Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 197 pages.

Summary

Nicholas Ridout's Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (2013), recently published in paperback and made open access by the University of Michigan Press, is an ambitious contribution to the scholarship on labor and performance, as well as to the wider scholarship on the political potential of theater. The book's development of the theme of labor and theater is not, as its title might suggest, research into the world of nonprofessional, applied, or community theater. Instead it is a materialist historiography that offers a critical treatment of wage work in (primarily) twentieth-century Europe by discussing a range of theater plays and productions, but also of a film (and theater in it) and a piece of theoretical writing. Passionate Amateurs focuses on the relation between work and nonwork, often moving away from theater to discuss how this relation materializes, for example, in the figure of “the professional” or in changes to the university and the social function of the scholar.

In pursuing this line of inquiry, Ridout finds moments in theater where structures of wage work both become apparent and present opening points to possible resistance and subversion. For example, he sees Godard's La Chinoise (1967) not as foreseeing the events of May 1968, but, following the film's group of amateur theater-makers cum revolutionaries, as both making visible and challenging the Fordist organization of work. From the Nanterre campus students in the film, Ridout launches into a discussion of work and the university system in 1960's France and “its transformation from a site of scholarly privilege into the edu-factory” (101), illustrating this turn's dramatic effect on course material and teaching. Throughout the book Ridout offers wholly original insights into theater and politics, which allow for a reconsideration of the material and affective relations between performers and audience while also exploring the potential for intervention through a Benjaminian concept of history and time. Ultimately, his inquiry is about a unique vision for a communism in theater.

This, we might say, is not easy work. Ridout weaves together theoretical, historiographical, and critical accounts of multiple provenances into a is precisely because of its speculative daring that the collective movement practice Marchart analyzes avoids the pitfalls of representation with which Malzacher wrestles in the volume's lead essay.