Drawn from the world of physics, ‘dark matter’ is the ‘nonluminous mass that cannot be directly detected by observation’ (p. 3), whose existence is ‘deduced from its gravitational effects on the motions of stars and galaxies’ (p. 201). As Sofer acknowledges, ‘My thesis is straightforward: Invisible phenomena are the dark matter of theatre’, which comprises ‘whatever is materially unrepresented on stage but not un-ignorable’ (p. 4; italics in original). Invisible, but exerting a gravitational force on all stage elements, dark matter is more than a textual device; it is ‘woven into the fabric of theatrical presentation’ (p. 4). Sofer's book is impeccably researched, with a glossary of terms that invites the reader to explore this methodology beyond the six studies offered here.

Grounded in phenomenology, this investigation focuses on acts of perception that move beyond the indexical toward a post-structuralist ‘presence of absence’. This deconstructionist frame drags the periphery to the centre and exposes the hidden, invisible, or unacknowledged as the organizing principle of each example. Not bound to a specific genre or style, dark matter is equally applicable to realism and the avant-garde, a ‘variety of approaches’ that ‘demonstrates the heuristic potential of spectral reading for literary scholarship and theatre performance studies’ (p. 12).

The first section tackles Christopher Marlowe's Faustus through J. L. Austin's speech acts, where conjuring in performance posits the act of conjuring itself. A Midsummer Night's Dream is explicated through a collision of classical and quantum physics, in which Bottom's desire functions as wave and particle. A tomographic criticism, in which a three-dimensional image is reconstructed via planar projections (p. 202) is developed to explore Aphra Behn's The Rover, where sexual politics of the masked female signify availability, while simultaneously unmasking that signification. Stanley Fish's concept of ‘self-consuming artifacts’ (p. 93) is used to explicate Sebastian's role in Suddenly Last Summer, and the metatheatrical devices in Arthur Miller's The Archbishop's Ceiling are explored via a focus on spatiality. The final section explores displacement associated with trauma in works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp. Haunting all sections is a sense of theatre as both present and non-present, providing an illusion of stability (of character, actor, narrative and setting) through a mediated process in which the audience itself becomes ‘dark matter’, the ‘invisible listeners (and observers) for whom the actors perform’ (p. 114).

Initiating his final section with a discussion of a medieval visit to the sepulture in which Christ's body is revealed to be absent, Sofer compresses his analysis until what is left is dark matter itself. The author recalls Anna Deavere Smith's ‘haunting performances’, which ‘remind us that, scripted or not, performance is always spectral’ (p. 145; italics in original). Sofer's anti-conclusion offers both insight and its effacement, underscoring the ‘paradox of dark matter . . . that something hidden is disclosed even as it eludes our sight’ (p. 145).