In the mid-1540s, Westminster School put on the first performance in England of a Senecan tragedy, Hippolytus. The English were behind the times: the same play had already been staged sixty years earlier in Rome, under the direction of Pomponius Laetus. Yet while early modern readers of Seneca had no reservations about staging his drama, twentieth-century scholarship stressed the limited performance potential of Senecan tragedy. T. S. Eliot memorably identified it as ‘drama of the word’: Otto Zwierlein's influential 1966 monograph pursued this more fully, arguing for Seneca's plays as Rezitationsdrama. The tide is now turning again: in addition to the collection of essays on the topic by distinguished Senecans, collected in George W. M. Harrison's Seneca in Performance (2000), more recent critical commentaries, especially those by A. J. Boyle on Troades, Oedipus and Medea, have devoted serious space to the performance potential of the plays. Kohn's monograph — drawing not only on his status as classical scholar but also his experience as an actor and director — aims to build on this trend, offering a systematic ‘performance criticism’ of Senecan tragedy in toto.

An introduction rehearses the critical performance debate — covering issues of dating, transmission and imperial theatre culture along the way — and outlines K.'s own approach, which is to develop the work of Dana F. Sutton's Seneca on Stage (1973) by subjecting the Roman drama to the same kind of performance criticism Oliver Taplin has provided for Greek tragedy. A further general chapter sets Senecan drama in context, visualizing the plays within the Vitruvian theatre space and considering the use of stage decoration and machinery, props, lighting and sound effects. Thereafter, K. tackles each play (including the incomplete Phoenissae, but omitting the pseudo-Senecan Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus) in probable order of composition, providing practical advice on the staging of scenes and smaller ‘action units’, and providing analysis of the rôle and placement of non-speaking characters and the chorus. A short conclusion to every chapter attempts to illustrate the contribution dramaturgy makes to the individual theme of each play: the monograph concludes by asserting the importance of dramaturgy to the central obsession of Senecan tragedy, the exploration of the effects of emotion on the inner life of its characters.

There are some conspicuous successes with this method. K. confronts notoriously hard-to-stage scenes such as the extispicium of Oedipus, using cautious judgement about the use of props and the rôle of mime to show how such scenes can practically be staged. Close attention to performance criteria can help in making textual-critical decisions: K. adjudicates on competing manuscript authorities at Oed. 103–5 and Tro. 248–9, and (against critical consensus) argues that Cassandra, not Clytemnestra, is the festa coniunx in Act 4 of Agamemnon. In perhaps the most significant insight of the monograph, K. highlights Seneca's consistently pointed exploitation of the ‘three-actor’ convention. So, for example, the same performer in Thyestes plays both Fury and infuriate Atreus, in a layering of character that complements the involved intratextual relationship of these two characters. The fraught gender-dynamics of Agamemnon and Medea are reinforced with single actors playing all the male parts. And, as K. shows, when Seneca does flout the ‘three-actor-rule’, it is for palpable effect: Troades, for instance, a play full of non-speaking characters whose mute presence underlines their impotence, powerfully breaks its own rules when it allows its fourth actor Astyanax a mere two words — ‘Miserere, mater!’ (Tro. 792) — before he is led off to his death.

K.'s monograph is also a work of rather limited focus. To assert, for example, that there is lots of stage business in Medea and Phaedra because a central theme of these plays is ‘scheming’ is suggestive, but underdeveloped. K.'s attempt to account for the awkward staging of Hercules Furens and Troades by making the confused dramaturgy a function of the thematic issue of maddened perception or shocked incomprehension within the plays is, for this reader, ingenious but implausible. K. has important observations to make about the rôle ‘silence’ and ‘spectacularity’ play from a performance perspective, but misses the opportunity to link his work with the related scholarship of Boyle and Schiesaro in these areas. And it is a pity that K. makes no attempt to integrate his ‘big idea’ — that the plays are above all interrogations of emotion and psychological interiority — with the important work of Gill, Leigh, Nussbaum and Schiesaro, who have done so much to elucidate Seneca's obsession with emotion in these plays.

Such criticism should not detract from the very real value of K.'s work, which succeeds in its stated aim of showing that dramaturgy is a key ingredient of Senecan drama. This monograph should not only stimulate more attention to the interaction between stage business and the thematic/linguistic preoccupations of individual plays: it should also in turn encourage new performances of Seneca into the twenty-first century.