In his introduction to Rafaëlle Jolivet Pignon's La représentation rhapsodique, Joseph Danan reminds the reader that the recent history of Western theatre exists in a perpetual stage/text dichotomy. This dichotomy perpetuates a sometimes contentious relationship between drama and theatre – both being incidentally designated by the same word in the French language, théâtre – the origins of which can be found at the very beginning of the twentieth century, within theatre's search for independence from literature. If the previous century has witnessed consequential experiences, such as Antonin Artaud's, trying to overcome this duality, the fact remains that, as philosopher Henri Gouhier stated in 1989, theatre is often considered an art à deux temps, an art in two phases: first the written text (creation), then the staged text (re-creation). However, Rafaëlle Jolivet Pignon's subtitle, Quand la scène invente le texte (or, when the stage invents the text) underlines the fact that, in a range of contemporary performances, phases and times might be less successive than it seems. What is, then, the place and status of the text if it is no longer first?

French theatre studies and critics have for more than a decade now tried to find a coherent notion that could define this phenomenon, the most common and employed being Bruno Tackels's écriture de plateau (stage-writing). If the expression has the advantage of describing clearly the end of a two-phased creation, it also carries the inconvenience of borrowing its lexical field from literature – and the history repeats itself. Following such a terminological lead, Pignon's aesthetical approach proposes using the concept of rhapsody, a poetic and musical image developed by French theatre theorist Jean-Pierre Sarrazac in the 1980s in an attempt to characterize the composite art that is theatre. By defining the performance as rhapsodic, when Sarrazac employed the adjective to categorize the drama, Pignon alludes to messy arrangements and scattered fragments, describing a complexity of contemporary composition that reflects the complexity of the world itself. She thus emphasizes the end of the single narrative.

Pignon chooses to test her conception by analysing the use of textual material in works by five very different major artists: Mnemonic by British director Simon McBurney, Hey Girl! by Italian director Romeo Castellucci, Il Silenzio by Italian director Pippo Delbono, Winch Only by Swiss director Christoph Marthaler and Ricercar by French director François Tanguy. The author considers these performances emblematic of a creative process in the European artistic landscape that integrates into their scenic writing ‘la “crise du drame”’, the crisis of drama (p. 353), which originally designated the end of an absolute system (see Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama (1956)). In these case studies, textual material needs to be understood in an open, complex sense, and this is the purpose of the book. The volume brings together the written text with the other just as important texts, such as those spoken, visual, quoted, but also embodied (as in the one written through and by the performer's body). By putting the stage at the very centre of her approach, Pignon investigates the way such works reinvent a dramatic form, through the lens of three new kinds of rhapsodes: the stage director or the author of the work, the actor or the co-author, and the spectator, a partner invited by the work and whose ‘imaging activity’ (‘activité imageante’, p. 363) is necessary to the theatrical dispositif and its creative process. Thereby, according to Pignon, when the text is no longer first, the theatrical space serves as the frame of a representation that develops by sequences and arises with an editing process. Representation is then about rhythm, mental landscapes and sensitive trajectories offered. The meaning is never given: it emerges little by little, sometimes long after the performance has ended, and becomes a visual and sound perception, but also an imaginary projection, the spectator growing into a relay of the theatre director. By shaping what could be considered a tentative poetic of contemporary theatre and performance, Rafaëlle Jolivet Pignon not only confirms the necessity of going over the so-called ‘two phases’ of text and performance, of creation and re-creation, but also calls forth a muddled complexity, turning this disturbance into a constitutive component of the works.