Mirella Schino, An Indra's Web: The Age of Appia, Craig, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Copeau, Artaud, translated by Vicki Ann Cremona and Marco Galea, Icarus Publishing Enterprise, 2018, pp. 365.

To what extent is theatre a part of our culture? For centuries, theatre professionals inhabited a society apart. The twentieth century changed this but perhaps not in the way we have always thought it did. This book is about the theatre-makers who were chosen as models in the early twentieth century, as well as about their spectators. Although they never coalesced into a movement, the theatre masters created a web that was instrumental to a unique transformation. This radical change was more than an aesthetic revolution or a completely new way of creating performances, and we are still grappling with its meaning. An Indra�s Web looks at this transformation from a new perspective, subverting the accepted hierarchy of arguments, and describes it in a way that both theatre experts and general readers can benefit from. It does this by drawing upon examples from novels, performances, journals, biographies, events, wars and revolutions. An Indra�s Web presents a history that cuts across many subjects, with one foot in theatre and the other in the outside world.

Mirella Schino teaches performance at the University of Roma Tre. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century acting, the twentieth-century theatre revolution, theatre during the Fascist period and ensemble theatre in Europe since the 1960s. She set up the Odin Teatret Archives and is editor of the journal Teatro e Storia. Her publications include: La nascita della regia teatrale (Laterza, 2003), I Racconti del Grande Attore (Edimond, 2004), Il teatro di Eleonora Duse (Bulzoni, 2008); Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories in Europe (Icarus, 2009) and Odin Teatret Archives (Routledge, 2017).