The great value of this contribution to the study of twentieth and twenty-first century theatre censorship is that in the course of eight carefully researched case studies, the author defines searching questions about our understanding of the nature of censorship: how and under what circumstances it was experienced in the past, and why in recent years the legitimacy of liberal assumptions about the absolute right to freedom of expression has been challenged, especially in the context of heighted awareness of politicized religious belief. Quoting the work of Nicholas Harrison on French literary censorship, she asks whether there really always is ‘inherent value in tout dire’ (p. 5)? Freshwater's case studies begin in 1920 with the blood-curdling attractions of the London Grand Guignol. They end in 2004 with the ‘competing fundamentalisms’ represented by the international furore sparked by the decision to halt performances of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti at Birmingham Rep following violent protests by the Sikh community.

Throughout the book, even as each case is set firmly within its specific historical context, we are invited to evaluate the controversies of the past through the lens of the critical and ethical dilemmas of the present. Thus while an account of Kenneth Tynan's failed 1966–8 campaign to promote a National Theatre production of Rolf Hochhuth's Soldiers, which accused Winston Churchill of war crimes, confirms the undoubted collusion between key establishment figures to block the attempt even as formal state censorship came to an end, the book's critique of the problematic blurred boundaries between fact and fiction in documentary and verbatim drama as exemplified by plays like David Hare's 2004 Stuff Happens raises worries about the probity of dramatized ‘truth’ claims. Freshwater's assessment of the long-term consequences of Mary Whitehouse's notorious prosecution of Michael Bogdanov as the director of Howard Brenton's 1981 The Romans in Britain under the terms of the 1956 Sexual Offences Act emphasizes the lingering fears generated by this action as well as the extent to which it still coloured the response to Sam West's 2006 Sheffield Crucible revival.

Moving back to the early twentieth century, it is refreshing to focus on an example of the under-researched popular commercial theatre as experienced in the Grand Guignol instead of the more familiar narrative of modernist battles with the censor. But there is historiographic relevance here, too. As Freshwater rightly states later in her chapter on ‘Capital Constraint: The Right to Choose?’, historians have paid far too little attention to the economics of theatre and the importance of commercial imperatives. While this chapter is perhaps less successful in its attempt to tackle wide-ranging examples of contemporary vulnerability to less overt censorship spawned by a dependency on both commercial sponsorship and state funding, it opens up the way to further substantial analysis. Overall, this book brings impressive scholarship and theoretical understanding to a major issue of our time. This achievement is somewhat undermined by one avoidable mistake: the name of the former bishop of Birmingham whose interfaith initiatives played such a decisive role in the challenge to Behzti is John, and not Jonathan, Sentamu.