Tackling the relationship between race and the theatre on two fronts – race as theatre and race in theatre – Theatre & Race offers a sustained meditation on important currents in scholarship on race, performance and performativity over the last few decades. The book begins by unpacking the term on the latter side of the title's ampersand. With impressive clarity and economy, Young illuminates race as a series of embodied processes and performances. The book's opening section echoes Judith Butler's theories of the performativity of identity and accessibly introduces useful theoretical tools, drawing upon the analyses of Louis Althusser, W. E. B. Du Bois and Pierre Bourdieu for thinking about ‘race’ as a complex and intersubjective process.

The rest of the book is separated into six short chapters that survey a selection of punctual moments in the staging of racial otherness in the West. Beginning with the visual and dramatic appeal of the outsider on the ancient Greek and Roman stage, Young helpfully establishes how audience reception of racial performances is intimately tied to models of citizenship. From the classical era, the book moves to Shakespeare's theatre, noting correspondences between its portrayals of race and religion and a political climate that was anxious about the increased presence of ethnic outsiders. The fourth chapter offers a thorough, if concise, overview of the rich and dynamic scholarship on blackface and blackface minstrelsy, noting diverse valences at different moments and locations around the world. This proves an expert excavation of the origins and histories of blackface. The following section on redface, yellowface and whiteface yields a broader understanding of the histories of racial impersonations, shedding light on their functions in social rituals and holiday celebrations, on the stage and in film.

The final two chapters on colour-blind and colour-conscious casting and post-race theatre implicate the reader in the practical and philosophical challenges of staging race in the contemporary era. Is colour-blind casting simply part of a desire to become ‘post-race’ while reasserting the predominance of plays by white authors about white characters, as playwright August Wilson maintains? Or is it a desirable and necessary multiplication of dramatic and employment opportunities for non-white actors? The book ends with a reflection on the future of race in the theatre, wondering if ‘race’ will become an increasingly destabilized category even as it continues to be reckoned with both in the performing arts and in artists’ self-identifications.

Young's privileging of the performance of blackness in the United States in the second half of the book restricts considerations of diverse racial performance in a global context. But this choice also lends focus to the temporally ambitious book. Most admirable about Theatre & Race is Young's ability to capture the complexity and ambiguity, indeed the messiness, of the performance of race, while remaining crystalline in his language and relatable in his examples. With its theoretical sophistication and lucidity, the book is a welcome addition to the Theatre & . . . series, which is meant to be accessible to a wide readership as well as representative of the ‘cutting edge of critical thinking in the discipline’ (viii).