Pannill Camp's The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France is an impressive achievement. Not satisfied with a coup d’œil or quick glance at the period, Camp employs a measured gaze that exposes the interconnected tissues among theatre, philosophy, and architecture in eighteenth-century France. His survey culminates in a complex enumeration on how “[e]nlightenment-era theatre architects represented theatre space in a new way that borrowed from optics, the physical study of light and vision” (5). The influence of optics led French architectural reformists to recalibrate the dimension, shape, and purpose of the stage in order to target the spectator's sensory experience. Camp's study, which ends with a discussion of Edmund Husserl and consciousness, not only educates its readers on theatre architecture but also provides a model for those writing about the phenomenology of the stage.

The book begins with two riddles. The first involves Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's enigmatic engraving “Coup d’œil du théâtre de Besançon” (View of the theatre of Besançon), an image of a theatre auditorium reflected in a human eye. The pupil in the engraving presents an odd contradiction. It is at once reflective and transparent. Camp believes “Coup d’œil” offers “a striking analogy between theatre architecture and ocular anatomy” (2). In other words, French architectural theorists at the end of the eighteenth century understood the playhouse “as a giant architectural eye” (2). How was this notion possible? The second riddle has a broader historical lens: What happened to perspective scenery? How did it come to disappear from modern stage design? Camp argues that the development began much earlier than most theatre histories report, commencing during “the most intensive period of theatre architecture reform in France's history,” between 1740 and the French revolution (3). The book traces the conceptual evolution of these ideas.

The two riddles correspond with Camp's two audiences. While the former localizes Camp's intervention in the field of architectural studies, the latter is more broadly construed within the field of theatre history. Because of the challenge of addressing two different audiences, both who have “written the French Enlightenment into an undeserved marginal place” (9), his study presents an intersection among a variety of discursive sources, including philosophy, theatre, and science. Camp casts his gaze on visual sources documenting veritable playhouses, architectural designs, and theoretical drawings of ocular geometry. Names familiar to theatre historians, such as d'Aubignac, Dubos, Voltaire, and Diderot, accompany less well-known architectural reformists, such as Ledoux, Pierre Patte, Charles de Wailly, and Marie-Joseph Peyre.

The two riddles also account for the structure of Camp's argument. The first half of the book surveys the philosophical shift between the seventeenth and eighteenth century—that between rationalism and empiricism—and its consequences regarding dramatic theory. The second looks more closely at how this shift altered perceptual notions of theatre space in France. The argument carefully traces the development of three reciprocal relationships between (1) empirical philosophy and dramatic theory, (2) experimental science and spectatorship, and (3) the study of optics and theatre architecture in the late eighteenth century. Given that the histories of these ideas “have usually been written separately” (9), Camp's book offers a detailed resource about the interdependence of these engagements.

The first portion of the book overlooks a familiar landscape, but Camp provides a fresh view. He distinguishes the seventeenth-century tendency to look at the stage as a type of mirror image—a truth-revealing reflection—from the eighteenth-century impulse to treat the stage as a window frame, enabling a transparent view of contemporary reality (60). The change correlated with the spread of empiricist ideas that emphasized the importance of sensory experience. Critics like Marian Hobson have accounted for this conceptual shift before, but Camp's distinction between the reflective and transparent model (informed by Ledoux's engraving) provides a useful metaphor that illuminates the relationship between philosophical and aesthetic trends in the eighteenth century.

The second portion of Camp's book showcases the complementary relationship between theatre and the sciences in France. Experimental science drew from and expanded theatrical notions of spectatorship. Scientists took to public demonstrations in cabinets, storefronts, and fairground theatres as a way of legitimizing their scientific knowledge in front of learned elites. In turn, this practice broadened French definitions of spectatorship. Theatre practitioners “increasingly saw theatre space as a field of guileless, truth-yielding transparency” (96). Theatre critics and architects wanted to reform the French stage, widen the spectator's field of vision, and remove obstructions like the onstage seats (banquets) in order to present the stage as a lens for the objective study of emotions.

The preceding discussions are previews for the conversation Camp hints at from the onset: the influence of optics on theatre architecture reform. He returns to Ledoux's engraving and expounds on its mysteries, analyzing the correspondence between theatre architecture and optics. He examines ways that “descriptions, diagrams, and mechanical models of the eye … comprehended the organ as a quasi-architectural entity” (187), and then demonstrates how “[t]he boldest neo-classical architects … mimicked the proportions of optical diagrams” (195). A demonstrative collection of illustrations of actual playhouses and conceptual designs substantiate Camp's claims with crystal clarity. The final chapter also brings to light how such ocular stage designs undermined and supplanted the practice of perspective scenery in France.

In establishing the historical precedence of the architectural reform movement, Camp delays the most important contributions of his study by more than a hundred pages. Although the first three chapters enrich the nuance of Camp's argument, those invested in learning more about the conceptual underpinnings of theatre architecture may forgo those and start with Chapters 4 and 5. Rhetorically, these stand independently and provide summaries of prior discussions sufficient to make the argument intelligible. Less a flaw than a necessity, this structure accounts for Camp's attention to two divergent audiences, whom he must familiarize with a largely understudied period. The book most certainly fulfills that goal, while also providing a major contribution to theatre history by examining a complex interpolation of architecture, philosophy, and science during the eighteenth century.