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Abstract
Spectacle is central to protest efficacy, yet the term performance has a history of being used pejoratively to discredit both protestors and their causes. This deflects analysis from the ubiquitous tactical performances enacted by institutional representatives themselves. Following Cape Town mayor Dan Plato's 2020 dismissal of an eviction resistance on the grounds that it was a "staged act," this article identifies various repertoires of performative intimidation enacted by local authorities against South African land occupiers during 2019–22. These staged acts were strategically performed with a dual audience in mind: one direct and the other, necessarily, oblique. In recasting such repertoires as rational actions in response to radical acts, municipal officials control the means of identifying and critiquing cynical public performance.

Urban sociologist, Virág Molnár, reviews the books No Billionaire Left Behind and Thank You, Anarchy. The books examine satirical activism and Occupy Wall Street's mix of direct democracy and anarchism as examples of unconventional political protest in the contemporary United States.

In his commentary on what he calls Althusser's dramaturgy, Étienne Balibar notes the importance of theater as a metaphor and in its literal, material existence as an organized space in which both visibility and invisibility are staged. This essay attempts to explore the importance of the figure of machinery in Althusser's work: stage machinery but also the machinery and apparatuses by which the world of subjection is simultaneously staged and disrupted. This theater is also a theater of war and as such is an authorless theater, a production in the double sense of the term of absent or metonymic causes.

Abstract
This year saw the continued expansion of four vibrant conversations within the field of theater and performance studies. The first section of this review, 'World Stages and Their Borders', features scholarship that explores how theaters represent worlds beyond the nation's territorial and symbolic boundaries. The second section, 'Performing Critical Temporalities', considers studies of minoritarian performance that engage with the lived experience of time. In the third section, 'Theater After Liveness', I discuss scholarship on modern drama that is in dialogue with theories of performance as a live event. A fourth section considers new works on the nineteenth-century theater, showing how 'Celebrity, Publicity, and Amateurism' are entwined. Finally, a brief concluding note outlines significant biographies and reference works released within the past year.