The Rehearsal

In the case of some academic book reviews, a reviewer may feel it necessary to act as translator and mediator, deciphering a highly abstract theoretical proposition presented in a primarily deductive format in the hopes of offering practitioners a conceptual foothold. In other cases, a book can be considered self-explanatory, requiring nothing more from a reviewer than an emphatic framing. The Rehearsal is such a book: as a coherent multiontological account of how death may be imaginatively constructed and socially reconstructed in a contemporary environment, The Rehearsal enacts in writing what it discusses with regards to performance. The Rehearsal offers more than simply a record of a devised script, more than simply a critical discussion of a performance as a completed project. The organisation of material - the intertwining of three performance texts, based on transcribed interviews and rehearsal documentation, and four critical essays penned by specialists in the areas of Performance Studies, Sociology, Health and Social Care, and Psychoanalysis and Cultural theory - offers the reader several varied, but converging, viewpoints of 'rehearsing death.'

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