Theatre, Activism, and the Limits of Political Spectacle

Staging Change: Toward a Theatrical Theory of Activist Performance

By Victoria L. Scrimer
Bloomsbury Academic / Methuen Drama, 241 pp.

Reviewed by Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri*

Staging Change: Toward a Theatrical Theory of Activist Performance makes a noteworthy contribution to the intersection of political activism and performance studies by foregrounding the ways in which political struggle is mounted, shaped, haunted, and sometimes inhibited by theatrical form. The book’s principal insight is useful: activism does not simply borrow from theatre; it is often already staged within dramatic frameworks that naturalize certain subjects and narratives. Activist events—rallies, marches, radical art, acts of self-immolation, insurrections—frequently follow the logic of dramatic representation: characters, conflict, climax, and resolution. The familiar dramatic structure, Scrimer proposes, feels “natural,” but can also limit the political imagination because it keeps audiences and participants inside recognizable theatrical frames.

Combining personal experience as an environmental activist with performance analysis and interviews with artists and activists from contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Occupy, Scrimer explores how form and reception are shaped by theatrical convention. Drawing on her fieldwork, she proposes a recalibrated postdramatic theorization of activist performativity, following Hans-Thies Lehmann. This complicates the subject position: the author-intellectual is at once a producer of cultural capital and a participant in activist struggle, a mediating and enunciating subject within the culture-industry-media matrix.

Scrimer establishes her postdramatic theoretical trajectory from the outset: the frames of activism are already embedded in the ideological machinery of dramatic representation, which enfranchises particular relations of domination and visibility. She also develops a critical consciousness about form through her question of whether activists’ theatrical legibility functions as a correlative of political power. It is, in fact, a pertinent question: can the theatrical spectacle absorb and de-radicalize struggle by converting it into consumable narrative?

The chapter titled “Directing the Activist Gaze” examines how activist spectacles are “staged” for visibility, including the international environmental organization Greenpeace’s canny media interventions and the optics of “bearing witness” (31–2). Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers is read, via Peter Szondi, alongside contemporary protest events to show how seeing, directing, and being seen are always already choreographed along theatrical lines. Scrimer argues that whoever controls the gaze—activists, media, or institutions—also exercises ideological control, shaping political action: what is seen, who sees it, and what remains invisible.

“Absent Executioners and the Spectacle of the Scaffold” examines David Buckel’s self-immolation at New York’s Prospect Park in 2018 as a climate-action protest, where bodily sacrifice is theatricalized as public spectacle and such acts are narrated, moralized, and aestheticized within public discourse. The logic of dramatic execution can both dramatize and humanize resistance, as the activist body becomes a site where pain and moral affect are produced. The spectacle dramatizes structural violence and, paradoxically, depoliticizes it by centering individual martyrdom rather than systemic exploitation.

In “When the Play Is Not the Thing,” Scrimer reads documentary drama on the Mueller investigation and its mediatization. The many staged readings, including Robert Schenkkan’s The Investigation: A Search for Truth in Ten Acts, all purportedly sought the “truth,” but risked becoming forms of “political hobbyism” (87) and “deadly theatre” (87), caught within bourgeois ideological resolution. Scrimer points out that such dramatizations may reduce the audience to passive consumers of spectacle. She contrasts this with Arena Stage’s live reading of the report, which actively de-dramatized it through alternative performance scenarios.

In “Soft Authoritarianism and the Hybrid Drama,” Scrimer interrogates the notion of “soft” authoritarianism and what she calls “dramacracy”: “the staging of a closed and fictive world before an audience that is moved to real action” (17). Her example is Putin’s regime in Russia, which uses twenty-first-century technology to construct a new hybrid social drama that can be weaponized.

The chapter titled “On Transgression and Resistance” considers the affiliation between right-wing activist action and experimental theatre. “I make the case that Trump is Artaud’s authoritarian double” (17), Scrimer writes, demonstrating how the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol seized the aesthetics of radical 1960s counterculture by borrowing from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. This unsettles the distinction between “transgression” and “progressive politics,” triggering “a crisis of identity for liberal leftists who have responded by adopting traditionally right-wing talking points of law and order” (17).

Poststructuralist theatre theory tends to focus on presence and the event, challenging the hegemony of representation and attending to the slippages between signifier and signified. Performance becomes an encounter, not a message. Distinct from Aristotelian theory, the ideological default, it discards the preeminence of script and narrative; distinct from Brecht, the dialectical revision of that default, it favors affective, embodied, and de-essentialized experience over the explicit project of class awareness. Staging Change situates itself in this somewhat hybrid space. It uses postdramatic tools but inflects them with left-leaning concerns. This intervention creates an aesthetic rupture that accommodates nonrepresentational, open-ended practices.

Scrimer argues that effective political theatre must necessarily reorganize the theatricalization of politics itself. However, the dangers of depreciating recognizable theatrical forms must also be noted. There is the experimental, utopian activist performance, and there is the legible, repeatable, media-friendly act. The postdramatic approach may even be labeled too elite, too intellectual, creating avant-garde hierarchies that overlook the legible, narrative-driven dramaturgies on which many mass movements have historically relied for mobilization and affective solidarity.

But the distinctive Eurocentric bias in the postdramatic model limits its applicability to non-Western forms that are ritual-based, or to protest practices that already operate outside Aristotelian dramaturgy but do not find a place within Lehmann’s framework. There is an implicit hierarchy here, and Scrimer risks marginalizing traditions in which political performance is already understood as collective, embodied, non-mimetic, vernacular, and oral practice. These are the challenges facing both Scrimer’s and Lehmann’s theorizations.

When Scrimer moves from radical-left actions, such as David Buckel’s self-immolation, to insurrection, such as the January 6 Capitol event, under the label of “activist performance,” crucial differences in political content, power, and ideology risk being conflated. If all politics is “staged,” what becomes of ethical difference? When politically asymmetric performatives—radical-left or ecological actions such as self-immolation—are placed within the same dramaturgical grid as the Capitol insurrection under the rubric of “activist performance,” the equivalence is problematic.

The author continually draws on autobiographical material, lending the book a compelling personal urgency. But because the argument is rooted in a U.S.-centric, left-liberal activist milieu, some generalizations are problematic. Scrimer only intermittently engages with movements of the Global South that are often religious, popular, or peasant-centered, such as the farmers’ protests in India, or with other postcolonial movements. To be more inclusive, the book would need to recognize contexts in which performance is profoundly intertwined with everyday cultural practice, not merely with corrective theorizations from the West. Read from such locations, including the one occupied by this reviewer, many of the book’s tensions remain undertheorized, embedded in familiar hierarchies of form, geography, and political subjectivity.

The book opens up critical space for questioning how theatrical conventions sediment relations of visibility, intelligibility, and power, and how political praxis might be revitalized. This is valuable. The proviso is that such work must remain grounded in the material conditions of labor, alienation, and value. Scrimer admits that “activism is a matter of survival, and experimentation can seem like a luxury” (18), and that her arguments for “a postdramatic approach to activist performance are meant as an addition to not a blanket renunciation of other ways of thinking through activism” (18). Perhaps the book’s real contribution is its attempt to pluralize theatre theory by placing questions of history and hierarchy within global formulations of activist-performative imaginaries.

Staging Change opens debates, invites critical rethinking of theorizations of activist performance, and attempts to rehistoricize theatrical form within global structures of capital, empire, and racial-spatial violence. And yet, the “staging of change” is always already taking place in the streets, in rituals, and in everyday theatrics across and beyond the frames of European avant-garde theatre theory.

Bibliography

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Touchstone, 1996.

Hersh, Eitan. Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. Scribner, 2020.

Scrimer, Victor L. Staging Change: Toward a Theatrical Theory of Activist Performance. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

Szondi, Peter. Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition. Edited and translated by Michael Hays, U of Minnesota P, 1987.

*Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri is Professor of English at Gauhati University, India. Her areas of research include theatre and performance studies, poetry, American literature, Indian writing in English, film and media studies, and gender studies.

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Bibliography

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