Engaging with watching theatre as an embodied activity, Fensham offers a stimulating alternative to theories of spectatorship that emphasize the visual. She applies a visceral, sensorial and critical mode of watching in order to ‘enter imaginatively into the performative labour of each performance’ (p. 20) she discusses. Each chapter highlights an aspect of this embodied experience. The concept of the body-double in Deborah Warner's Medea (2000) brings to the fore the ‘multiple codings of corporeal signs in textual and live bodies’ (p. 45). Kristeva's theories of the abject and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the assemblage provide keys for reading smell-bodies as vulnerable figures of masculinity, permeated with difference in Barrie Kosky's 1998 King Lear. The corporeality of performative speech in Anne Bogart's Miss Julie (1997) points at the ‘visceral complexity to the erotic tensions’ (p. 124) simmering between the main characters, providing an alternative reading of desire. Artaud's and Deleuze's rhetoric of the ‘body without organs’ helps to unravel the way Romeo Castellucci stages immediately recognizable figures that bear traces of history, but at the same time exceeds pictorial signs in order to explode myth in Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio's Genesi: The Museum of Sleep (1999).

The choice of major productions of mainly canonical works presented by leading international theatre companies is deliberate; Fensham aims at constructing a new aesthetic theory of genre for the theatre as well. In her corporeally focused criticism, she draws upon historical (re)interpretations of canonical dramatic texts in order to illuminate shifts in codes and conventions of theatre. She draws on recent thinking on genre in literature and feminist criticism in order to rethink tragedy as a genre, as ‘the creative imagination, in forms wrought by aesthetic and social frameworks, following how human subjects act when faced with individual ruin and global disaster’ (p. 167). To watch theatre implies being open, being alert and observing; hence a notion of responsibility to what is seen onstage in relation to the world at large is at stake. The affective and corporeal engagement that Fensham demands also entails an ethical responsibility. There is an engaged involvement between cultural aesthetics and politics, particularly in relation to gender and race issues, that fuels tragedy with a contemporary drive.