Readers excited by the recent and growing body of work on audience studies, such as Richard Butsch's The Making of American Drama, will be pleased to discover in Neil Blackadder's Performing Opposition a lucid historical examination of a very specific kind of theatre audience: the protesting one. Covering the scandals that greeted performances of plays by Hauptmann, Jarry, Synge, O'Casey, and Brecht, Blackadder provides us with a thorough reading of the events themselves, based on extensive use of firsthand accounts, reviews, court decisions, and more, as well as with a useful contextualization of the protests within the increasingly detailed—and important—history of theatre audiences.