ANU productions, led by theatre director Louise Lowe and visual artist Owen Boss, is a Dublin-based, interdisciplinary company whose performances invoke and draw upon practices in the visual arts, dance and theatre. The company has created more than seventeen innovative new works since its founding in 2009, garnering significant attention in Ireland and abroad. Brian Singleton's new book focuses on ‘The Monto Cycle’, a series of performances staged by ANU between 2010 and 2014 in and around ‘the Monto’, a socially and economically marginalized area of Dublin North's inner city. For Singleton, what makes ANU's tetralogy unique in Irish theatre – as well as international examples of site-specific and immersive performance – is its interdisciplinary mixing of performance genres, styles and modes of engagement. Singleton argues that the cycle's politics are based in how each individual performance intervenes in dominant narratives of Irish history by foregrounding the contemporary spectator's agency and complicity in these performative acts of remembering – and, importantly, forgetting – through intimate encounters that blur performance and reality.

The book is exemplary in its performance analysis, situating each of the four performances – and Singleton's own experience of them – within theatrical, theoretical, historical and political contexts. Singleton dedicates a chapter to each performance in the tetralogy, which cover a century of the Monto's history: World's End Lane (2010), which looks at the area's history of prostitution in the years before the establishment of the Irish state (1922), when the Monto was the largest red-light district in the British Empire; Laundry (2011), which was staged in a former Magdalene Laundry and concerns the shocking history of these institutions since the founding of the Irish state; The Boys of Foley Street (2012), a performance that interrogates the poverty and social exclusion suffered by the Monto in the 1970s and 1980s, problems compounded by a heroin epidemic that saw the destruction of a generation of its residents; and Vardo (2014), which looks at the current situation of the area, where prostitution has returned through an international syndicate of organized crime that traffics women in the physical and virtual worlds, and where poverty, social exclusion and substance abuse are continuing problems. Singleton's experience of each performance is the fulcrum around which each chapter turns. He elaborates his experience through discussions of relevant theories of space, place and affect, as well as social and cultural history, and elucidates each performance's dramaturgical structure (i.e. how each worked in performance) and its effects.

In each chapter/case study, Singleton examines how these peripatetic performances employ intimate encounters (often a lone performer and spectator), the neighbourhood and its built environment, and enjoin spectators to action, effecting a practice of agency in the spectator that produces affective responses and feelings of complicity. In his chapter on Laundry for example, Singleton argues, ‘Each spectator did not simply encounter a scene, s/he was embedded within the scene, and through direct address and position played the roles of tourist, punter and a complicit worker in the sex trade’ (p. 19). This intimacy and encouragement to action is not simply a ‘dramaturgical device in the performative experience’ (p. 11). Rather, Singleton argues that ‘emotionally identifying and disidentifying with characters I met … was a dramaturgical conflict that I experienced within me as a spectator, rather than within the performance, as none of the characters I met were similarly conflicted’ (p. 68, my emphasis).

For Singleton, the Monto Cycle's politics emerge from its foregrounding of who and what are forgotten and remembered in narratives of Irish history, and who and what are served by these patterns of memory:

Singleton argues that this combination of agency and performative complicity makes the cycle a complex historical reclamation that asks difficult questions for Irish culture and society in the present.

The book's strength is Singleton's performance analyses, which are grounded in his phenomenological experience, and which are elaborated through detailed analyses of space, affect and cultural and theatrical history. It is a tremendously valuable resource and serves as an example of how to write theoretically sophisticated and materially contextualized performance analyses.