Sound studies have become one of the liveliest fields of interdisciplinary humanist study, evidenced in new anthologies and international conferences concerned with the sounding arts and the so-called ‘sonic turn’. Adrian Curtin's Avant-Garde Theatre Sound finds its inspiration in this work and adds, importantly, a theatre voice to the various disciplinary perspectives that have stimulated this conversation. In theatre and performance studies, we have been immersed in theories of embodiment, interrogations of space, and, more practically, matters of voice and speech, but, with the exception of more technically oriented texts for sound designers, there has been a surprising scholarly silence on the subject of sound. It is easy to agree with Curtin, then, that theatre and performance scholars have given the topic ‘short shrift’ (p. 4) rather than considering the production and reception of sound as a ‘marker of socio-historical circumstances of artistic creation’ (p. 5).

Curtin's book focuses on sonic modernity, theatre and performance of the avant-garde from the late nineteenth century to 1935, explored in four richly constructed chapters that range into music, visual arts, opera and cabaret. The first of these addresses imagined sound – how we hear between the lines, as it were, and how this constructs subjective experience – in works by Maeterlinck, Anton Chekhov and Wassily Kandinsky. The next turns to newer technologies of sound (from the phonograph to the first cinema soundtracks), with reference to Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau as well as a fascinating account of the théâtrophone, a phone-in listening service that allowed subscribers and users of coin-operated booths the opportunity to take in stage performances in London, Paris and elsewhere in Europe as well as in the United States – a kind of ‘live-casting’ avant la lettre (pp. 88 ff.). The third of Curtin's case-study chapters explores invented language and its soundscapes through analyses of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (1916), sound poetry, and some of the Futurists’ performances. The last and longest chapter asks, ‘what does it mean to hear affectively?’ (p. 143), a question that is familiar from John Cage's 4′33″. Here Curtin's work resonates importantly with a broader theoretical interest in matters of affect, and he provides a fascinating reading of Antonin Artaud's The Cenci. The deployment of sound in this avant-garde theatre, he suggests, responds to (and is created by) the impacts of a noisier life in the streets of the modern city (p. 197).

While his project embraces an international scope, it is singularly male, with women garnering only the most passing of references (and only Gertrude Stein more than once), and it seems odd that women should be silent in this otherwise vigorous sonic modernity. But Curtin's is a genuinely original book that effectively challenges received approaches to the theatrical avant-garde, one that more than accomplishes his goal to challenge the organizational categories of theatre history-making and of periodization and genre in modernist studies (p. 204).