R. Darren Gobert's elegant The Mind–Body Stage represents a significant scholarly and stylistic accomplishment. Gobert stages a generative incursion into contemporary and historical discussions around the complex relationship between theatre and philosophy by first demonstrating how theatre scholars have paid insufficient attention to René Descartes's transformational impact on many key elements of theatre practice from the seventeeth century onward. He then shows how, for their part, philosophers have generally not thoroughly investigated the cultural impact and reception of Descartes's thought. Gobert proposes ‘another Cartesian theater’ (p. 4) beyond the reductive vision of Descartes as an anti-body monologist concerned only with theatre's metaphorical potentials, and instead presents the Descartes who ‘defines the emotions as bodily perceptions and thus precisely as a source of knowledge’ (p. 5) and, additionally, the Descartes who had a significant impact on the playwrights, performers and theatre architects of his day. By focusing on Descartes's later texts, particularly his extensive correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and The Passions of the Soul that he wrote at her request in 1645–6, Gobert presents a thinker who argues for the inextricability of the material and immaterial beyond duality of substance, centralizing the body as an epistemological nexus. Complementing the theoretical and philosophical considerations, Gobert engages an extensive range of theatre artifacts, to observe with precision how historically traceable performance practices have helped physicalize and promulgate Descartes's ideas.

A historian with a flair for narrative, Gobert anchors his argument in key sites of Descartes's encounter with performance. One such example is the opening night of a court ballet in 1647, The Birth of Peace, sponsored by Queen Christina of Sweden to mark the end of the Thirty Years War, for which Descartes composed narrative verse. This starting point becomes the basis for an exploration of the profoundly non-dualistic themes in the performance text, through to a presentation of his articulation of ballet and theatre as sites for the manifestation of the human body's capacity for generating joyful experiences and memories. Further chapters analyse Descartes's paradigm-shifting impact on playwriting, in the work of Pierre Corneille and John Dryden, and demonstrate his significant contributions to acting theories in France and England, as well as to European theatre architecture.

By presenting a nuanced articulation of the relationship between theatre as a potent cultural metaphor and the generative (or performative) capacity of thought to instantiate new practices in the theatre and beyond, Gobert has made an important contribution to the wider intellectual discourse on the widely variegated terrain currently described as performance philosophy. Overall, the text is an exemplar of finely tuned, witty and compelling scholarship that will most certainly have a significant influence in theatre and performance studies, as well as in a variety of related interfields and emergent interdisciplinary constellations of thinking.