Shannon Craigo-Snell is Professor of Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. In making interdisciplinary connections between theatre and theology, she follows theologians from Hans Urs von Balthasar to Francesca Murphy, Nicholas Lash, Frances Young, Tim Gorringe, Max Harris, Samuel Wells and Kevin Vanhoozer. These connections have already been fruitful and theologically illuminating. However, her distinctive take in this book is to compare the ideas on performance of a number of distinguished theatre directors with various theologians.

The first chapter provides a fairly loose account of other theological contributions in this area, with a strong emphasis upon performance from a script. The latter is crucial for her ecclesiology:

So she notes, but is not especially interested in, either Samuel Wells’ focus upon improvisation or Balthasar's upon theo-drama.

The four distinguished theatre directors that interest her most are the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski, the radical Brazilian director Augusto Boal, the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht, and the deeply sensitive English director Peter Brook. Stanislavski (whose student, Lee Strasberg, developed ‘method’ acting) was particularly concerned with emotional memory in acting – with actors recalling events in their own lives when playing dramatic parts. She makes connections here with those theologians (such as the Jesuit Simon Harak) who have championed Ignatius’ spiritual exercises as a means of Christian formation. For Boal the connection that she makes is with liberation theology: in both radical theatre and liberation theology people are encouraged to challenge their comfortable status quo and to change roles in favour of those less privileged than themselves. Brecht, in contrast, ‘wanted theatre to be both instructive and entertaining’ (p. 97), with actors sometimes speaking directly to the audience and even reading aloud stage directions. Here she makes connections with womanist theology. Finally, she turns to Peter Brook's seminal 1968 book The Empty Space, especially with its notion of ‘Holy Theatre’, that is, ‘The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible’. Brook's writing is so infused with religious imagery that she has little difficulty making theological and ecclesial connections here. However, she makes her task more difficult by taking Karl Barth as her dialogue partner, while recognising frankly that ‘there is ample reason to believe Barth would have serious reservations about my entire project’ (p. 114).

Does this book really work? In part it does. If you enjoy making interdisciplinary connections (as I do) there is much to relish here. But some of the connections work better than others. The connections that she makes with Brecht are very brief and not especially convincing. Those with Stanislavski are more developed and detailed, but they do depend crucially upon Ignatius’ spiritual exercises, which may not be to everyone's taste. Boal and liberation theology are clearly of a piece, but will appeal most to those sympathetic to radical ideology. Brook and Barth are much more difficult to connect. Brook and Balthasar might have made a more obvious pairing. This is not the most rigorous of books. Its style is often loose and sometimes anecdotal. Yet it is imaginative and exploratory and well worth reading on that account.