Duška Radosavljević's book challenges limited and under-historicized concepts of contemporary devised theatre, a term popular among theatre festival promoters and scholars today. This is a good thing: since the 1990s, much scholarship on collectively created performance has framed this work as distinct from its theatrical predecessors of the 1960s and earlier (which includes artists who collaborated with Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Copeau, and in the Reduta theatre). The shift in terminology among scholars and marketers from ‘collectively created’ to ‘devised’ plays has left the impression that devised theatre is not only a new movement in theatrical practice but also one easily distinguishable from text-based theatre. In this collection of interviews with theatre-makers, producers, directors and critics, Radosavljević focuses on the many different ways ensemble theatre-making is currently being practised. In doing so, she offers continuities across seemingly distinct modes of creation. Ensemble is what connects British producer Richard Jordan to New Jersey's Riot Group to the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, she argues. Radosavljević's book Theatre-Making: Interplay between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (2013), which draws on similar source material, searches for comparable continuities, though through a more concentrated investigation of diverse and interrelated modes of authorship in today's theatre.

Radosavljević's background gives this project a clear, though necessarily limited, focus. Raised in Yugoslavia, educated in the UK, and for some years a member of The Stage's Edinburgh reviewing team, Radosavljević explores differing practices of ensemble theatre-making in general. Her main interest lies in contrasting devising companies in the UK, where ‘the inherently collaborative nature of theatre-making is in practice more difficult to achieve’ because of the ‘free market economy’, with those companies in ‘the heavily subsidised context of a Central European country in which [collaboration] is simply standard practice’ (p. 12). When the juxtaposition of interviews supports this interest – for example, when an interview with Russian theatre-makers Anton Adassinsky and Elena Yarovaya of Derevo is followed by one with Kneehigh Theatre's Emma Rice – the book offers its clearest insights.

Radosavljević groups her interviews into three sections: ‘Redefinitions of Ensemble’, ‘Working Processes’, and ‘Ensemble and the Audience’, though interviews within each section do not stick solely to these topics. If Radosavljević's focus is decidedly British (almost half of those interviewed are UK-based), it is at least ‘Edinburgh Festival Fringe British’, drawing in interviews with members of frequently touring companies such as Croatia's Shadow Casters, Belgium's Ontroerend Goed, and the US's the Wooster Group. Therefore, while Radosavljević's ideas about devised theatre are mainly in conversation with recent UK-centric scholarship – Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart's Devising in Process (2010); Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson and Kate Normington's Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices (2007); and Deidre Heddon and Jane Milling's Devising Performance: A Critical History (2006) – her shifts to a larger scope are refreshing and useful to our understandings of what devised theatre means today, within and outside the UK.