Beginning with the question ‘Why are Greek tragedies so frequently revived and adapted on European stages?’ (p. 1), Margherita Laera launches her complex and compelling study of recent adaptations into waters that, seemingly charted as ‘the “classical” tradition’, reveal themselves to be deep and churning Sargasso Seas of ideology, politics and mythology. Following Fredric Jameson's neo-Marxist mantra, historicize and theorize, Laera sets out three crammed chapters, any and all of which deserve a volume, to explore questions of the role and function of the chorus, the imagination of the false derivation of the notion of the ‘obscene’ and the widespread dissemination in the West of the self-serving myth of the simultaneous birth of theatre and democracy in ancient Greece.

Reaching Athens fills an important role as it explores areas that are often neglected or given short shrift in US theatre studies. The European emphasis of Laera's research brings to the foreground the vexed question of the status of nationalism, as she examines the contemporary designations of post-national and transnational. She complicates the polemic in an extremely meaningful way when she connects these terms, which the European community has popularized, to discuss their own attempts to unite many nation states without raising the spectre of the destruction of national identity. Although questions of national identity have emerged in North America mainly in the sporadic struggles of the Quebec nation, Native peoples and African-American populations, many US academics may not be aware of how prevalent these questions are in European intellectual life. Laera deftly exposes the neoliberal underpinnings of these ringing declarations of the end of nationalism and the rise of cosmopolitanism as merely new turns of the screws of post- and neo-colonialism.

Most usefully, Laera analyses the political and ideological consequences of adaptations by such writers as Heiner Muller, Mark Ravenhill, Michael Vinaver, Katie Mitchell, Sarah Kane, Romeo Castellucci, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Rimini Protokoll. She discusses their various appropriations of the charisma of the ancient texts and finds some to be not so radical as they declare themselves. Some remain in the service of essentialist claims for Western democracies as anointed descendants from their Athenian progenitors. This invaluable work deserves a wide audience and should encourage further investigation of the ideological role of present-day adaptations and the ongoing mythologizing of ancient, selective affinities.