With personal anecdotes of performers and performances in Calcutta, an indication of the ways in which British laws from the 1800s still affect West Bengal, and a critique of performance studies that falls just short of an indictment, Chatterjee's conclusion of this book provides the justification for writing it. Wisely, he focuses on select individuals involved in Calcutta's theatre. Doing so, he may, as some earlier reviewers have noted, tend to underwrite the cult of singular personalities. While valorizing earlier individuals such as Girish Chandra Ghosh and Michael Madhusudhan Datta, who did, indeed, assume great risk pursuing art and politics on Calcutta's stages, Chatterjee does not exhibit excessive naïveté about these important figures, either. Regarding Datta, for instance, he does not ignore the complications in imagining two theatres – the mainstream colonial theatre manifested in Shakespeare and the antique and largely theoretical tradition of Sanskrit drama – as similarly ‘classical’, though he might work too hard to excuse Datta's attempt to develop an authentically Bengali genre from both of them. The criticism of Ghosh's devotion to Queen Victoria is understated but clear.

The Colonial Staged makes important contributions to the history of Bengali theatre, especially as Chatterjee's own translations provide a useful point of access into local scholarship. The author's introduction, which describes his surreptitious and risky entry into the crumbling Minerva Theatre, promises a book of intrepid history, a venture into unconsidered sources and unexpected material. Too often, however, the sources that confirm Chatterjee's theoretical assertions are culled from reviews, letters and other documents already found and analysed by Chatterjee's predecessors. Perhaps, then, his theory and methodology contribute more than his history. Following Antonio Gramsci and Homi Bhabha, he describes a wide variety of theatrical experiments as hybrid entities through which the literati of colonial Bengal pursued different, sometimes conflicting, objectives. Through this theoretical prism, Chatterjee sees the value of these hybrids. Datta and Ghosh, the actress Binodini and the actor Ardhendu Shekhar Mustaphi, and the playwright Upendranath Das, are, for the author, not merely sounding boards for contemporary theory, but real people with real interests, living their own colonial identities and working their way through their treacherous, colonized landscape. Chatterjee's people – including the sketch he provides of himself – illustrate contemporary theory and also provide a convincing premise for one of his concluding remarks: ‘Perhaps it is time to make fuzzy the lines of distinction between the academic and the creative’ (p. 292). And indeed, performance theory works best as a creative description rather than a formulaic prescription.