Davis succeeds in systematically applying rigorous theatre and performance theory to the Cold War defence procedures marshalled by Canadian, British, and US civilian groups facing the perceived threat of nuclear attack in the mid- to late twentieth century (p. 2). These procedures included not only staged exercises in emergency response, triage and evacuation, but more broadly the indoctrination of rehearsed behaviour in the populace, from the early ‘duck and cover’ drills to more insidious normative inscriptions of gender roles: men save the wounded and trapped, while women do the clean-up and supply cheery moral support (p. 36 ff).

The study demonstrates how theatre was used by civil defence organizers to assign to the abstract and unknowable future of nuclear war a set of consumable narratives that could be responded to. In this respect, chapter 2, ‘Rehearsals for Nuclear War’, is the most theoretically important contribution, parsing the complex intersections of realism and the real, of acting and authenticity, in defense exercises. Yet the most gripping pages are in chapter 7, ‘Acting Out Injury’, which describes the actors in the ‘Casualties Union’ and other groups who played the wounded and dying in defence simulations – so persuasively in some instances that they challenged the paradigms of emergency response planning (p. 219).

While the reader must at times navigate dense prose and complicated charts, the reward is a manifestly more complex notion not only of performance and war simulations, but also of how social anxiety was and is mobilized for state purposes through rehearsal. It is disturbing enough to witness the futility of the performative preparation for nuclear war, knowing now that the devastating reality of such a war would render any anticipated post-attack scenario moot (p. 330). Most disturbing for theatre scholars, though, might be Davis's (near) indictment of theatre as the culprit in the inculcated disbelief in this futility. Moreover, as Davis points out, we rehearse an analogous complicity today each time we remove our shoes at airport checkpoints, having been trained in the received hegemonic narrative that the war on terror is necessary and inevitable. The question with which Davis charges us, in the end, is whether we will ever stop rehearsing for ‘risk abatement’ and the ‘mitigation of consequences’, and start rehearsing for peace.