Performing the Eighteenth Century: Theatrical Discourses, Practices, and Artefacts is a synthesis of the discoveries that the research group ‘Performing Premodernity: Exploring Cultural Heritage through the Drottningholm Court Theatre’ has made over its five-year existence. The book is divided into three parts and includes contributions by ten authors. Editors Meike Wagner and Magnus Tessing Schneider both contribute to the first, theoretical part, which also features chapters by Willmar Sauter and Mark Tatlow. Petra Dotlačilová and Maria Gullstam, on the other hand, do the heavy lifting in the middle section, focusing on ‘Practical Questions’. The last part deals with challenges encountered in actual performances on the Drottningholm stage. Despite a variety of methodological perspectives, Performing the Eighteenth Century still functions as a coherent whole: its authors not only refer to the same praxis-informed examples but are also aware of each other’s ideas and terminology and actively seek to apply them. This brings the book far closer to a traditional single-authored monograph than a collection of loosely related individual chapters.

The main objective of the Performing Premodernity project, explicitly articulated in the volume’s Introduction by Schneider and Wagner, was to define the conditions under which a permanent dialogue between artist-practitioners and scholars could develop. The book begins with a series of research questions, the most important of which are: ‘What can artists learn from theatre scholars when it comes to performing historical works on stage today? And what can theatre scholars learn from today’s artists when it comes to understanding the works and practices of the past?’ (1). In order to answer these questions, the members of the research group engaged in several workshops in which they investigated, and in some cases tested, their theoretical hypotheses. The empirical evidence acquired in these experiments was then used to find the middle ground between ‘the literalist branch of the HIP [Historically Informed Performance] movement’ (7) and the much more common Regietheater. The proposed alternative to this binary opposition is what Wagner calls ‘historiographical praxeology’ (10) and what Sauter describes as ‘aesthetic historicity’ (47).

The first chapter in the Theoretical Questions section was written by Jette Barnholdt Hansen. While her contribution is not as polished as the other chapters in this section – the author died before the research project was completed – Hansen’s examination none the less contains an intriguing suggestion that any contemporary performance of a historical work must always also consider the diachronic factors. What matters in such performances, she suggests, is kairós, or the ‘timing’ of theatrical delivery (17).

Wagner’s explanation of the relationship between historical scholarship and theatrical practice, which follows next, is based on a study of four performative parameters: ‘relationality, temporality, corporeality, and materiality’ (35). Using the 2015 workshop in the Drottningholm Court Theatre during which Mozart’s duet ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni was experimentally performed in several different areas of the stage, Wagner demonstrates how the interaction of these parameters affects the audience’s perception of a performance. ‘By mounting productions of historical works’, she argues, ‘we produce both historiographical sources and – as paradoxically as it may sound – historiographical experiences’ (38). Such an approach fills in one of the voids that traditional scholarship cannot address: it gives the researcher an indication of how the first audiences might have experienced an original production. The one potential reservation about this hypothesis is that while Wagner’s method is meant to be deductive (24), it relies on a small sample size: one rehearsal or even a multi-day workshop is hardly enough to justify the kinds of theoretical generalizations that scholarship usually craves.

Wagner’s other contribution to Performing the Eighteenth Century comes in the third part of the book, in her summary of the panel discussion at the 2016 International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) conference. Here, Wagner’s own voice retreats into the background and only emerges sporadically. Still, her interventions in the discussion on the relationship between theatre scholarship and creative practice are not only subtle but quite insightful, perhaps because this was the only time in the course of the project when a working director was present and could weigh in on the debate, providing a counterpoint to scholars’ speculations.

Sauter, too, makes several contributions to Performing the Eighteenth Century. In his first chapter, he proposes that any performance of a historical work must begin by examining the connections between three related phenomena: ‘Artefacts, Archives, and Artists’ (52). In his case study (the workshop of two scenes from Le nozze di Figaro) the artefact was the Drottningholm Theatre building and the archive was the opera itself, while the artists were the two singers on the stage in 2015 (51). Though the selection of the authorities on whom Sauter relies to flesh out his alliterative triad is so eclectic as to border on idiosyncratic – he borrows successively from ‘Hannah Arendt, Thomas Postlewait, Jacques Derrida, David Wiles, Fredric Jameson, and finally Bertolt Brecht’ (56) – the fact that other participants in the Performing Premodernity project have successfully adopted Sauter’s distinction clearly demonstrates its heuristic potential.

Sauter’s second chapter, an analysis of the reasons for the failure of a 2016 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Drottningholm Theatre, offers an even more persuasive argument in favour of a historically informed approach to performance. Sauter’s awareness of historical, social and intellectual contexts enables him to explain very compellingly why Antoine Fontaine’s stage design and Ivan Alexandre’s directorial concept interfered with Mozart’s music and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s words, being far better suited to a more neutral theatre space than Drottningholm’s fully functional baroque stage. Sauter’s application of his own theories is consistent and organic and seriously undermines the unconditional belief in the inevitability of Regietheater.

This same view is also expressed in Schneider’s lively discussion of ‘Contemporaneity in Historically Informed Performance’. Because his exploration begins with a reference to the Polish critic Jan Kott, who was instrumental in promoting and defending the first generation of postmodernist directors, Schneider’s rebuttal is far more subversive than if he had opted for a more categorical dismissal of directorial theatre. In his view, ‘champions of Regietheater’, who are usually seen as ‘progressive’, and ‘champions of Werktreue’, who are typically labelled as ‘reactionary’, should both be considered extreme (83), the former because they eventually gravitate towards the ideological and the latter because they choose to ignore the subjective. He proposes instead ‘a return to the concept of contemporaneity’ (85), wherein the sole criterion of a performance’s success is its ability to ‘engag[e] both the artists and the audience in a creative exchange with the text and with the past evoked by the text’ (86). And this goal is just as easy to accomplish within the confines of a historically restricted environment such as the flat-winged proscenium stage in Drottningholm as it is in any newly built black-box theatre.

The last chapter in the theoretical part of the book is Tatlow’s ‘Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos and the Search for an Affective Practice’. His analysis focuses on the ‘first performances by five of [the cantata’s] original singers’ (111). While his objectives are ostensibly limited – to determine how historical research could shed light on the notion of ‘performative flexibility, and how such flexibility might have been expressed at the time’ (111) – Tatlow’s observations lead him to several intriguing observations about the nature of any performance of historical materials. The most promising of these is perhaps the concept of ‘affective potential’ (135) as that unique quality of past artworks which enables them to communicate with the present.

In the second part of the book, the experiments in the Performing Premodernity workshops are no longer merely the means to an objective but become the principal research subject. This does not make the chapters any less interesting. On the contrary, in many ways, the analyses in this section are even more convincing. Both of Dotlačilová’s chapters, for example, are superbly researched and supported with high-quality visual sources, and explore an area of study that is frequently underrepresented in theatre history. In her first contribution, Dotlačilová focuses on the ‘materiality’ of eighteenth-century costume and its behaviour on baroque stages; she is particularly interested in the interaction of candlelight with reflective and light-absorbing fabrics and in the effect the use of these materials has on the audience’s perception. Her second chapter describes in detail the experiments in designing costumes for the four versions of the project’s production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet’s Pygmalion. She demonstrates how these carefully (re)constructed costumes belonged simultaneously to the artefact, the archive and – through being used in an actual performance, rather than on a museum mannequin – also to the artist (184).

In Gullstam’s chapter, the author, who was the dramaturge for Pygmalion, summarizes the research that preceded the rehearsals and explains the intellectual processes that informed the creative team’s decisions. ‘In Pygmalion Rousseau deliberately detached music, language, and pantomime from one another, and then combined them in new ways’ (167), she writes. Though Rousseau’s innovations had relatively little immediate influence, they none the less represented an important step in a transition from premodern to modern theatre and anticipated the reforms that followed a century later.

The two sets of interviews that conclude the second part of the book do not add anything radically new, but they do provide an insight into how working practitioners deal with the HIP approach. The third section consists of three chapters. The first two, by Sauter and Wagner, were mentioned earlier; the last one is David Wiles’s keynote address given on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Drottningholm Court Theatre. While this chapter is just a transcription of the remarks delivered at a live event, Wiles offers enough tantalizing commentary to justify its inclusion in the collection.

Performing the Eighteenth Century is a labour of love. It is the result of the work of a small group of enthusiasts working on a couple of stages preserved well enough to justify their experiments. The researchers worked with relatively modest means – no full orchestras or proper production budgets, merely grant money that allowed them to recruit a handful of musicians – but they did this with great passion and expertise. Though the group’s attempts to counter the excesses of Regietheater are a daunting task, their arguments are solid and their approach quite pragmatic, avoiding the usual academic rage at being ignored by the artists. The main value of their book is in its reassessment of the HIP movement, which can be just as dogmatic (if less ideological) than Regietheater. The authors’ case might have been even stronger if somewhere in their investigations they had also addressed other comparable performance trends, for instance, the ‘Original Practices’ approach to William Shakespeare’s plays. Even without doing this, however, Performing the Eighteenth Century is a coherent and well-structured book that more than holds its epistemological ground.