Although representations of rape and sexual violence are commonplace in contemporary popular entertainment, such representations are largely under-discussed in theatre scholarship. Rape on the Contemporary Stage is an ambitious study that fills part of the extant gap in scholarship addressing representations of violence against women throughout Western theatre history. By weaving together performance and script analysis, theories on trauma, rape, violence and the subject and the sociological concept of the ‘rape script’ – as previously written about by Sharon Marcus and Carine Mardorossian – Fitzpatrick creates a theoretical framework for analysing rape onstage and understanding the role that rape and sexual assault play in contemporary entertainment.

Fitzpatrick argues for strategies that resist eroticizing the act of sexual assault and the female body onstage while simultaneously critiquing or subverting dominant cultural narratives about rape. She builds her argument by analysing and comparing representations of rape in plays from the naturalistic stage, in plays by women, in theatre representing war and conflict and in plays staging extreme violence. Throughout the book she is concerned with how rape can be represented without creating a ‘titillating’ spectatorial experience. Fitzpatrick frames feminist practitioners’ and scholars’ struggle with the scopophilic nature of representing the sexually victimized female body onstage by using the concept of the rape script in conjunction with Georges Bataille's Eroticism (1962) and Robin Morgan's and Andrea Dworkin's work on pornography. A majority of Fitzpatrick's study focuses on representations of rape by female playwrights, which utilize various strategies to circumvent the possibly arousing nature of staging rape. Fitzpatrick examines these for their efficacy in terms of their affective power, demonstrating that they are successful at both resisting scopophilia and representing the trauma of sexual violence.

Fitzpatrick posits two theories about the affective power of violence and vulnerability onstage. The first is that male–male sexual violence is not pleasurable for audiences to witness and therefore creates an affective experience of sympathy with the suffering body. The second is a twofold theory about an object signifying as a female body and the female body being reduced to an object in performance. Fitzpatrick argues that both ‘heighten rather than lessen the horror of the representation, engaging the imagination of the audience and working affectively to represent vulnerability that is not eroticized but instead demands recognition and respect’ (p. 208). Although she earlier addresses the link between the objectification of the female body and sexual violence in Western culture – as argued by anti-pornography feminist scholars such as Morgan and Dworkin – she does not include this issue in her argument here. This omission weakens her argument that the objectified female body heightens the horror of rape and demands respect. When audiences are conditioned within rape culture to always already view female bodies as sexually available objects, how can reducing the female body to an object in performance elicit a sympathetic response?

Fitzpatrick's book makes an important contribution to the field of theatre and performance studies and will also be useful to scholars in sociology. The study of sexual violence onstage is an emerging sub-field in theatre and performance studies, and while this book works to establish it as a valuable lens, there is room for other scholars to build on and engage with Fitzpatrick's work. Fitzpatrick's project is formidable since, as she acknowledges in the introduction, an exhaustive survey of all plays that include rape scenes or narratives on the contemporary anglophone stage would be impossible. At times the lack of other scholarship available on contemporary theatrical representations of rape seems to overwhelm Fitzpatrick with the need to provide context for each case study. Even with this gap in the scholarship pressing on Fitzpatrick's enterprise, she cohesively establishes the resistant strategies of feminist theatre-makers, the ways in which rape is represented in war zones and areas of conflict, and the affective power of violence and vulnerability onstage. Rape on the Contemporary Stage is instrumental in furthering the knowledge of how rape is and can be represented on stage in ways that do not succumb to scopophilic possibilities of eroticizing rape, but rather communicates the trauma and horror experienced by victims, most often women, who survive the violence.