In Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage, Sara Soncini argues that new forms of warfare that have emerged since the 1991 Persian Gulf War have challenged contemporary playwrights to create new modes of representing war on stage. Using a case study approach, Soncini examines recent British productions of plays by Caryl Churchill, Simon Stephens, Tony Kushner, Tricycle Theatre, and others, and analyzes how experiments in dramatic form confront and critique the aestheticized spectacle of modern warfare. With Forms of Conflict, Soncini adds an arts-based focus to the growing literature of contemporary war studies and also connects theater studies to political science research into the rhetorical strategies of war. Using detailed descriptions and persuasive close readings of recent performances, Soncini paints a thorough picture of contemporary British theater and offers a timely reminder of art's power to disrupt the discourses of war.

Soncini's argument is based on Mary Kaldor's New Wars theory, which describes modern warfare as distinct from traditional war due in part to the global nature of local conflict, the emphasis on identity over ideology, and the spectacular image warfare that is now a major component of conflict. As war has changed, Soncini reasons, so too has theater. She argues that contemporary dramatists, asking how to “translate into material, embodied terms an endless war fought on a global battlefield against an invisible, faceless enemy,” have rejected mimetic representation in favor of metaphorical depictions of war (24). Soncini begins by analyzing Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Stay I Love You? (2006), Mark Ravenhill's Product (2005), and Simon Stephens's Pornography (2007) as examples of scripts that use fragmented language and dialogue assemblage to signify our modern alienation from the messiness of contemporary warfare. Soncini next explores the work of Tricycle Theatre as an example of the rise of documentary drama and verbatim theater on the British stage, which she argues is a corrective to the information overload of modern mediatized war. Soncini then uses the case studies of Look Left, Look Right's Yesterday Was a Weird Day (2005), Robin Soans's Talking to Terrorists (2005), and Tricycle Theatre's Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (2005) to theorize how dramatists frame the performance of witnessing as an ambivalent act that offers the potential for self-reflexive examinations of authenticity, liveness, and the nature of truth in war. In her final chapter, Soncini examines the role of the translator in contemporary war plays as a figure who embodies language as a site of conflict. She uses Gregory Burke's Black Watch (2006), George Packer's Betrayed (2008), David Greig's The American Pilot (2003), and Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul (2001) to demonstrate how a mistrust of conventional dramatic dialogue by playwrights exemplifies larger public distrust of the spectacle of war.

Forms of Conflict contains rich close readings of scripts and meticulous descriptions of performances. Soncini has a knack for imagery that draws readers into the performance experience while simultaneously directing them to key points in her analysis. For example, in her final chapter, Soncini sets up a discussion of the linguistic fragmentation of recent war plays with a vivid description of the beginning of Trevor Griffiths's The Gulf Between Us (1992): “the monologic, monolingual voice of the narrator [gives] way to a Babelian medley of disparate and dissonant discourses in Arabic and English, a cacophonic verbal turmoil in which one language breeds another and is swallowed by it in turn” (166–67). Even if the reader is unfamiliar with the scripts or productions Soncini discusses, her colorful depictions form a clear picture. Soncini also provides comprehensive historical context for events like the Bloody Sunday inquiry or the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, and this attention to detail strengthens her argument.

Soncini's contention that recent plays about war disrupt dramatic conventions and offer formal innovations could be bolstered with clearer contrasts to previous performances and a more thorough attention to theater history. How does the recent resurgence in documentary dramas like Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner's My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) build from earlier forms like Newspaper Theatre? How is the modern move to eschew linguistic coherence in favor of representation through metaphor different from Absurdist reactions to World War II? While Forms of Conflict is not a theater history, its lack of theatrical context reduces the urgency of Soncini's claim that the past two decades have produced exciting innovations and important experimentations in dramatic form.

Soncini concludes Forms of Conflict with a fifteen-page list of war plays produced on the British stage from 1991 to 2011. This appendix not only demonstrates the vibrancy of recent British theater but also will be invaluable to theater scholars, historians, and cultural critics interested in contemporary responses to war. Although published as part of the Exeter Performance Studies series, Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage reaches across disciplines as Soncini intertwines political theory, recent history, and cultural analysis to consider the aesthetic and political significance of modes of representations both real and imagined, on stage and off.