As an art form, theatre has traditionally been associated with vision and the acts of seeing and being seen. The construction of theatre in terms of its visual dimension also involves the conception of sight as the detached sense that provides a basis for understanding the theatrical performance analytically as an aesthetic experience. Martin Welton challenges this abstraction through proposing an ecological approach to theatre as a practice in the Bourdieuian sense. In doing so, the author also contests the perception of theatre in terms of the distinction between aesthetic experience and ordinary lived experience. Whilst the categorical distinction is maintained, Welton persuasively shows that, for spectators and performers alike, the theatrical experience is aesthetic and everyday at once.

The exploration of feeling as a phenomenon, act of communication, and theoretical concept provides the key to the interpretation of theatre productions as mundane and yet extraordinary. Feeling is defined in an inclusive sense, as a modus of perception and sense-making. At the same time, in line with the current efforts in the humanities to retheorize feeling in terms of embodiment, personal and cultural encounters, movement and moving of and across boundaries, the author proposes a subject-centred dynamic model. The claimed position becomes somewhat betrayed in the autobiographically inspired chapter (‘Somewhere, Somehow’) considering ‘theatrical motility’ and ‘plac[ing] attention on the movement within theatrical tourism of quotidian structures of feeling’ (p. 108). The chapter narrates a travelling of Unknown Origin/Ursprung unbekannt, a theatre production performed by the author and Klaus Seewald, ‘in collaboration with his Graz-based company Theater ASOU’, from Britain, via Austria, to Albania (p. 112). The account constructs ‘Albanian reality’ through staging centuries-old clichéd images of geocultural difference familiar from the Western exoticist discourses on South East Europe. Albania is depicted as a country ‘being towards Europe's edge geographically’ as well as ‘economically and to some extent culturally’ (p. 118). (Mis)matching economic development with cultural advancement, the description mediates the imperial construction of the relationship between the centre and the margin. The account of encountering difference is limited to the discussion of the ‘strangeness’ of the Albanian natural and urban landscape but makes no reference to the inhabitants as embodiments of subjectivity and agency. Correspondingly, the narrative of theatre tourism ‘assimilate[s] difference’ through the ‘familiar habits and routine’ of the discourse of imperialism (p. 119).

Nonetheless, the readings of some recent experimental performances from the USA and Western Europe not only provide persuasive illustrations of how to ‘see [theatre] feelingly’, but also demonstrate how recent productions encourage the retheorization of the established theatrical notions of dark and light, speech and silence, atmosphere and temper, in affective and ecological terms (p. 19). The reviews of the applied theories occasionally appear as the re/presentations of basic readings. Yet their combination proves illuminating and opens thought-provoking perspectives. As the argument demonstrates, focusing on affective ecology empowers the reconfiguration of the vision-centric approach. The proposed vantage point opens out the complex relations and interactions among sight, hearing and touch while highlighting the ways in which the sensory elements organize the perception of theatre as an aesthetic and social activity.