The history of producing medieval plays in the twentieth century stretches from the recurring performances of the Passionsspiele of Oberammergau to the re-creations of the York and Chester Cycles in England and Canada to the ‘ritual imports’ in the Americas, which Claire Sponsler analyses in her book of the same name (2004). Helen Solterer's work discusses a little-known theatrical troupe, the amateur Théophiliens, who developed as a student group at the Sorbonne in 1933 under the leadership of Professor Gustave Cohen. They drew their name from the first play they performed, the thirteenth-century Miracle of Théophile by Rutebeuf, and they continued to perform until 1952 despite the continuous change in membership due to the Second World War and its aftermath. Solterer focuses her study on the history of the troupe and its leader, following their shifting political positions as they attempt to navigate the varying French governments in power.

The central figure for Solterer is Gustave Cohen, whose French nationalism she believes was driven by the fact that, as a Belgian Jew, he was always doubly an outsider. As a contrast to Cohen's flight to the United States during the Second World War and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism, Solterer spends her sixth and final chapter on Moussa Abadi – a Syrian Jew and one of the early actors in the Théophiliens – who remained in Nice and formed a resistance network that saved Jewish children from deportation. Yet in the lives of both these men, as well as in the performances of the Théophiliens as a group, Solterer sees the relationship with medieval theatre as paramount.

Solterer argues that the ‘role playing’ experienced by Cohen and his Théophiliens as they performed medieval plays shaped their reactions to the political situation as it unfolded from 1933 to 1952, even as she discusses each government's successive attempt to co-opt medieval history and theatre for its own political agenda. Although she makes Cohen's republican values clear, she is strangely vague about whether she believes that the Théophiliens who performed during Vichy were allowing themselves to be co-opted, were attempting to undermine the politics of the regime, or were in essence collaborators themselves, and she seems unwilling to theorize about the ways in which the Théophiliens’ political allegiances may have been due specifically to their medieval expertise, largely failing to place them within the context of early twentieth-century French theatre or medieval revivals.

The argument that role playing aided the Théophiliens during the war – particularly those who were Jewish and needed to avoid deportation – has obvious potential, but Solterer uses no role-playing or performance theory. That Moussa Abadi made use of role playing in his resistance work is transparent and excellently argued, but the importance of the medieval aspect of his role playing remains uncertain, and another possible context for her work – the use of theatre by Jews during the Second World War – is disregarded. Despite these omissions, Solterer deserves our thanks for bringing to light the work of Cohen and the Théophiliens in such a detailed and fascinating study.