This excellent book represents the first serious and sustained attempt to establish utopian drama as a distinct and distinctive field of study. Inspired both by the ‘near absence of attention to drama within the field of Utopian Studies’ and also a similar lacuna in theatre studies, Adiseshiah offers a remedy by providing a rich transhistorical analysis across a considerable time frame, from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century (p. 2). Her attention is focused on to what effect, and/or affect, dramatists and theatre-makers have staged the utopian imaginary, and also on why their efforts have attracted so little critical and scholarly attention. To this end she has selected examples to reflect a diversity of approaches but also to establish something akin to a genealogy of the ‘dramatic representation of utopian societies’ on Western stages (p. 30). Like any compelling transhistorical study, Utopian Drama succeeds because of the strength of its framework.

Chronologically organized in six chapters, the first of which, in combination with the introduction, provides a very useful overview of the existing literature and the challenges and potentials of its topic, Utopian Drama excavates the particularities of each period, analysing the ways in which a range of contexts – theatrical, social, cultural, gendered, racialized, political – condition the articulation of utopian longing. Beginning with the Old Comedy of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, its author takes us on a very pleasurable journey via Margaret Cavendish’s Restoration plays of the 1660s, George Bernard Shaw’s eccentric utopian experiments of the early twentieth century and Howard Brenton’s utopian trilogy of the late 1970s and the 1980s, to the contemporary stage, which she argues ‘no longer appears obligated to represent utopia’ but instead experiments with ‘staging performative exchanges about utopian possibility’ that function as ‘utopian counter-narratives to the fatalism of current political discourse’ (p. 159, italics in the original). Her examples here include Mojisola Adebayo’s STARS (2016), and a number of short plays by the New York-based African American playwright Cesi Davidson, which are marked by formal and linguistic audacity, and quite extensive use of the fantastic.

Among Adiseshiah’s more powerful early moves is to reach back beyond Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which is typically seen as the genre’s foundational text, to the comedies of Aristophanes and his contemporaries. These plays, she convincingly argues, are replete with golden-age utopian motifs and, moreover, because of their ‘formal plasticity and anarchic disregard for thematic and ideological discipline’, are extremely well suited to the conjuring of ‘alternative worlds’ (p. 62). This idea of the theatre as a space particularly well suited to communal utopian imagining acts as a kind of suture thereafter, threading together the chapters that follow. Cavendish’s closet dramas The Female Academy (1662), Bell in Campo (1662) and The Convent of Pleasure (1668) – which establishes a separatist female utopia dedicated to female empowerment – are read as determinedly and effectively disrupting patriarchal, Morean assumptions. All three are understood by Adiseshiah as precursors to the more celebrated experimental utopias of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a critical move which ‘encourages us to think again about the narrative of the development of the literary utopia’ (p. 97). Similarly, her chapter on Shaw sees his focus on the utopian potentials of longevity, in Back to Methuselah (1921), for instance, as extending the limits of the genre in productive and underappreciated ways.

More’s Utopia establishes the well-ordered city as utopia’s ideal location, and is anti-hedonistic in the sense that it valorizes rationality and education, but Adiseshiah is intent on turning our attention to bodily and/or sensual utopias, or utopias of pleasure or abundance, arguing that utopian drama has specialized in these forms from the outset. In Sore Throats (1978), Bloody Poetry (1984) and Greenland (1988), she notes, Brenton ‘centres the human body and ordinary life’ as the site of utopian possibility, privileging felt experience, in order to critique the logic of capitalist consumption (p. 157). If it is Adiseshiah’s goal to prove to theatre scholars and those in the wider field of utopian studies that there is life in these plays, that they are still potent goads to ethical and political reflection, she most definitely succeeds.