Lisa Lewis's monograph Performing Wales is a bold attempt to account for and interrogate the complex relationship between performance and collective identity and action. Whilst its main focus is on Welsh culture (with a number of contextual examples drawn from further afield), it deals with issues of memory, place and language that apply in many other contexts. Its main proposition is to deal with Wales as an entity that incorporates two languages; Lewis describes the cultural experience of those for whom the negotiation of identity across a linguistic divide is a constant source of complexity and reflexivity. Accordingly, the book is implicitly critical of ‘the inability to consider the Welsh-language dimension in discussing Welsh culture as it appears in English-language scholarship about theatre and performance’ (p. 9).

Performing Wales addresses this deficiency by counterbalancing critical reference to some mainstays of performance studies (such as Taylor, Conquergood, Roach, Diamond) and postcolonial studies (such as Bhabha) with a more eclectic terminology drawn from the work of Welsh figures such as the philosopher J. R. Jones, the historian Prys Morgan and the curator and poet Iorwerth Peate. For example, the discussion of cenedl (nation) is enriched by the poet Waldo Williams's image of cadw tŷ mewn cwmwl tystion (‘keeping house in a cloud of witnesses’) – a formulation which not only provides a novel starting point for discussion but also stresses that cenedl is to be experienced as an action rather than as an object. Importantly, it also implicitly concedes its own ‘foreignization’ through translation, and as such provides a crucial example of Heideggerean poiesis – ‘a threshold occasion where something moves away from itself to become something other’ (p. 171) – which becomes a key concept in the book.

Using the broad headings ‘Heritage’, ‘Festival’ and ‘Theatre’, Lewis discovers this poiesis in a range of Welsh institutions, practices and events, each of which enacts a different performative, poietic estrangement and reconciliation of itself in the process of its exposition. For the National Eisteddfod of Wales and the theatre company Brith Gof, poiesis relates to construction – their ‘capacity to make, or to enable becoming’ (p. 142), of new senses of identity; for the St Fagans National Museum of History, it encompasses a negotiated ‘making and breaking’ (p. 78) of cultural constructs; whilst for the 2009 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC, it involved the ‘revelation’ of collective memory. These different applications of poiesis nuance a largely optimistic view of performance as an agent of cultural identity formation within Lewis's work.

Such optimism constitutes one of my (few) caveats about Performing Wales. Lewis's approach posits a kind of Welsh citizen-spectator capable, and desirous, of apprehending the complexity and contingency of the identity-formation projects within which her own life is played out. This may have been persuasive twenty years ago, with the coming of the millennium and the establishment of the Welsh Assembly (later known as the Senedd), and before the international advance of disaster capitalism, right-wing authoritarianism and alternative facts, but it feels rather remote as an approach today. The 2010s have also seen a grand resurgence of British nationalism, both banal (in Billig's sense) and overt; and in that climate, the postulation of a distinct Welsh identity (particularly where the use of Welsh is foregrounded) has greater potential to incite antagonistic responses from diversity denialists. Similarly, whilst Lewis's performance studies-based approach retains an underlying sense of generosity and openness to redefinition and change, its capacity to refute the more ‘functional’ demands being placed on the university by the pressures of marketization is debatable.

Nonetheless, Performing Wales is hugely welcome. Its application of terms, ideas and works drawn from the Welsh language is intricate and rigorous, its scope is broad, and a good deal of its critical outlook is innovative and original. It makes a hefty contribution to contemporary studies of Wales and Welsh culture, but also poses interesting questions about performance studies as a critical method in times of great political and social flux.