Case's new work is a challenging, exciting and engaging read with a broad scope: spanning the early modern to the postmodern, from alchemy (Ben Jonson) to Lara Croft and Grand Theft Auto, as well as encompassing play-texts, performance art, the music of Cage and Glass, spiritualist performances, the Internet and the avatar to name but a few. It is one of the strengths of Case's study that she teases out aspects of the virtual and the virtualized that are not confined to one particular period or medium and makes connections that encourage a reading which doubles back or jumps ahead of itself rather like hyperlinks on the Web. The analogy with the Internet is apposite in relation to this study since Case makes extensive use of materials gathered and meticulously referenced from websites, in addition to print sources. Predictably, although most of the websites cited by Case are extant, some of the pages she quotes from no longer exist, but this is a shortcoming of her strategy of embracing mutable sources.

What her book makes clear is that performance of identity on the Internet is akin to other, older, sometimes considered more legitimate, forms of performance. The study is organized along broadly chronological lines, so that each chapter covers a discrete period moving from seventeenth-century alchemy in chapter 1 to avatars at the end via nineteenth-century spiritualism and Darwin and twentieth-century modernism, mechanization and new technologies in the middle sections. There is much that is impressive – but there are limitations. Despite its title, the work does not offer an exploration of theatre's direct engagement with science; those wanting such a text would be better off consulting Kirsten Shepherd-Barr's Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006, reviewed in TRI 32.3). Nor is there much theoretical consideration of the ‘hard’ sciences. Case calls theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking a ‘noted mathematician’, for instance, and there is little attempt to explore ideas within the natural sciences per se (p. 59). Instead, she offers a persuasive reading of how technologies of science are implicated in the subject and the modes of performance on offer through the ages, with an emphasis on North America that is especially evident in the book's later chapters. Case does not respect ‘science’, preferring to blur the boundaries between the natural sciences, technology and areas that many might consider to have little in common with science at all, such as in her discussion of spiritualism and Mme Blavatsky. The links made between Blavatsky and Case's exploration of the avatar in her final chapter make this an important discussion of impersonation as a virtual and virtualized performance.