W. explicitly aligns her approach in this engrossing book with a broader prioritisation of affect and embodiment detectible in much recent English-language scholarship on Greek drama. (Prominent scholars associated with this trend include M. Mueller, M. Telò and N. Worman.) While such scholarship has largely focused on tragedy, W. looks at satyr play and Aristophanic comedy too, arguing that all three genres exploited in creative ways the potential for ambiguity and instability in the viewing experience of the audience. In the introduction W. cites as key influences on her thinking the work of American theatre scholars Bert States and Stanton Garner, Jr., who, from the 1980s onwards, explored the phenomenology of theatre – its embodied immediacy – in the face of dominant semiotic methodologies. Particularly important for W.’s purposes is Garner’s idea of theatre as involving a ‘play of actuality’, which W. explicates as ‘an unstable oscillation between the virtual and actual, presentational and representational’ (p. 6).

The assumptions underlying W.’s phenomenological approach are laid out relatively briefly in the second section of the introduction, and much of the rest of the chapter is devoted to contextualising this understanding of the theatrical viewing experience in relation to the ‘culture of visuality’ in archaic and classical Greek culture (through discussions of choral lyric, epiphanic religious processions and vase painting). The first two main chapters examine how fifth-century drama took advantage of the potential for instability in the construction of space (Chapter 1) and in the identification of bodies, costumes and props (Chapter 2). The focus narrows in the third chapter, as W. examines the representation and enactment of pain in tragedy (the chapter is dominated by readings of Oedipus the King and Prometheus Bound). In an innovative move W. turns to vase paintings in the final main chapter, using analyses of three fifth-century Attic vases to shed further light on the conceptual issues explored in the preceding chapters.

The book’s value lies above all in its sensitivity to the ways in which fifth-century drama invites the audience to ‘participate, alongside the actors and technicians, in the creation of meaning’ (p. 32). The result is a set of close readings that are consistently thought-provoking. In the discussion of Acharnians in Chapter 1, for example, W. argues that the alignment of Dikaeopolis’ perspective with that of the theatre audience in the prologue leads to a blending of the ‘physical space’ of the theatre and the ‘virtual space’ of the Athenian assembly (p. 58). By complicating this alignment in later scenes, the play promotes a ‘more discerning form of viewing’, which in turn suggests to the audience that it can ‘become more actively involved in its city’s policymaking’ (p. 62). In a similarly compelling reading later in the same chapter, W. links the gradual identification of the dramatic space in the opening scene of Oedipus at Colonus to other forms of (productive) disorientation to which the play exposes the audience (pp. 70–6). The discussion of Prometheus Bound in Chapter 3 (pp. 138–59) is a striking demonstration of the value of foregrounding the process of sense-making. W. argues persuasively that ‘Prometheus’ suffering body … repeatedly seems to exceed the “virtual space” of [its] representation by involving the bodies of those around [him]’, including the bodies of the audience as they share Prometheus’ pain (p. 161).

W.’s central claim that the experience of theatre involves an oscillation between the actual and the virtual is not defended at any length. An important presupposition, however, is that spectators are expected to imagine a separate fictional world on the basis of what is happening onstage (even if, as W. argues, this is not necessarily a straightforward task). Such a ‘representationalist’ picture is indeed often taken for granted in theatre studies, but it is not the only option. Enactivist approaches, for example, posit a form of ‘seeing-as’ that does not require the mental construction of a virtual reality but inheres entirely in the unfolding performance, and philosopher S. Gallagher has drawn attention to the deep continuities between this anti-representationalist stance and the insights of twentieth-century phenomenologists (above all M. Merleau-Ponty). The theory of ‘ecological perception’ developed by J. Gibson offers a further alternative, and R. Rehm has already demonstrated its value for analysing the ‘play of space’ in Greek tragedy in his 2002 book of that name (W. implicitly acknowledges the extent to which her interests overlap with Rehm’s in a footnote on p. 49; unfortunately, the book contains little direct engagement with Rehm’s work). Many readers may find W.’s framework intuitively convincing, but as someone less inclined to see semiotics and phenomenology as complementary, I would have welcomed a little more discussion of these theoretical issues.

W.’s focus on the potential for tensions in theatre’s ‘play of actuality’ means that little allowance is made for a different possibility: that – at least some of the time – the fictional and the performative dimensions of the action cohere in such a way that the dominant impression is of the richness of the whole rather than any dissonance between its constituents. This alternative framing is particularly inviting in the case of W.’s reading of Prometheus Bound, and it is striking that there is much less talk of instability and oscillation in the chapter on pain of which it forms the centrepiece. W.’s set-up is more effective, on the other hand, in cases where something physically absent (e.g. the actual Pnyx in the case of Acharnians) or yet unknown (e.g. the true identity of the grove in Oedipus at Colonus) makes its nagging presence felt.

W. argues throughout the book that, by exposing the instability of the viewing experience, fifth-century drama encourages the spectators to become ‘attuned to the mechanisms of representation’ (p. 210). In making this case, she presents herself as ‘turning toward aesthetics, and away from the emphasis on cultural and social history that dominates much of the previous scholarship on theatrical visuality’ (pp. 14–15). For this argument to work, we need to assume that the audience would have expected the process of representation to function seamlessly, an expectation that fifth-century dramatists took it upon themselves to disrupt. In the introduction the Aristotelian phrase ‘this is that’ is used as shorthand for such a concept of artistic representation (pp. 6–13), according to which the appreciator’s first job is to identify each element of the medium with its counterpart in the represented reality. It is precisely this task, according to W., that is complicated and problematised in the plays that she examines. W. acknowledges that there are ‘hints’ of a more complex picture in Aristotle’s account (p. 8), but her use of Aristotle is nevertheless unhelpfully simplistic. As S. Halliwell has shown (in a discussion cited by W.), Aristotle’s concept of mimesis is intended to capture precisely the sort of joint awareness of medium and object of representation that concerns W., an awareness demanding both cognitive and emotional engagement from the spectators and drawing on their embodied experience of the ‘real’ world (Part 2 of Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems [2002]).

Rather than needing to be reminded of the complexity of theatrical representation, it seems to me much more likely that fifth-century audiences went to the theatre hoping to see that complexity exploited in new and creative ways. Such a perspective creates less of a need to choose between aesthetics and cultural history, since we can take the audience’s attention to have been focused as much on the political and religious issues foregrounded by these creative solutions as on the solutions themselves. Many of W.’s stronger readings touch on these issues in any case (as already indicated); and while there is scope for disagreement concerning the book’s theoretical stance, W. has done a considerable service to students of ancient drama by demonstrating the value of paying close attention to the participatory sense-making process integral to fifth-century theatre.