Nicholas Ridout's Scenes from Bourgeois Life sheds new light on the deleterious distances intrinsic to theatrical spectatorship. Via close readings of history and theory, Ridout argues for the emergence (since the seventeenth century) of a particular bourgeois subjectivity, closely linked to bourgeois spectatorship, fostered by experiences of watching drama on stages (and more recently on screens). This subjectivity is characterized by placing “at a spectatorial distance the world in which its [the bourgeoisie's] own hegemony is the source of suffering” (12).

This argument first appears in the second of three Prologues to the book, each theatrical and reflexive in unique ways. The first Prologue is structured like a piece of imagined theatre: detailed scenic descriptions fill a page of text, supported by thrice that many pages of footnotes highlighting the bourgeois subjectivity that might inhabit there. The second finds the author watching people watching television on the television program Gogglebox, an experience that prompts an elaboration of the subjectivity of a spectator “in a society in which everyone is a spectator” (8). And the third places the author on the way home from the theatre, comparing his own experience to that of two other spectators he overhears, a comparison that forces him to take stock of the distances at which the performance invited him to hold himself from the injustices and degradations it depicted. Staging the subjectivity of the bourgeois spectator, the Prologues make clear that that subjectivity is also the author's and quite possibly the reader's subjectivity too. An interrogation of the author's own subjectivity emerges as a theme that will underwrite the theoretical stakes of the book as a whole: Is not the subjectivity of the theatre professor “merely an intensified or specialized version of the bourgeois spectator?” (21). And does generalizing from this subjectivity risk “the repeated exclusion of other subjectivities,” especially the subjectivities of women and people of color? (21).

Following the Prologues, the inquiry turns to the past to give an account of bourgeois subjectivity in relation to theatrical spectatorship. Chapter 1, “An Essay Regarding the Bourgeoisie,“ proceeds via close readings of Marx, histories of the transition to capitalism, and more recent feminist political theory (especially Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch) to present the bourgeois of the book's title not as a sociological category, but as “a relationship and a struggle . . . characterized, above all, by the production of distance,” a twofold distance that connects the distance of colonial relationships (the geographical distance between a colonizer and colonized as well as the “social, economic, and psychological distances involved in that relation”) with the distance of spectatorship (40). In Chapter 2, “The Scene with The Spectator,” bourgeois spectatorship emerges from a daily newspaper published in 1711 and 1712 in London, The Spectator. There, bourgeois spectatorship appears as a critical worldview adjacent to theatrical spectatorship in a nascent bourgeois public sphere, and “the habitus of a spectator” provides ample financial and leisure benefits as a skill for observing and evaluating the behavior of others (90). In Chapter 3, “The Scene with the Trunk-Maker,” Ridout digs deeper into an excerpt from The Spectator published 29 November 1711. In the excerpt, Mr. Spectator goes to the theatre seeking another spectator, a trunkmaker in the upper galleries, who he finds is “a large black Man, whom no body knows” (104). Unknotting the excerpt, Ridout reveals the political unconscious of the bourgeois subject imagined and produced by The Spectator. To wit, “that black rebellion [in the slave plantations of the Caribbean] is what makes bourgeois criticism possible” (125).

Having thus traced bourgeois spectatorship to its origins, Scenes from Bourgeois Life skips ahead to the twentieth century in Chapter 4, “The Scene with the Smoke.” This chapter takes up one of Bertolt Brecht's preferred images of spectatorship: the spectator smoking a cigar. Ridout identifies a problem with Brecht's preference for an aloof mode of spectatorship: it reiterates the constitutive distances of bourgeois subjectivity Brecht's scientific theatre would rather overcome. Nonetheless, Brecht's image of a spectator smoking a cigar proves redemptive as it smuggles into the scene of spectatorship elements of ritual, magic, and intoxication. “[W]hat sort of critical spectatorship might be possible if we were to reject Brecht's strict opposition between magic, hypnosis, intoxication, or befuddlement, on the one hand, and clear critical thinking in the interests of political transformation, on the other?” (175). In the Epilogue, Scenes from Bourgeois Life imagines solutions to the bourgeois problems of theatrical spectatorship by “inviting (or nudging, perhaps) the audience to give up on spectatorship a little” (190).

Running through these arguments is an account of disidentification, “a means by which a subject resists or repudiates the terms by which they are named by the institutions and the social order in and through which they live” (24). This definition appears amid discussions of the common use of the term “bourgeois” as a pejorative in contemporary (bourgeois) culture. Disidentification thus describes the author's (and perhaps reader's) own sense of their relationship to the term “bourgeois.” In subsequent chapters we find that the figure of disidentification may in fact be intrinsic to theatre (insofar as the use of theatre as a machine of ideological reproduction is prone to failure) (73), and implicit in the emergence of the trunkmaker and related figures (137). It serves as a marker of ideal subjects of capitalism (154), but also as one way to escape interpellation as such an ideal subject (177). Disidentification is innate to bourgeois subjectivity insofar as it reiterates the distance at the center of that subjectivity, but it might also be cultivated to encourage more bourgeois subjects to resist interpellation as good subjects of capitalism. Surprisingly, the book does not directly engage with other approaches to disidentification in performance studies, especially José Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) which offers a theory of precisely some of those subjectivities the author frets he may be excluding by extrapolating from his own subjectivity.

The absence is hardly fatal and points to ways in which Scenes from Bourgeois Life will have a significant impact on conversations across the disciplines of theatre and performance studies. Scenes from Bourgeois Life provides an account of the historically contingent mode of spectatorship that remains dominant today, an account that must be reckoned with by any effort to theorize the capacity of theatre to make political subjects, to impact its audiences, or to play a role in addressing the oppressions it so often depicts.