While the radical Italian theatre collective Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) has published similar texts, commentaries and theoretical documents of past work in Italian and French, this English-language collection goes beyond this by offering a perspective of spectatorship. Presented in three sections, its content can be described as an act of curation, where selected material such as statements by the company on the conception of Tragedia Endogonidia are placed alongside descriptions of its staging and accounts of what the spectators saw in performance.

Part I, ‘Makers and Spectators: Tragedia Endogonidia 2002–4’, opens with an essay by Ridout and Kelleher that explores notions of spectatorship and the archive. It contextualizes the collage of fragmentary material, organized chronologically by episode, which pertains to the conception, playing and reception of SRS's tragic cycle. This is the closest the book gets to commentary that makes sense of their practices. While not presenting an easily accessible introduction to their theatre, it offers an archival document that captures the spirit of their practice, similarly to the articulation of Forced Entertainment's practices in Tim Etchell's Certain Fragments (1999). The authors leave it to the reader to make sense of the barrage of oblique references, which question notions of representation, experience and the nature of tragedy. SRS's dense and obscure language resists easy interpretation, much like their works in performance. Part II, ‘Conversations’, presents conversations between the five authors about dramaturgy, pretense and illusion, composition, rehearsal, gesture and the future of the company. This section proves to be most accessible and valuable as instigation to practitioners to question what is possible when experimental methodologies are followed in production. Part III, ‘Disjecta Membra’, then reproduces entries drawn from Romeo Castellucci's notebooks that reveal the germs of ideas later realized in performance. Taken together, these sections provide a glimpse into the obscure world of a company that challenges the boundaries of representation and of what is possible onstage when people play with the Western canon of art, theatre and literature in the laboratory of performance. Written for an audience of postgraduate and performance studies scholars who are interested in the conceptualization of performance and the consequences of metatheatrical representation, this collage is to be considered an impression of the working practices of one of Europe's most provocative and enigmatic theatre collectives.