These volumes offer different takes on the reception of Greek drama. Walton's book is an introduction to Euripides pitched at non-specialists, and in particular at anyone looking for an author for modern performance – the title alludes to Jan Kott's Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964–7). Hall and Harrop's collection of essays is a theoretical reflection on the recent explosion of work on the reception of classical drama in performance, which also seeks to establish the place of reception studies within cognate disciplines, not least theatre studies. They not only aim at different markets, but also tell different stories about the place of Greek tragedy in the modern context.

Walton's book takes a broadly thematic approach. The first part sets out the domestic, intimate and darkly humorous dimension of Euripidean tragedy; the second explores the ‘Grand Passions’ (war, revenge, mortals versus immortals, madness); the third considers the specifically theatrical dimension: Euripides’ self-conscious artifice, the ‘great roles’ (particularly female roles), which Walton argues are still one of the great attractions of Greek tragedy for actors, and finally a selection of modern playwrights that evoke some aspect of Euripides (mostly political or iconoclastic in some form). The book includes valuable consideration of neglected plays, such as Rhesus, although Walton's support of its doubtful ascription to Euripides is not particularly convincing. The thematic approach is certainly a brave one, but the danger of repetition is not always avoided.

Walton's pitch is that Euripides is unfairly neglected, victim of classicists’ insularity, the tyranny of booksellers and pigeonholing by drama specialists, all of which are rather overstated. Despite the many sideswipes at classicists, the tendency to revisit silly controversies of nineteenth-century philology, the insistence that great authors never nod, the lack of engagement with Euripides’ fragmentary plays (some of which are quite substantial and invalidate some of his generalizations), and the uncomplicated use of the comedian Aristophanes as a reliable theatre historian, the book is solidly grounded in recent work on Euripides in Classics that has stressed his theatrical self-consciousness and located him very firmly in his historical context. Walton is dismissive of attempts to boil Euripides down to a simple formula, but two recurring elements in Walton's account are Euripides’ realism and relevance (with the none-too-subtle connections between, e.g., Trojan Women or Hecuba and recent conflicts in the Balkans and Middle East). Euripides’ stark confrontation of ethical, political and personal issues is itself underpinned by stylization and convention (a point made by Aristophanic parody, which Walton neglects).

Hall and Harrop afford a more constructive view of approaches to Greek drama across and between Classics and other disciplines. Indeed the wealth of modern performances of ancient drama and approaches to them on display here rather undermines Walton's stance. There is an impressive range of contributors from well-established and up-and-coming scholars, and an admirably broad range of aspects of performance considered (including costume, gesture and physicality, spatial poetics translation, and so on). As an introduction both to the best of what is going on in classical reception, and to the theoretical issues, this is a major contribution to classical reception studies.

Most of the work here responds to Hall's article in Arion, 12, 1 (2004), pp. 51–89, reworked in this volume, which sought to theorize the reception boom. Hall's main point of reference, as for most of the contributors, is not so much Jaussian Rezeptionästhetik but a broad take on cultural materialism. Nonetheless, Hall ultimately advocates a pick ‘n’ mix approach to theory, and, as so often with classicists doing theory, I am left wondering whether this is not so much deriving new perspectives from theory as justifying what classicists would do anyway. Strong exceptions to this are the entertaining punch-up between Charles Martindale and Simon Goldhill over Kantian aesthetics, David Wiles's reminder that reception is usually (though not quite as uniformly as he implies) understood by classicists in broadly historicist (Jaussian) rather than communicative (Iserian) terms, Felix Budelmann's valuable introduction to cognitive approaches for the uninitiated (primarily theory of mind and Lakoffian models), and Rosie Wyles's excellent article on the semiotics of costume. Some essays are less rewarding (if there was a point to Freddy Ducreus's Deleuzean discussion, I didn't see it), but overall this is a tightly organized and important collection.