There has been a welcome growth in performance studies over the last few years of books on audiences, many of which engage with the diverse and fascinating ways in which people watch, interpret and talk about theatre. Caroline Heim's Audience as Performer is a welcome addition to this body of literature, and one that is committed to taking seriously the role of the audience and the potential of combining empirical research with conceptual and historical discussion. Heim offers a unique and intriguing focus through examining the overt performances of the people whom we nominally describe as the audience. That is, she examines the ways in which audiences variously talk back to the stage, interact with each other, walk out, dress up, purchase experiences, create communities and demonstrably assert their presence and importance.

It is also revealing to observe some of the features of an audience that Heim does not attend to. First, she is specifically not interested in the internal processes of an audience, including meaning-making, or how audiences respond to the ‘content’ of the work. Second, she does not set out to examine audiences as performers in relation to explicitly immersive, interactive or participative theatre – although there are shades of grey here and Heim sometimes slips across them. The book, in other words, is interested in the acts of participative engagement or demonstrative audience performance that occur in more conventional ‘mainstream’ audience scenarios.

Heim's book persuasively asserts the value of considering the various roles that audiences perform as well as (or rather in parallel to) that of being an audience. A recurring image she uses is that of theatre consisting of two ‘troupes of performers’: the actors and the audience, who face each other and perform for and to each other. To examine audiences as performers, Heim uses two main approaches: first, empirical research, and interviews with audience members, actors and ushers. During these interviews Heim asks a set of standardized questions designed to invite audience members to reflect upon their role as spectators, such as the intriguing question ‘What does it mean to you to “be” an audience?’ Disappointingly, the methodological analysis of what it means to talk to audiences is fairly thin, and the actor interviews in particular are presented primarily at face value, with little analysis of how or why the interviewees’ articulations are produced.

The second methodological approach is a historical analysis of the changing role of audiences through time. Part One of the book presents a brief but fascinating account of the transformation of audiences from boisterous, distracted, gaudy performers in the early to mid-1800s to the silent, attentive, invisible spectators of the twentieth century. This historical overview enables Heim to construct one of her main arguments, which is that the emergence of various kinds of overt performance among contemporary audiences (from tweetseats to fandom to post-show discussions) is evidence of a cyclical return: ‘audience members are discovering new ways to perform in the theatre in this twenty-first century which are often remarkably evocative of nineteenth-century performances’ (p. 174). Part Two details these contemporary audience performances across four chapters: audience as critic, as community, as consumer, as co-creator. Each chapter braids together key conceptual ideas with empirical research and a detailed case study.

In many ways Heim's discussion echoes a recurring admiration for those boisterous audiences of the nineteenth century who were loud, made their opinions known, and dictated to the stage who was in charge. In contrast, twentieth-century audiences are presented as cowed, dictated to by etiquette and the authority of the stage. Audiences, Heim suggests, fell into a ‘stupor’ and needed to ‘break out of their inertia’ (p. 80). Such a lament neglects consideration of what might have been gained through different kinds of more intense attention, perhaps inevitable in a book that focuses on overt performances and not on cognitive, emotional or interior responses.

As Heim notes in her conclusion, the emergence of different forms of audience performance is ‘a wonderland for some and a dystopia for others’ (p. 173). Certainly we can no longer presume that we know what an audience is. In exploring and understanding the diversity of what it means to be an audience the hybrid approach combining empirical, historical and conceptual research presented in this book is precisely what is needed.