This excellent study, which includes an extensive historical introduction and a comprehensive bibliography, acknowledges the difficulties of representing the Holocaust onstage, yet counters them by the need to bear witness to the atrocities as a legacy of the victims. Its shortcoming – an almost exclusive engagement with the past rather than with current meanings of its rich paradigms – is somewhat balanced by the contextualization of the works within the historical and biographical circumstances of their creation as well as their theatrical and critical reception history. The book's greatest merit lies in the meticulously annotated description of the plays’ plots at the expense of mere allusions to their theatricality.

Plunka's vantage point is Hannah Arendt's familiar concept of the ‘banality of evil’. It serves here to explore the Nazi mentality as represented in Donald Freed's semi-documentary The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Cecil Taylor's parable Good, Peter Barnes's grotesque Laughter! and Thomas Bernhard's onslaught on Austrian anti-Semitism, Vor dem Ruhestand. These plays’ common denominator lies in seducing the audience into adopting a non-hostile attitude towards the Nazi protagonists and becoming complicit with their mundane evil. Plunka's interpretations of Sobol's Ghetto, which revisits the controversial theatre in the Vilna Ghetto, and Arthur Miller's Playing for Time, a homage to the women's orchestra in Auschwitz, remain, however, at the level of conventional readings. Exceptional with regard to the role of culture during the Holocaust is the discussion of Liliane Atlan's Monsieur Fugue, which demonstrates the power of children's imagination to overcome the horrors of impending death. The strategies of interpolating past, present and future, and employing randomly juxtaposed images, are traced back to Jarry, Artaud, Ionesco, Gatti and other dramatists of the absurd. Stylized Artaudian techniques are likewise exploited to depict the struggle of French female inmates in an extermination camp to counter the German ‘attack on the body’ (p. 73) doctrine, in Charlotte Delbo's Who Will Carry the Word?. The detailed description of how this discreet play conveys corporeal suffering in absentia is one of the finest, and – together with the discussion of the plays on survivors’ memory – the epistemologically most updated accomplishment of Plunka's study. Another commendable novelty is the exposure of the intricate behind-the-scenes story, replete with foul play and neo-Marxist manipulations, of the genealogy of the saccharine, de-ethnicized Broadway version of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Two chapters devoted to plays on Aryan responsibility dialectically (perhaps too much so) contrast the chapters dealing with heroism, moral responsibility and dignity in the ghettoes and concentration camps. Prominent in the second category is the analysis of George Tabori's epic-ritual The Cannibals, which leaves open the moral questions involved in feeding upon a dead fellow inmate's flesh. It remains, nevertheless, unclear why Tabori's black comedies such as Jubilee, My Mother's Courage or Mein Kampf, the absolute epitome of Shoah dramaturgy, remain entirely unaddressed in this book. Its weakest sections are those devoted to Israeli Holocaust plays. Plunka's discussion of Motti Lerner's Kastner, Joshua Sobol's Ghetto, Leah Goldberg's Lady of the Castle and Ben-Zion Tomer's Children of the Shadow reveals his ignorance of local contexts and lack of acquaintance with prominent Israeli Shoah studies, surpassed only by the author's disregard for German Holocaust drama scholarship. However, these shortcomings, and the odd lack of reference to works created after the 1980s, do not detract from the importance of this extensive, sensitive and insightful book.