Many contemporary academic books have long titles that aspire to descriptive precision concerning their contents. Performing Queer Modernism eschews such normativity by giving a broad title to a set of highly specific case studies within the field of queer performance. The result will be of use to people who wish to explore any of these individual examples. But the chapters also act, together with their introduction, as a suggestive set of theme and variations. Farfan makes a set of bold claims for the importance of her project. She asserts that ‘queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism; that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities; and that it anticipated … the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies’ (p. 1) The teasing or, depending on taste, puzzling chapter titles do not tell you clearly what each section is about. Each is, in essence, a queer reading of a series of performances which is judiciously informed by insights from critical theory. ‘Performance’ here means more than just a play or a dance sketch and encompasses the intentions of the playwright or choreographer, the way(s) in which it was performed and its reception (both at the time of its premiere and in later critique).

The first chapter explores Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which premiered in 1893. Farfan argues that the highly emotional – one might say melodramatic – redemption of Paula Tanqueray through the love of her husband's daughter by his first wife is distinctly queer. Pinero's interests in feminism leads Farfan to conclude that this was not simply an example of kitsch exaggeration but of strategic excess. As a result this text need no longer be seen as a second-rate piece but as having played a role in the development of queer modernism. The second chapter explores the development of Loie Fuller's Fire Dance from its origins as a version of Salome in 1895 in connection with contemporary hints and later analyses identifying her as a lesbian. The third chapter examines the queer indeterminacy of Vaslav Nikinsky's Afternoon of a Faun (1912). Farfan sees the dancer's sexuality as queerly indeterminate in real life, which helps to explain his creation of the Faun as a character that is highly sexualized but neither effeminate nor conventionally masculine (p. 42). In this piece eroticism is focused away from a group of nymphs to the Faun himself, who runs off with one of their scarves and appears to masturbate with it (p. 49). Farfan identifies this piece with the emergence of queer audiences and queer spectatorship (p. 7).

The fourth chapter focuses on the closeted gay playwright Noël Coward's Private Lives (1930). This has often been seen as one of his less subversive plays, but Farfan provides a persuasive interpretation of it as containing a strategic deployment of both male and female androgyny such that modern marriage itself became queerly indeterminate. Such gender ambivalence in which husband and wife speak and style themselves in very similar ways is depicted not so much as an ideal but as something with dramatic potential and as ‘a fact of life’ (p. 58). Finally, two of Djuna Barnes's one-act plays, To the Dogs and The Dove, published in 1923, are understood in relation to the notion of the ‘queer art of failure’ which has been explored by Jack Halberstam in their book with the same title of 2011. These two pieces, therefore, should be understood as having been deliberately constructed in order to refuse conventional opportunities for theatrical success. This argument, like many of Farfan's, relies on reading between the lines of the work in order to discover its previously obscured inner dynamics. But that is the point of a book which argues for close reading in order to clarify the ‘historic alignment between the indeterminacies of modernism and queerness’ (p. 38, my emphasis). As long as the reader does not expect to find clear evidence of lesbian and gay identities they are likely to come away intrigued by the notion of the pervasiveness of queer traces within theatrical constructions of modernity.