In the decades since the publication of Martin Meisel's Realizations (1983), the reciprocal relationship between theatre and the visual arts in Victorian culture has remained remarkably underexamined. This volume goes a significant way towards filling this gap, focusing on the theatre as a site of synthesis for all the arts. One of the real delights of this volume is its challenge to the distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Across the eleven wide-ranging chapters, which examine productions of Greek classics, ‘toga plays’, pantomime, Shakespeare, melodrama, amateur dramatics and the work of Molière and Gilbert and Sullivan, the reader is presented with a picture of the diversity of Victorian theatrical practice as well as its relation to an equally diverse range of visual arts, including paintings, portraits, photographs, moving images and cartoons. Highlighting the ways in which the latter have been relegated to descriptive illustration in most studies to date, Jim Davis's essay exemplifies an important attempt by a number of the essays in the volume to re-evaluate the use of visual materials in understanding theatre history.

As well as the more evident ways in which painters might engage with theatrical practices (such as the scene painting examined by both Jeffrey Richards and Richard Foulkes), essays such as Janice Norwood's detailed case study on the Britannia theatre's repertoire from the middle to the end of the century and Shearer West's engaging analysis of the shift from painted to photographic portraits offer an insight into the less obvious but equally important ways in which changes in the visual arts informed both theatrical output and the actor's construction of their image.

With the volume's diversity and range, in terms of both subject matter and approach, Ruskin's aesthetic and cultural theories, examined specifically in the first half of the book, provide a useful through-line: exemplary essays include Andrew Leng's thought-provoking revisionist analysis of Ruskin's attitude to Browning's dramatic monologues and Anselm Heinrich's examination of Ruskin's legacy in the development of the national theatre. The second half of the book moves away from Ruskin's theories to consider the more material relationship between the visual arts and theatre. Moments of dialogue between essays demonstrate the ways in which these two sections might have spoken more revealingly to each other. David Meyer's essay in particular holds in tension an understanding of both the aesthetic and material practices of using supernumeraries in order to suggest Ruskin's naivety about the manufacturing of spectacle. By doing so, Meyer opens up a space for debate between the aesthetic and pedagogical ideas examined in the first half of the volume and the material practices of theatre-making examined in the second. He reveals by doing so the exciting potential of this volume to cross boundaries not only of high and low culture, but of theory and practice, and the aesthetic and material.