This book was published for the first time in 1992 in Italian, and in 2010 Icarus Publishing Enterprise published this deservedly revised and extended English edition that makes the text accessible to broader audiences – academic and beyond. Far from being outdated, Nicola Savarese's historical research is still an urgent text today. At a time when culturally constructed borders are increasingly dissolved, it is of paramount importance to trace back the historical dimensions of the manifold encounters between Eastern and Western performance and theatre practices.
Savarese presents himself as a somewhat old-fashioned scholarly storyteller – a disguise that is appropriate to his subject: the history of exchanges, interweaving, diffusion of theatrical knowledge and techniques. In six chapters he deliberately guides the reader through consolidated findings and speculative terrain at the same time. What we are confronted with are encounters between peoples and cultures. Savarese's historical account starts with antiquity and ends in the twentieth century with a chapter about Eugenio Barba's anthropological studies and experiments.
The book's achievements are various. First, it is a wonderful introduction to the history of interweaving and entanglement, as well as being aware of the problems of historiography. To the scholarly reader who is interested in all the complexities that connect theatre to histories of war, commerce, barter, migration, religion, travel, etc., Savarese's book reveals cultural relationships that are made of closeness and distance, similarity and difference concurrently. The study reveals that our knowledge of each other results from observation, imagination, projection and construction at the same time.
Whereas the first chapters are presented in a more speculative way and based on the assumption that heterogeneous elements in a given culture disperse, diffuse and gradually are absorbed, later chapters display single biographies and different patterns for the reception and cognition of theatre works. Of course, we meet here all the well-known names we know from the European history of theatre.
Finally, the author rightly suggests throughout the book that the history of drama and theatre should be seen separately. This does, however, not prevent him from addressing the impact that texts and their respective translations – like the Indian dramatic poem Sakuntala – have had on the history of theatre and all the diffusions and encounters.
