chapter Six returns to the issue of divine representation with Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and Godspell (1976). These productions are well-known through countless ‘rewrites, reimaginings, recordings, and revivals’ (145), and each is noteworthy within the history of Broadway musicals generally. They are significant here for featuring live actors as Jesus and their success would, according to Bial, ‘redefine the rules for biblical plays’ (144). While both productions employed sincerity, Bial finds Godspell’s balance of performance strategies unique among all biblical adaptations ‘in its capacity to unify – if only temporarily – religious ritual and the Broadway theater’ (160). Bial concludes by briefly analyzing two failed productions that premiered in an era when other biblical plays found acclaim, thereby demonstrating that ‘zeitgeist...is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success’ (175). And while ‘the success-to-failure rate of biblical adaptations is not significantly different’ from Broadway generally, virtually every biblical adaptation on Broadway ‘has been treated, at least initially, as a dubious experiment, offering little more than novelty value’ (181, 176). Thus, Bial demonstrates that despite the century-long history of biblical drama on Broadway, critics still struggle to interrogate and take seriously the religious elements of these performances. In this exceptional book, Bial examines many more plays than those I have mentioned. His writing is engaging and his performance-based analysis never loses analytical precision. Incidentally, Playing God is also entertaining in how it showcases the evolution in style, vocabulary, and zingers used by Broadway critics over the twentieth century. Jill Stevenson Marymount Manhattan College jstevenson@mmm.edu

Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance

freedom for an era of technological fetishism. At one point, when Jones tells his digital collaborators ‘I don’t think your technology can actually capture what I do’ (pp. 124–125) Goldman is at pains to underline the ‘profound’ (p. 125) rather than prosaic nature of that comment. It is not simply that sweat and speed cause motion sensors to slip off heated skin; it is rather that there is ‘very little trace, if any, of his labour, his improvisational exhaustion, once Ghostcatching becomes fully realized as a public work’ (p. 125). The seemingly self-indulgent practice of improvisation is reformulated in Ghostcatching as an index of complex histories of race, labour, motion, and measurement, as the improvised gesture becomes the ghost within the machine. Through her observations on Jones, Goldman returns to a central paradox of her study: improvisation as a practice necessarily produces work (dances, musical pieces, social movements). But the form of that work, however much it looks like ‘improvised work’, can never be conflated with the work of improvisation itself. Improvisation must perpetually reinvent itself, because it can never rely on any recognizable image of what it should look or even feel like. And yet, it must also be something in the world: a practice, a technique, a strategy. The necessity and impossibility of improvisation provides the most profound of analogies for the raced and gendered other. In modelling a form of scholarship that remains scrupulously attentive to the blindspots of much scholarship on the avant-garde, which have rarely exhibited much interest in or sensitivity to such questions of identity, Goldman takes the study of improvisation to a new level of political and theoretical sophistication.

BOOKS: Review Forum

On 19 July 1995 President Nelson Mandela signed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, setting into motion South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which would, by December, begin its work under its chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The TRC would hold its first public hearing on 15 April 1996, would ultimately take statements from more than 21,000 witnesses, and hear testimony in public hearings from some 2,000 individuals. It would receive more than 7,000 amnesty applications and present its final report in October 1998. A full seven-volume report was only completed and presented to President Thabo Mbeki five years later. As intended, the work of the TRC, and especially its public hearings, became a crucible of South Africa’s transition from apartheid and offered a specific path towards a new and non-racial nation. The TRC was, in its time, a vehicle that saturated through newspaper, television and radio coverage, through artistic and dramatic representations, and through live hearings that moved about the country virtually all the spaces of civil society. More so, as various publics engaged with the TRC in radically different ways, the TRC became constitutive of civil society in the ‘new South Africa’. The TRC, its unfolding role in South Africa’s post-apartheid transition years, its reverberations through truth processes in other countries (still ongoing), and its opening of spaces for ‘voices’ not broadly acknowledged before, created an extraordinary opening for commentary, interpretation and publication