Part recovered journal, part epistolary rhapsody, part long-form essay, the project is an attempt to think about the history of the present through writing, accumulated over several years of following theatre in Europe during the early twenty-first century. The Ridiculous Subject figures a topic (theatre) and a subject (the dedicated, or passerby spectator) who show up wherever they feel called, whether they are called or not.

Joe Kelleher is Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Performance (Roehampton University in London). His books include The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (Routledge 2015), Theatre & Politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and the forthcoming Theatres of Powerlessness (Bloomsbury) co-edited with Edit Kaldor.