This book secures Ibsen studies as a leading area of scholarship in the digital humanities, joining the invaluable online resource Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (Ibsen's Writings) and the ever-growing database IbsenStage, to both of which this study is deeply indebted. Using Franco Moretti's theory of distant reading via digital analysis, Holledge et al. trace the performance history of A Doll's House across the globe and through nearly 140 years, a scholarly feat that is only possible when vast amounts of data are available to map. Their exhaustive study of the worldwide performances of this play, from the early European Noras through contemporary adaptations, has generated precisely this wealth of data and they show how well suited it is to Moretti's approach. While their suggestion that we may by now have exhausted close readings of the play goes perhaps too far, their methodology – fusing distant and close reading, performance analysis, biography and visualization – is compelling, and the book is a leading example of how these methods can be implemented.

Yet the study exemplifies even more strikingly than it does Moretti's ideas what Jacky Bratton in New Readings in Theatre History (2003, 37) calls ‘intertheatricality’, a concept strangely absent from this otherwise thorough study. Indeed, theatre historians will be fascinated by the intertheatrical mesh of connections between theatre texts and between texts and their users outlined across its two parts: ‘Cultural Transmission’ and ‘Adaptation at a Distance’. The early Noras form the focus of the first part, along with an exploration of the Norwegian government's powerful role in shaping Ibsen's ongoing legacy abroad. The new research here is revelatory, significantly adding to the scholarship on the play. It is rarely recognized, for instance, that most of the first Noras kept the role in their repertoires for decades, and often communicated with each other, or that there was a hereditary as well as a sociable passing on of performance techniques as many of these first Noras had daughters and granddaughters who took on the part. Nor have we known much until now about Janet Achurch, who played Nora in London in 1889 and then took the play on tour to Australia, New Zealand and India. The details about her life and those trips challenge the assumption of much previous scholarship that this tour was an unfortunate distraction from the main work of getting Ibsen through to British audiences, and instead provide a much clearer sense of her impact and how the play made its way abroad.

Holledge et al. also illuminate the trend for adaptations of Ibsen's plays, rather than faithful revivals. A recent example is Patrick Marber's adaptation of Hedda Gabler for the National Theatre, directed by Ivo Van Hove in a stunningly brutalist and deconstructed contemporary staging. Ever since its premiere, A Doll's House has prompted sequels speculating what happens to Nora after she slams the door. The dual appetite for canonical Ibsen and for new iterations of his works continues to grow. The book contextualizes this development within the framework of what makes a play a global success, with the authors showing how the play made its way to China, Japan and Africa and became uniquely adapted to world cultures. An especially powerful contribution is a chapter that scrutinizes the tarantella scene as it has been performed across time and cultures.

There is a pitfall to Moretti's distant-reading theory, and it occasionally manifests itself here. Despite the wealth of detailed information about the performance history of the play and the arresting maps this generates, the authors often have no other explanation than vague ‘forces’ as to why the play did what it did across the world. This is particularly noticeable toward the end of the Introduction, when ‘a force at work’, ‘the internal forces at work’, ‘external social forces’ and several other variations on this term occur within a single page. Though the book strives to pin down these forces, most of them are already well known (e.g. the European women's movements of the late nineteenth century). But this is a minor point in an otherwise exemplary work that is set to reinvigorate the field of Ibsen studies and, hopefully, initiate further such mappings of global dramas.