Nicolas Ridout's important book operates against the too conventional double marginalization of theatre and of communism by means that are at once creative and cunning, offering fresh analytic horizons by which to place them in conversation. It arrives at a moment when the political prospects of each may appear to have been dimmed and the means to appraise their combined labors diminished when the trajectories of their work have come under pressure. Ridout's figure to operate on this double dilemma is the passionate amateur. This is the worker who opens the divide between freedom and necessity through his or her labors of love, which are irreducible to the wage subsumption or exchange value by which art is typically devalued or the total escape from capitalism for which communism is dismissed as a failed alternative. As Ridout puts it, “Communism here is not the given name of a party, nor, least of all, of any national political state under which theatre might be produced and presented. The communism in question here remains to be found, in relation to the practice of theatre, or rather, as a potential relation within the practice of theatre” (5). He locates this potentiality in the figure of the “romantic anti-capitalist” (6) whose disposition is neither the professional revolutionary nor fellow traveler, but whose abiding presence gives trouble to the naturalization of capitalism's self-performance as well as theatre's capacity to trouble the work of time and the time of work. This figure therefore undoes the partitions between work and leisure and necessity and freedom as separate domains unable to trouble one another, by summoning a nonpresent past and future that negates the apparent givenness of work that is not work.

For those seeking alternatives out of the existing trajectories of capitalism and of theatre these complications and openings are most welcome indeed. If nineteenth-century labor struggles centered around the length of the working day that drove absolute surplus value, they now raise the stakes of the length and composition of working life. Under the former regime, professionalization led into the heart of capitalism through the imaginary of the petit bourgeois autonomy of self-directed work. Today, professionalization is affiliated with maker and do-it-yourself production and dissemination, with potential routes out of capitalism associated with the postwork passionate amateur. Ridout locates the passionate amateur in a longer trajectory of theatrical production from Athens to Chekhov to Walter Benjamin's Children's Theater. Although the more common lineage of theatre's labor of love is that of community and the artistic critique associated with freedom, Ridout regrounds that pleasure in society as a whole. He locates the impetus to enjoy ourselves in society, in a sense suggested by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's No Dice: a “changeable association made of multiple conversations, across the intimate distances of the public space, rather than as a community that might close around its participants” (137). Theatrical communism in this regard spans spatial and temporal scales. It expands and compresses what is affectively palpable without losing the capacity for projection and mediation. Through the “relations of exposure” (148) that are the basis for other entanglements of knowledge production, theatrical communism moves beyond the managerial protocols in which art is either instrumentalized or subject to vertiginous precarity.

Ridout is committed to delivering theatre and communism back to what he terms a “solitude in relation” (28): “It is precisely because there can in fact be no community here in the place where it is always presupposed that the experience of listening among others acquires a peculiar condition, in which the intensities of both solitude and relation are amplified, so that inside a theatre auditorium one feels oneself both more alone and more related than one does on the outside in so-called real life” (162). Here, Ridout takes a final turn to foreground the paradoxical aspect of the professional spectator, erstwhile theatre critic, who can attend to such feelings in the realm of necessity and find “real pleasure in the manufacture of that love as a commodity” (162). This is a supple invitation for a postworkerist criticism that does not jettison the labor of obtaining the long view that makes such criticism possible through a deep theatrical audition. Along these lines, the restaging of communism might suggest something of the organizational question that could convey the routes from a specificity of these professional commitments to their societal entailments, however immanent these suggestions remain in the course of this book. We will await eagerly and expectantly further labors along these lines.