Writing on one of the most significant events in twentieth-century European history, the May 1968 student uprisings, cultural critic Roland Barthes remarked upon how the protesters, many of whom carried portable radios, made sense of the demonstrations thanks to the coverage they were listening to. Broadcasts became the meaning of the event, by which it acceded to intelligibility. Equally, for Adrian Kear, the historical event, as it is recognized, is constituted of testimony, memory and experience, as opposed to being an empirical reality. While Kear does not engage with Barthes, he draws upon historiographical theorizations of the event by a range of philosophers, including Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy, applying them to twenty-first-century stage productions that look back on major events from the European twentieth century, and that expose as discursive constructs the very notions of the event, of Europe, and of the twentieth century itself. For Kear, it is precisely the theatrical mode, involving interrelations between image, scene, action and narration – what he terms ‘an apparatus of appearance’ (p. 17, Kear's emphasis) – that enables spectators to observe the subjective and aesthetic structuring of the historical event both on- and offstage. Moreover, for him, the imaginative and contextualizing activity with which spectators co-compose the theatrical event leads not only to the illumination of past events, but also to the elucidation of present European issues such as citizenship and state sovereignty. Since this ‘performative historiography’, in Kear's words (p. 30), is essentially a Brechtian idea – that the assemblage of the stage production demonstrates the social production of what we perceive as reality – it is surprising that Brecht is not more present in Kear's study. Kear illustrates his understanding of the event with a case-study approach, rather than a systematic overview of theatrical outputs that might stage the European twentieth century. The productions he analyses are genuinely European in their scope: the Sad Face/Happy Face trilogy by Belgians Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, Sonja by the Latvian Alvis Hermanis and Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, Tragedia Endogonidia and Divina Commedia by Italians Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, The Persians and Coriolan/us by the UK's Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes with the National Theatre of Wales, and La création du monde 1923–2012, pour en finir avec Bérénice and More more more … Future by Faustin Lunyekula and Studios Kabako from the former Belgian colony Congo. Kear demonstrates how each work presents a different facet of the European twentieth century: Sonja represents all the major events in Europe over the last century, Tragedia Endogonidia was staged across a host of European cities, the Divina Commedia exposes the twentieth century's passion for spectacle and appearance, Lunyekula's works testify to Europe's colonial past and to decolonization. Kear orchestrates the theorists on historicity by which he is inspired with great mastery and demonstrates his arguments by means of beautifully meticulous and highly informative accounts of the productions, which he illustrates with wonderful photographs. The book, while revealing illuminating insights into contemporary theatre, tends to draw on critical theorists at the expense of theatre theorists, which at times are marked by their absence. Erika Fischer-Lichte's description (The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (2008), p. 9) of theatre's transformational potential to become an event in which everybody present achieves a ‘sudden deeper insight into the shared process of being in the world’ strikes me as an apt, yet absent, complement to Kear's argument.