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Abstract
It's a cliché, of course, to open an annual review by pointing out how the texts under discussion reflect our contemporary moment. And none of the books reviewed here are modish responses to passing scholarly fads. All speak first and foremost to concerns located at the very heart of the theatre medium itself: the imaginative construction of alternative shared worlds, and the exploration of our hopes and fears around modes of interpersonal touch and intimacy. So, forgive me just one brief reflection on how it is surely no coincidence that the books that intervene most excitingly and meaningfully in the scholarly field this year are also those that speak to some of the most pressing anxieties and desires in the broader world as well, in the wake of pandemic contagion, the #MeToo movement, a cost-of-living crisis, and continued dystopic crises in both the academic industry and in national and global politics.
The first section of this chapter, 'Utopia', reviews three monographs that discuss the intersections between theatre, concepts of utopia and utopian thinking: Siân Adiseshiah's Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre, Selina's Busby's Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia and Ryan Claycomb's In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation. The second section, 'Touch and Intimacy', reviews two books that cast an eye on questions of touch and intimacy onstage, from a contemporary practice-based and historical scholarly perspective respectively: Supporting Staged Intimacy: A Practical Guide for Theatre Creatives, Managers, and Crew, co-authored by Alexis Black and Tina M. Newhauser, and Alex MacConochie's Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England.

Legal bias against the poor, and competition from nonstate legal services providers, can both seriously affect state justice provision. But analyses of these factors often fail to incorporate a critical feature of justice systems: states use them for revenue generation. I build a series of formal models to understand how these factors interact. I derive several insights into empirical patterns of bias, competition, access to justice, and legal system viability. First, in poor countries, bias can increase access to justice and legal effectiveness. Second, given competition, poor groups will pay a premium for state-provided justice, while wealthy groups will pay a premium for private dispute resolution. However, losing a poor group to competition is also less costly than losing a wealthy group, and the latter loss can sometimes destroy the viability of the state justice system. These results contribute to our understanding of state capacity and rule of law development.

Abstract
The first section of this review, 'Staging Reality', reads two monographs that grapple with large-scale thinking about how theatre and performance engage with various ideas of 'reality': Lindsay Brandon Hunter's exploration of performing 'the real' in theatre, television, and alternative-reality gaming in Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief, and Bess Rowen's theorizing of 'affective stage directions' in The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment. The second section, 'Politics and/of Performance', reviews two books with an explicit interest in the political as well as aesthetic dimensions of performance: Tiziana Morosetti and Osita Okagbue's edited volume The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race, and Jon Venn's Madness in Contemporary British Theatre: Resistances and Representations. The final section shifts to monographs that structure their enquiry around a specific figure: the playwright Jez Butterworth, in the case of Sean McEvoy's Class, Culture and Tragedy in the Plays of Jez Butterworth, and the biblical figure of Salomé, in the case of Megan Girdwood's Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome's Dance after 1890.

AbstractThere is a sad irony in writing about theatre and performance scholarship at a time when most US and UK theatre are still closed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, for all its challenges, 2020 saw the publication of several noteworthy books that significantly advanced the field of theatre and performance studies, and which offer some cause for celebration. This review focuses on three major subject areas: 1. Performing Women, Women in Performance, 2. Tackling the Body, and 3. Social and National Borders. Several larger ideas unite the texts reviewed here, in varying constellations across these three sections: questions about representing identity, about failure and impossibility, and about unity, division, and the porous boundaries between the two. The term 'encounter' recurred with startling frequency across these eight texts, signalling a shared central concern with how far the performance space might offer a site of communion—or, at least, communication—in our fractious historical moment.

AbstractPolitical security is often viewed as a necessary precondition for rulers to develop property-protecting legal institutions. I argue that because these institutions can build political support and generate revenue, domestically insecure rulers may also invest in them. I test this argument using newly collected 12th-century data on the operation of the nascent English common law system. Leveraging the 1192 shipwreck and subsequent kidnap of Richard I as an exogenous shock to domestic political security, I find that the catastrophe appears to have prompted the English Royal Court's short-term deployment to raise political support in areas vulnerable to rebellion. I present suggestive evidence that this effect in vulnerable areas persisted into the medium-term, and appears to have expanded to the rest of the country. Drawing on this and other evidence of changes in Royal Court funding, activity, and organization between 1184 and 1203, I argue that the shock may have helped to bring about a permanent increase in the Court's capacity and accessibility. These findings are relevant to studies of the common law and the political economy of legal institutions generally.

What institutional arrangements allow veto players to secure maximal welfare when all agree on both the need for and the direction of policy change? To answer this question, we conduct a mechanism design analysis. We focus on a system with two veto players, each with incomplete information about the other's policy preferences. We show that the unique welfare-maximizing mechanism is the mechanism that implements the preferred policy of the player whose ideal policy is closer to the status quo. We provide examples of institutional structures under which the unique equilibrium outcome of this two-player incomplete information game is the policy outcome implemented by this mechanism, and argue that our result can be used as a normative benchmark to assess the optimality of veto player institutions.

AbstractIn theory, the administration of criminal justice is state business: Defendants are arrested, tried, and punished by state agents. In reality, citizens often attempt to intervene in this process—for example, by imposing their own punishments in lieu of, or in addition to, state penalties. We build a game‐theoretic model to investigate how such behavior affects state justice provision. Illustrating our results with examples from, inter alia, the Jim Crow South, we show that community intervention warps both court procedures and the mapping between court attitudes and court decisions: Relative to a baseline without interference, it can lead courts to under‐ or over‐convict, and can disrupt court incentives to use or acquire information at trial. More broadly, the threat of community interference can distort the behavior of all actors in the criminal justice system—and neither courts themselves nor other state actors may be able to mitigate these distortions.

Plea bargaining figures heavily in criminal justice systems in the United States and, increasingly, around the globe. Conventional wisdom holds that plea bargaining generates efficiency gains for all parties, while sorting the guilty from the innocent. We build a series of formal models to consider the relationship between a defendant's guilt and her likelihood of pleading guilty. In an inversion of the conventional wisdom, we show that under a range of empirically plausible scenarios—for example, if criminals are more risk-seeking than the wrongfully accused, or if prosecutors derive a career benefit from trial wins—the innocent are more likely than the guilty to plea bargain.

After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.