In the ‘Preface’ to his engaging monograph, French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris and Avignon, Edward Baron Turk explains that his intention is ‘to supply the reader with pertinent aesthetic and intellectual perspectives on aspects of contemporary French theatre, and to convey – and possibly arouse a like response in others – my sustained affection for the topic’ (p. xiii). Despite not being a seasoned theatre scholar, Turk nevertheless manages to deliver on both fronts. This is due, in no small measure, to his capacity to synthesize an enormous amount of information (one has the impression that he saw just about everything in France in 2006), and to articulate his enthusiasm in accessible and well-written prose. Turk's activity as an ‘amateur’ spectator between 2005 and 2006 is broken down into three sections. The first section focuses on the key productions that made up the ACT FRENCH festival in New York in the autumn of 2005, the second describes his odyssey through the Parisian theatre scene between January and June 2006; and part three chronicles his time at the Avignon Festival in July 2006. This fluid, almost picaresque, structure allows Turk to provide a panoramic view of French theatre. Some indication of the heterogeneous scope of the book is given if I mention that some of the practitioners and genres he deals with include (in no particular order), Théâtre du Soleil, Pascal Rambert, Rimini Protokoll, Joël Pommerat, Philippe Quesne, Claude Régy and Isabelle Huppert, Valère Noverina, the Comédie Française, boulevard theatre, stand-up comedy, opera and new circus. In between his informative performance reviews, Turk finds the time to explain the historical importance of theatre to French national identity since 1945, to reflect on the representations of ethnic minorities in contemporary work in France, and to investigate the threat posed to French theatre by President Sarkozy's policy of what can only be called cultural philistinism. While there is no argument or thesis professed in the book as such, I was impressed by the amount of contextual information provided in each chapter, and have no doubt that it will provide a useful introduction to undergraduate students and lay readers interested in French theatre. Specialist readers, however, might want to look elsewhere, since for all Turk's skill as a guide, much of what he says has been articulated by scholars in greater detail elsewhere. This is not meant to lessen Turk's achievements in French Theatre Today, simply to point out that more focused work remains to be done, if we are to understand the aesthetic, political and ecological significance of those practices which go by the name of contemporary French theatre.

No such caveat applies to Kimberly Jannarone's provocative new study of Antonin Artaud's theatre, Artaud and His Doubles. This is a thoroughly researched and intensive exploration of the aesthetic politics of Artaud's work, which focuses its attention on the collection of essays that make up The Theatre and Its Double – Artaud's best-known text in the anglophone world. To its great credit, Artaud and His Doubles is an anachronistic work in theatre and performance studies scholarship today. Instead of exploring a given theme or set of practices via a series of case studies (as has become the norm), Jannarone prefers to unfold a coherent argument, to tease out an original and troubling idea. Building on the small body of research by scholars such as Rainer Friedrich, Naomi Green and Stephen Koch, she sets out to show that Artaud is a reactionary playwright whose investment in irrationalism contributed to the development of a fascist mindset in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

Jannarone consciously positions herself against those practitioners (Brook, Grotowksi, Schechner) and thinkers (Sontag, Foucault, Derrida) who have argued for Artaud as a politically progressive playwright. According to Jannarone, Artaud's doubles are not Marx, Reich and Marcuse, but Hitler, Mussolini and Nietzsche. There are two aspects to Jannarone's revisionist methodology. First, she situates Artaud's ideas within the enervated political and ideological climate of the 1920s and 1930s; second, she undertakes a literalist reading of Artaud's language and theatre practice which refuses to interpret his fevered, hyperbolic suggestions for apocalypse and catastrophe as anything other than real.

For Jannarone, Artaud meant exactly what he said, and any attempt to understand his world view in terms of metaphor, dialectic or a homeopathy is seriously misplaced. Jannarone's argument has three movements. Section 1, ‘The Fight against Civilization; or the Rebirth of Tragedy’, contextualizes Artaud's ideas politically and historically, and highlights the extent to which the plague metaphor in Artaud's writing is haunted by fascist fantasies of destruction, death and war; Section 2, ‘Audience, Mass and Crowd’, explains how Artaud's theatre of cruelty, like the Nazi Thingspiel, articulates a desire to violate and transform the audience through an intense, painful affective shock, depriving it of autonomy and critical reflection; and Section 3, ‘Visions of Power’, finishes by drawing out the authoritarian parallels between the director and the fascist leader or Führer principle, before providing a close analysis of what one might call the ‘fascist poetics’ in Artaud's theatre practice itself. Jannarone is particularly good here in arguing for the sinister shift that took place in Artaud's directorial vision when he abandoned the collectivist ethic of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry for the more single-minded approach he adopted for Les Cenci (1935). While I do not have the space to articulate my response to Jannarone's thesis in the depth it merits in this short review, I am reluctant to accept it in its totality. For me, her attempt to posit Artaud as a fascist playwright is compelling but ultimately unconvincing. Like Jacques Rancière, who writes about Artaud and Brecht in his much-cited essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, the politics of the artwork do not reside, magically, in the work itself; rather, they are generated by the readers or spectators who make use of them. Jannarone does not consider this form of spectatorial production, and neither does she invest in the difficult but essential task of thinking of Artaud's theatre as a type of delirium that might well have acted as a force for sublimation for spectators. To have convinced me on this point, she would have had to have engaged in a profound conversation with the ideas on fascism proposed by Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, all of whom are either absent from or scarcely mentioned in the book. However, my reluctance to follow Jannarone does not diminish the originality of this revisionist study – it certainly provoked me into rethinking my habitual response to Artaud's idea. Jannarone deserves huge credit for this, and, to my mind, it is one of the most profound books to have emerged in theatre studies in recent years. Anyone interested in Artaud and in avant-garde theatre in general should read it.