The double nature of the title is discussed in Sophie Nield's neat Coda at the end of this fascinating collection of essays. ‘Performing survival’ shows how theatre and performance create possible future articulations of hope while ‘performing for survival’ shows how engaging with these activities embodies or materializes the possibility of survival itself, illuminating how the examples in question work in ‘registers of both presence and representation simultaneously’ (p. 241). Reflecting on the plethora of performative gestures that emerged around the ‘Je suis Charlie’ campaign (in the wake of the shootings at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015), Nield's contribution provides a reflective conclusion that illustrates how this book helps to articulate important social, political and cultural questions against a contemporary background of crisis and extremity. Nield's Coda expresses clearly how the book is balanced on a delicate knife-edge position – enabling readers to understand the material and symbolic gestures developed in the creative practices under discussion without ‘diminishing or trivializing the significant impacts which they made on real people in real circumstances’ (p. 246).

The book is divided into five parts and one of the strengths of this collection lies in the sheer diversity of the examples considered. The editors point to recurring ideas about space which help to unite the essays by calling on Lefebre's ideas to suggest how these performances of extremity show spaces as ‘always in the process of being written and rewritten’ (p. 4). Thus Lisa Peschel's essay foregrounds the precarious space of the Terezin Ghetto as articulated by a group of Czech-Jewish survivors twenty years after the Second Word War, while Ananda Breed and Alice Mukaka take on the space of cultural memory and ethnic identities in post-genocide Rwanda. Considerations of carceral space feature in Patrick Duggan's account of ‘radical resistance’ among prisoners in the Maze prison during the conflict in the 1980s in Northern Ireland, while Katie Beswick considers conflicting readings of the British council estate as a site of urban marginality. The second uniting factor of the essays is that the practices discussed were created in the moment and not as a reflection on the ‘crisis’ that generated them. The book opens by considering theatre in sites of conflict with an account of cultural troupes in the Eritrean war by Christine Matzke along with Breed and Mukaka's chapter. The second part focuses on historical practices with Peschel's chapter and Amanda Stuart Fisher's account of the work of Charlotte Delbo's act of solidarity in resisting Nazi occupation through theatre and activism. Switching to a consideration of form in the third part, Cariad Astiles discusses the possibility of using puppetry as a creative tool for subversion, and Macelle Mahala examines the work of Congolese playwright, Sony Labou Tansi. This section is completed by Samer Al-Saber's description of the fraught relationship between Palestinian theatre artists and the Israeli office of censorship. Two chapters offering examples from the UK follow, both of which focus on ideas of community, where, alongside Beswick's chapter, Graham Jeffrey, Neill Patton, Kerrie Schaefer and Tom Wakeford reflect on the work of Theatre Modo's circus projects in north-east Scotland. I found it unhelpful for this section to make such a strong distinction between ‘insider and outsider’ collaboration, as all the examples are surely based on highly complex relationships between artists, inhabitants and resources. In the final two chapters, Alwyn Walsh and Patrick Duggan turn from aesthetic theatre practices to ‘social performance strategies’ to examine the impact of performative gestures surrounding political discourses of asylum and nationalism, respectively.

This is a strong collection which examines voices, practices and places that are often overlooked in theatre scholarship as well as in general political discourse. Each chapter stands on its own and readers looking for specific examples will find this a very valuable source of information and perspective. Taken as a whole, the book also works well in asking overarching questions about what motivates people in extreme conditions to ‘express dissent or a desire for change’ (p. 6); what role theatre might play in that; and how this might inform us on a broader sociopolitical, theoretical or philosophical level.