The rise of modernist spectating in Europe and the United States effectively severed the relationship between the audience and the public sphere. This provocative contention motivates Christopher B. Balme's The Theatrical Public Sphere and leads to his central question: Can the much-debated concept of the public sphere be adapted more precisely for the theatre, and, if so, redefine theatre's status?

From the outset, Balme offers a bleak diagnosis: the theatrical public sphere is no longer located inside the theatre. Its spatiality “must be calibrated less in terms of concrete spaces than through constantly changing sets of discursive, social and institutional factors” (22–3). Although Jürgen Habermas's notion of the bourgeois public sphere constitutes Balme's primary theoretical referent, he taps into the surge of interest in the public sphere through the work of Shannon Jackson and David Wiles and engages public sphere theorists including Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner. Unlike many analyses that conflate and confuse cognate concepts of the public, or consider it coterminous with audience, Balme successfully renders these concepts distinct. He concentrates on theatre studies and theatre sites, though his argument intersects with multidisciplinary arts practice and scholarship, including participatory art, relational aesthetics, and calls to reconfigure art from private spaces to new social contexts.

Balme delineates the concept of the theatrical public sphere both theoretically and historically, and in Chapter 1, “Locating the Theatrical Public Sphere,” he clarifies the agonistic public sphere as originating in a Greek model of theatre and the polis. Balme argues for a multifaceted definition of the theatrical public sphere “that includes the discursive potential of the Habermasian theory but is augmented by agonistic and ludic dimensions” (11). Insightfully, he positions his inquiry within debates between agonistic pluralism and deliberative democracy.

In Chapter 2, “Reciprocal Articulations: From Playbills to Blogs,” Balme shifts his attention to the undertheorized topic of “theatres as institutions” (48). He covers a broad complex of social interactions, though his specific interest is in the mediating practices between institutions and their publics. He traces the changing nature of theatrical institutions from the nineteenth-century playbill to Internet-based theatre criticism. In the new communicative practices of social media, Balme finds cause for optimism. A reinvigoration of the rules of theatre criticism can reconnect the theatrical public sphere with the “wider public sphere of genuinely important social and political issues” (73).

What are these issues? In the ensuing chapters, religion, race, and migration emerge as urgent concerns. In Chapter 3, “Openings and Closures: Puritans and the Pilloried Stage,” Balme explores antitheatrical movements, beginning with the closure of public theatres in seventeenth-century England. This inventive chapter questions traditional narratives of the prohibition: rather than a battle between the theatre and Puritan killjoys, the debate in fact opened “a new arena of primarily discursive combat” (75). In interpreting the closure as evidence of a functioning public sphere, Balme demonstrates how the frameworks of the public sphere can lead to new and sympathetic readings of antitheatrical texts.

One of the secondary themes of the book is the tension between religion and the theatrical public sphere. In Chapter 4, “The Prophet Onstage: Theatre, Religion and the Transnational Public Sphere,” Balme writes of internationalized controversies around Western theatrical representations of the prophet Muhammad. He explicates “transnational theatrical public spheres” (108) through examples of cancelled productions spaced a century apart: late nineteenth-century productions of Henri de Bornier's Mahomet planned for theatres in Paris and London and a 2006 cancellation of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Berlin Deutsche Oper. In Chapter 5, “Thresholds of Tolerance and the Publicity of Scandal,” Balme pairs censorship during the Weimar Republic with Romeo Castellucci's 2011 On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God. The latter incited protests in France and Italy; militant neofascist groups eagerly defined the theatre as a public space more clearly than the theatre spectators did. As in the case of Idomeneo, Balme notes that it is often “non-performance[s]” that “re-establish contact between the theatrical and the political public sphere” (138). These chapters bring to light the many contradictions of theatrical public sphere formation.

In his final chapter, “Distributed Theatrical Aesthetics and the Global Public Sphere,” Balme turns to “the new power of social networks to generate a controversy and sustain a public debate” (173). He analyzes works frequently categorized as postdramatic theatre to argue for the potential of social media to reclaim the public nature of theatre and to create a global public sphere through “political debate and mass-media attention” (180). Some readers may well disagree with this final conclusion or with Balme's overall premise that theatre has been relegated to political irrelevance as “the black box of artistic absorption” (14), “ill-designed for activism or other instrumental ends” (40). Yet Balme's book bravely provides a staging ground for advocates to contend with the marginalization of the political and social functions of theatre practice.

Balme concentrates on large-scale institutions, and attention to the economics of the theatrical public sphere would have been a worthwhile addition, particularly insofar as access to technology and online tools are so crucial to his final chapter. Additionally, though Balme's examples connect multiple continents, his focus is on the stages of the Global North, and, in particular, Europe. Its applicability beyond the development of Western theatre remains a lingering question, one that will no doubt be tested and examined by scholars to come.

The Theatrical Public Sphere is a masterful and vital contribution that provides a theoretical linkage between theatre studies and the public. It refines the public sphere in the context of performance—how it has functioned historically and how it continues to be transformed by changing practices of spectatorship and production. It will prove essential to researchers seeking rigorous theorizations of the public sphere in many contexts, and its implications for theatre studies demands serious consideration. If performance in its modernist manifestations “and more so in disciplinary theorizing” (174) has excluded the public sphere from its analytical framework, then theatre studies must also have a major role in a rectification.