The Illuminated Theatre is a book about theatricality and spectatorship in the early twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging analysis that draws upon theatrical, visual and philosophical approaches, it asks how spectators and audiences negotiate the complexities and challenges of contemporary experimental performance arts.

It is also a book about how European practitioners working across a range of forms, from theatre and performance to dance, opera, film and visual arts, use images to address the complexities of the times in which their work takes place. Through detailed and impassioned accounts of works by artists such as Dickie Beau, Wendy Houstoun, Alvis Hermanis and Romeo Castellucci, along with close readings of experimental theoretical and art writing from Gillian Rose to T.J. Clark and Marie-José Mondzain, the book outlines the historical, aesthetic and political dimensions of a contemporary 'suffering of images.'