In this broadly conceived study, Ralf E. Remshardt delineates the theatre's deep connection with the grotesque and traces the historically extensive and theoretically intensive relationship between performance and its "other," the grotesque. Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance examines the aesthetic complicity shared by the two in both art and theatre and presents a general theory of the grotesque.

Performing the grotesque is both a challenge to a culture's order and the affirmation of certain ethical principles that it recognizes as its own. Remshardt...