Ever since the European Enlightenment and its national cultural policies focusing on aesthetic and linguistic homogeneity, theatre-goers have been accustomed to monolingual theatre performances. In the global village of the twenty-first century, however, those artificial boundaries of nations have collapsed under the weight of diversity and migration. It is hardly surprising that this has given rise to a variety of bi- or even multilingual theatrical productions all over the globe, a tendency that prompted Carlson to undertake his historical–typological study, referring to numerous examples from Western, traditional Eastern and postcolonial theatre. To avoid a purely linguistic approach, he takes up James Clifford's suggestion to apply Bakhtin's concept of ‘polyphonic discourse’ or ‘heteroglossia’ to a cultural semiotics, so that he is able to argue on the levels of linguistics and theatre performance at the same time.
The vast amount of material discussed is proficiently structured in five topical chapters: ‘The Macaronic Stage’ gives an impressive overview of mainly Western plays of different eras in which certain characters express themselves in a language different from that of the play's main action. From classical Greek drama on, this strategy has been used to characterize ‘barbaric’ outsiders; it thus stands in the tradition of theatrical verisimilitude. In addition, Carlson refers to several compelling examples from Asian theatre where the use of different registers reflects social stratifications or even temporal structures, where events located in the past are reported in a different language than those happening in present times. Next, he exemplifies the subversive qualities of ‘Dialect Theatre’ in a case study on the history of Italian comedy, whereas the third chapter, ‘Postcolonial Heteroglossia’, goes even further: not only does it deal with syncretic languages such as Creole or Pidgin, but it also assesses polyglot voices in monodramatic speech acts, thus acting as a model for ‘polynational’ communities (pp. 148 ff) in times of global migration.
The cultural and linguistic diversity of company members is a precondition for contemporary heteroglot productions discussed in the following chapter, ‘Postmodern Language Play’. In contrast to the intercultural productions of their predecessors, Mnouchkine and Brook, a new generation of theatre directors such as Karin Beier, Tom Lanoye and Luk Perceval play with cultural and linguistic fragments from different cultures without privileging any particular material. At this point at the latest, the question arises of how an ‘ordinary’ audience will interact with such multilingual aesthetics. Carlson's proposals in his final chapter – such as intrafictional or simultanous translation, sub- or supertitles, and so on – are all epistemologically inspired by Ingarden's concept of the ‘side text’, thus based on the use of supplementary linguistic sign systems. Here, this excellent study, which undoubtedly deserves credit for having established the first historical survey of theatrical heteroglossia, reveals the limitations of linguistic methods and semiotic hermeneutics for understanding theatrical performances. Nevertheless, Carlson's pioneering work is not slighted by the shortcomings of its methodological approach and will surely become an essential basis for further research on this virulent topic.
