Joanne Tompkins's Theatre's Heterotopias is an excellent account of contemporary performance with an emphasis on theatrical spatiality. Expanding upon Foucault's concept “heterotopia,” which he introduced in 1967 to discuss the unsettling of space, Tompkins demonstrates heterotopia's value for theatre and performance studies by offering detailed analyses of performance across numerous theatre genres and styles. Through a range of case studies—from site-specific works, to performances at Shakespeare's Globe, to reconstructions of Elizabethan playhouses using virtual reality (VR) technologies—Tompkins develops and extends Foucault's concept through vivid performance accounts analyzing theatres’ or specific productions’ dynamic uses of space. In turn, heterotopia's particular emphasis on the unsettling of space provides a rich framework to examine the relationship between performance and its social, cultural, and political contexts.
Tompkins's introduction defines her theory of heterotopia as the ability to provide alternative orderings of space through performance. To this end, Tompkins develops notions of constructed and abstracted space in the first chapter, which recur across the subsequent four chapters. Although these “two poles” (42)—constructed and abstracted—of heterotopic performance space are sometimes hard to grasp across all the eleven of her case studies, Tompkins is, for the most part, successful in making these spatial zones explicit. Generally, her evocative performance analyses are seamlessly interwoven with tireless conceptual work throughout the book.
The performances Tompkins examine all unsettle the boundaries between the theatre's inside and outside. Some performance examples—such as Suitcase and And While London Burns (both examined in Chapter 2)—make this unsettling explicit through their use of site specificity. Suitcase, staged at London's Liverpool Street Station in 2008, for example, commemorated Kindertransport: the transportation of hundreds of Jewish children by the British government to London in 1938 in an effort to save them from being taken prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Tompkins proposes that the performance's dialogue with the site of the train station in the present day, as well as its (re)construction of the site of Kindertransport, illuminated the direct implication of the past on the present and vice versa. She writes that the performance “repositioned this historical moment from the 1930s back into public memory in a way that encapsulated the urgent need to assist those trapped in conflict zones around the world now” (67). Suitcase's layering of time and space oriented the spectator toward the future by insisting on a greater awareness of the past; history's potential to repeat itself in different configurations transforms our relationship to space, a transformation that, Tompkins shows, is a central feature of heterotopic performance.
Tompkins also discusses more conventional theatrical spaces and their participation in heterotopic ends, seen especially in the work of the National Theatre of Scotland, discussed in Chapter 3, and in productions at the Globe, discussed in Chapter 4. By turning to these more fixed and stable performance venues, heterotopia gains even greater scope for performance analysis beyond treatment of site-specific works. The National Theatre of Scotland, for example, has no fixed location, and stages productions at a variety of theatre venues. Further, Tompkins's analysis of several performances at Shakespeare's Globe reveals an explicit, heterotopic dialogue with the world outside the theatre. Tompkins highlights that the Globe's history lends it to such an approach, where the double entendre of globe/Globe has always stood for the interpolation of theatre and world, with an emphasis on performance as inherently oriented toward the social and political. Therefore, whether the performance space is site-specific or not, an intimacy between inside and outside becomes felt in theatre's heterotopias, and at times the intimacy collapses that binary completely.
Each of the book's chapters demonstrates not only the flexibility of heterotopia as a concept to discuss the spatial dimensions of numerous styles of performance from traditional proscenium stagings to postdramatic modes, but also provides a rounded understanding of contemporary theatre's social, cultural, and political resonances through the prism of space. Tompkins develops a concept of performance heterotopia to emphasize how alternative spaces not only are constructed through performance, but become enabled in the world outside of the performance as a result. The ideas put forth in Theatre's Heterotopias will be of considerable use to any student or scholar of theatre and performance, privileging a discussion of space sometimes overlooked in theatrical analysis.
Theatre's Heterotopias is vast in scope and yet rigorously concise in its argument. Tompkins shows that heterotopic performance orients the spectator toward an illuminated future through its emphasis on alternative orderings of space–times; it is a useful methodological framework insofar as it argues for the construction of space as a political proposition. Tompkins concludes that she remains hopeful for performances that “take spatial risks” to “facilitate connections between the potential of what happens on stage and matters beyond the theatre's walls” (186). Theatre's Heterotopias’ emphasis on the relationship between spaces inside and outside of the theatre, applicable to numerous performance styles, is well overdue, and the book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on performance and politics.
