The late German theatre and performance artist Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) remains still widely unknown to non-German audiences and theatre scholars. This collection of articles is therefore a welcome introduction to Schlingensief for English readers, and a comprehensive outline of the director's career in various media (film, television, theatre). The ‘List of Titles’, an exhaustive reading list in addition to the bibliographies that end each individual article, and an introduction by the editors entitled ‘Background, Inspiration, Contexts’, point towards a collection designed to present Schlingensief to unfamiliar audiences rather than to engage critically with its subject.

Following a foreword by peer film director Alexander Kluge and the editor's introduction, the book is structured into twelve short articles each focusing quite tightly on a small number of Schlingensief's works (films, television, theatre performances and public interventions). While very efficient in providing the reader with an ample spread of the director's artistic interventions, this structure also produces repetition as the authors find themselves exploring the recurrent patterns and themes that inhabit Schlingensief's world, asking the same critical questions and, thus, producing very similar analysis and conclusions around his performances. Pieces such as Freakstars 3000 (a television programme based on the casting-show format shot at a home for people with physical and mental disabilities) and Please Love Austria (a week-long installation in central Vienna which explored Austria's far-right Freedom Party's inclusion in government) are described in detail, as is their function and impact on the context in which they were performed. Their politics, their public engagement and the controversy that surrounded them are aspects that the articles particularly bring to the fore.

While most of the articles are descriptive and offer little critical analysis, some (Scheer, Varney, Forrest and Beuker), in my view the strongest, engage critically with Schlingensief's theatre and relate it to wider performance-studies questions such as audience participation, performance as political intervention, performance and public space, etc. Some problems remain, however, around the way the collection has chosen to approach Schlingensief's work. Most of the articles in the collection stay dangerously close to the director, undermining the authors’ ability to engage critically with their subject, and producing hagiographical pieces that are too often in awe of it. This means that overall Schlingensief's work remains critically unchallenged. There is no critical engagement with the ethical questions around Schlingensief's interventions in other countries (especially in Africa). Berka's article mentions how the deaths of 9/11 were compared in ‘a problematic manner’ to African hunger victims in Schlingensief's film The African Twintowers, without considering this statement further (p. 176). Equally, personal accounts of performances, films and television programmes receive little critical questioning. Umathum's account of the performance Terror 2000 describes the lasting effect that the show had on her personal life and her boyfriend's imposed participation when one of the actors ran to him and ‘taped him by his ankles and was dragging him by the arms to the stage’. She states, ‘The situation was anything but enjoyable’, dedicating no attention to the ethics of actor–audience interaction in the piece (p. 67).

The collection closes with an interview with Schlingensief, adding to the book's documenting profile. Hopefully, this first English publication will fulfil its aims and attract scholars to this extraordinary practitioner.