Play-House of Power, edited by Lata Singh, assembles 13 articles that focus on regional theater cultures in India during the colonial period and thereafter. While the volume's dominant methodological orientation is historical, essays like Susan Seizer's “Legacies of Discourse” (pp. 70–104) and Nandi Bhatia's “Reading Premchand's ‘The Actress’” (pp. 194–214) anthropological and literary approaches, add depth and nuance to the examination of theater in the colonial India.

The 13 articles are grouped into two sections. The six essays in Part 1 argue that in the colonial period, theater was a contested site for the articulation of regional and national identities. Focusing primarily on the theatrical traditions of Maharashtra, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu, many of these essays trace the discourse around folk and elite traditions, and the remaking of the former into a suitable vehicle for the aspirations of the emergent middle class. An example of such reframing, and one which the volume's many essays repeatedly make, is the marking of folk traditions as aesthetically problematic, obscene, and vulgar in order to render them more suitable for consumption by a newly empowered middle-class. Susan Seizer's “Legacies of Discourse” demonstrates how the discourse of vulgarity in Tamil Special Drama has radically altered the embodiment and performance of theater. She argues that the front-facing speech and minimal on-stage movement of Special Drama artists indexes moral and emotional self-control, which in turn reflects higher class and caste status. In contrast, Sharmila Rege's essay (pp. 132–154) traces the trajectory of caste specific performance genres of the feminine, erotic lavani and the masculine, heroic powada in Maharashtra into forms with popular, mass appeal.

The seven essays that comprise Part 2 on “Theatre and Gender: Rescribing Patriarchy” elaborate on the intersections of cultural practices and the formulations of gender identity. This exploration traverses two channels: the first focuses on the compelling figure of the female impersonator in various regional theater traditions, while the second considers his/her vexed counterpart: the actress. Scholarship of the past decade has argued that even while female impersonators played a significant role as arbiters of notions of femininity and fashion, such articulations were not without tension, and the emergence of nationalist discourse on masculinity and femininity eventually rendered the role of the female impersonator on the public stage as unsustainable. (Hansen, 1992, Dwyer and Dewey, 2001, Srivatsava, 2004). In contrast, the actress, like other female public performers such as dancing girls, burdened with newly emergent notions of moral laxity and depravity, was held in contrast to notions of domesticated womanhood. Like in the first section, these seven essays reassert the above arguments primarily in the contexts of the regional theater traditions of Bengal, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu.

The past decade has produced a wealth of scholarship on performance and theater, with a specific emphasis on the influence and impact of the colonial period. Work on Bharatanatyam, Karnatak and Hindustani music (Peterson and Soneji (2009), Weidman (2006), Subramanian, (2006, 2008), Bhakle, (2005)), have pointed to the re-forming and re-formulation of various performance traditions—elite and popular—in the powerful nexus of colonialism and nationalism. The essays in the present volume on various regional traditions—Marathi, Tamil, and Bengali performance cultures receive the bulk of attention—succeed in demonstrating the broad penetration of the discourse on caste, class, and aesthetic traditions. Indexing the actress as morally suspect, or lower-caste performance traditions as aesthetically coarse, was as much in evidence in discourses around Tamil kataikkuttu (Hanna de Bruin, pp. 241–269) as it was with the problematic heroine's song in Marathi theater (Urmila Bhirdikar, pp. 27–53). An introduction or an afterword that contextualized such impulses in regional theater traditions against the backdrop of similar movements in other South Asian performing arts would have situated this volume more firmly amidst this huge body of recent scholarship.

Scholars familiar with the most current research on Indian performance traditions will not find much that is new in Play-House of Power. Many of the essays contained here traverse familiar ground, yet the focus on regional practices enable and perhaps even encourage, study along either regional or comparative themes. For instance, reading the three essays on Tamil theater, each of which brings a different theoretical lens and focus, provides a useful way of understanding impulses that govern the production of a regional theater form. Play-house of Power is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship in this area. While the volume would have benefited from a more incisive editorial eye, many of the essays will be useful in an undergraduate class on theater, colonial modernity, or gender in South Asia.