C. seeks to challenge the Western scholarly tradition that subordinates Plato's style of prose dialogue to the overriding philosophical commitment to pursue and convey truth by logical argumentation. That commitment, he claims, is an anachronism which variously either discounts Plato's form of written dialogue as an obstacle to the truth or welcomes it only as a ‘successful device for pedagogical or (meta)philosophical purposes’ (p. 2). Either way, it prioritises content over form, message over medium, and Plato the dialectician over Plato the artist; in the process, the ‘original unity of the Platonic dialogue is cancelled for a selective reading’ (p. 3). C. aims to restore this ‘original unity’ by (a) recovering a lost tradition of Plato as a great – or even the greatest – of ancient dramatic poets, and by (b) exposing within the dialogues Plato's case for their use as guides to the best possible life for humans (i.e. the culmination of Plato's own conception of philosophy). However, it must be noted at the outset that if the modern discipline of philosophy sees itself as standing aloof from poetry then still this is not entirely anachronistic, for it was Plato himself who famously introduced the ‘ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’. To succeed in resolving that quarrel, C. must do more than vindicate the importance of poetic form in Plato's writing: he must also do justice to the content of Plato's philosophy and explain why form and content here are interdependent. Unfortunately, while C. achieves the former requirement very well, he largely ignores the latter, with the result that this study somewhat inverts the error of the traditional view: it prioritises form over content, medium over message, and the artist over the dialectician.

The book's argument develops through three long chapters which deal respectively with: the dramatic character of Plato's dialogues themselves (Chapter 2); the scattered evidence for a tradition of Plato being taken for a dramatic poet both by a reading public and by literary theorists (Chapter 3); and the also quite scarce evidence that may point towards the ‘institutionalised’ dramatic performances of Plato's dialogues over several centuries, beginning at the Academy in Plato's lifetime (Chapter 4). In these last two chapters, C. leaves no stone unturned in his search for evidence, and his treatment of his sources is certainly careful and well-informed, but there is no way around his persistent reliance on a fair degree of speculation to pull this all into grounds for what are really quite demanding conclusions. In the fourth chapter he even goes so far as to make a virtue out of his dearth of material: the mere six pieces of evidence (from a Hellenistic statue of a Socratic-looking Silenus in Athens to a Roman mosaic suggesting a theatrical cast for a performance of Phaedo in Mytilene) are miscellaneous, drawn from across several hundred years, and are all subject to alternative interpretations – but it is this very ‘openness’, ‘richness of contexts’ and ‘variety’ that ‘implies a persistent, alternative tradition of Platonic interpretation’ (p. 155). While we may agree that these pieces are suggestive, they fall short of implying that much: there are simply too many other ways we might account for these materials.

Likewise, the third chapter relies on the close reading of just six passages, most of them quite late, to support the claim that in Plato's lifetime and for most of a thousand years afterwards, it was a commonplace that his dialogues were plays intended to be performed. C. goes on to supplement these sources with a very useful analysis of the ‘performance culture’ that surrounded all classical literature, especially in Plato's time. Once again, however, his conclusion stretches all this evidence too far: we may agree that he succeeds in making his really quite significant points that Plato's dialogues were typically read aloud in company, and that their form draws readers into a kind of experience of theatricality and performance, and even that they were designed for that purpose, without inferring C.'s further proposition that Plato put himself forward as an alternative dramatic poet writing plays for performance in a new kind of theatre, and was accepted as such by his reading public and by ancient literary theorists.

The arguments of his later chapters are ultimately unconvincing, but why does C. need them? The answer lies in his lengthy second chapter which contextualises the unique features of Plato's writing within the broader context of ‘prose dialogue’, and then derives from Plato's dialogues themselves (esp. Symposium, Republic and Laws) a theoretical account of their relationship to pre-existing dramatic poetry – what C. calls a ‘metatheatre of dialogue’. Accordingly, Plato's new variety of ‘philosophical dialogue’ was put forward by its author as a fourth genre of dramatic poetry (along with tragedy, comedy and satyr-play). This new genre was intended to supersede – and ultimately to replace – the others by combining all of their best features into a new form that can alone succeed in the truly grand project which theatre has set for itself, namely the use of imitative means (mimesis) to achieve in reality the best life possible for humans. But then it would have been a singularly disappointing result for Plato if nobody around him understood what he was doing or if nobody took up his challenge to transform their own lives and the life of their community through performance of his dialogues. Moreover, it is fair to say that such a negative real-world, historical outcome would stand as a rebuke to C.'s metatheatric theory itself: his proposal that the ‘original unity’ of the dialogues consisted in their successful combination of dramatic form with philosophical significance would come to nothing if in fact they had never succeeded in having any ‘philosophical significance’. Hence the need to demonstrate in the following chapters that Plato did, in fact, create a new institutional space for theatre at the Academy, that others did indeed follow this practice themselves for centuries afterwards and that everyone around Plato understood that this is what he was up to.

Despite the immense learning and the careful analysis on display throughout his second chapter, and despite the very useful insights gleaned from his thorough survey of the evidence for prose and dramatic dialogue before Plato and his comparative account of Plato's use of dramatic tropes and devices – all of which I highly recommend – the crux of this book's argument lies in the section called ‘The Platonic Dialogue’, and this is where philosophical content recedes to a vanishing point while dramatic form is given free rein in the delineation of the meaning of the dialogues. C. quite rightly infers a parallel between Plato and Parmenides (and Empedocles and Xenophanes) before him, all of them philosophers with strikingly new ideas who ‘appropriated the most powerful literary genre’ available to them at the time to promote those ideas (p. 58). As we know from the dialogues, Plato's new ideas were immense, profound and, above all, diverse. Yet these ideas are nowhere to be found in C.'s book. At best we might say that the theory of forms, which is itself intrinsically ‘mimetic’, implicitly provides the theoretical backdrop for C.'s reading of the Laws to be presenting itself as the ‘tragedy of life’ – i.e. the most effective means to promote the ideal within the becoming life of humans by imitative means. But if so, then C.'s argument may ultimately reduce to the one claim that Plato's dialogues were meant to be the perfect form of human mimesis (and hence of philosophy itself) while the traditional dramatic genres were just imperfect forms of that same thing. Yet this raises so many questions not even touched upon by C., despite being addressed at length by Plato in the theoretical and argumentative content of his dialogues.

There are some real gems of analysis in this book which make it a valuable read in spite of the challenges faced by its main thesis. Among them are the exemplary reading of Socrates' discussion of narrative modes from Republic 3, which shows convincingly that the real target of the discussion is Plato's own kind of writing (pp. 77–83); and the discussion of the transition to fully dramatic dialogue in Theaetetus, which wonderfully elucidates the ‘metatheatrical’ effect of reading this dialogue aloud in its original context (pp. 146–54). But though C. has set out to resolve decisively the question of why Plato wrote dialogues, and dialogues only, his proposed solution remains an interesting and original hypothesis in need of much more historical evidence and exegetical analysis.