An increasing number of recent publications on Stanislavsky's legacy in contemporary theatre have reinvigorated the field of Stanislavsky studies. Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina firmly position their anthology Stanislavsky in the World: The System and Its Transformations across Continents in the current discourse about the continuing influence of Stanislavsky's theory and practice. While acknowledging the wealth of new perspectives on the work of Stanislavsky and his followers, the editors point to the lack of discussion about his practices beyond Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Their book, an impressive compendium of international scholars and practitioners, sets out to fuel an intercultural dialogue about the transmission of Stanislavsky's system across the world. The editors effectively articulate the parameters of this ambitious undertaking by focusing the discussion on the ways Stanislavsky's practices have been “disseminated, adopted, resisted, and ultimately changed” (2) and grounding it in a complicated polemic about power relations and cultural exchange.

The book is organized into six parts: Europe; China and Japan; Latin America; Africa; Australasia; and India and Bangladesh. As the editors note, this structure reflects the trajectory of Stanislavsky's cultural transmission chronologically while “maintaining geographical borders and country associations as sections for clarity and navigability” (20). Mindful of the broad scope of this study, Pitches and Aquilina guide their readers with brief and clearly framed introductions to each part. These introductions serve as both helpful summaries of the included articles and thoughtful provocations that conceptualize diverse possibilities embedded in Stanislavsky's system and point to the complexities of its cultural transmission.

Although introducing the European continent as a starting point in this study might be perceived as privileging the West, its “priority” placement in the book fits within the work's chronological structure—Europe being the first site of the system's dispersal. Part 1 offers a wide-ranging interpretation of Stanislavsky's practices in Italy (Ruffini), France (Autant-Mathieu), Lithuania (Pukelyté), Malta (Aquilina), and Greece (Gaitanidi). The spread of Stanislavsky's ideas in Europe manifested itself in many forms, shaped by each country's cultural specifics and influenced by the states’ ideological pressures. While the integration of his system in Lithuania before the country's annexation by the USSR in 1940 was closely linked to the process of developing the Lithuanian National Theatre, its dissemination in Italy and Greece involved a broader cultural context, and its development occurred alongside other theatrical methodologies and artistic voices. Malta's lack of an institutional theatre structure conversely led to the unfortunate reductivism of Stanislavsky's ideas. France, in turn, had a vexed relationship with the system informed by accidental misreadings and aesthetic misunderstandings of psychological realism associated with Stanislavsky's pedagogy.

Subsequent parts of the book continue to engage with the complicated politics of cultural exchange and recognize the importance of ideological structures that often inform the interplay between accepting and resisting. Part 2 presents cases of “hybridity and adaptation” (144) in China (Liu; Pitches and Li) and Japan (Nakayama). Whether driven by the urge for modernization or influenced by changing political affiliations, both countries adapted Stanislavsky's principles in their respective local frameworks—a process that at times resulted in productive cultural conversations but often led to unresolved methodological collisions. By contrast, the essays in Part 3—on Brazil (Cavaliere), Cuba (Brugal), and by implication Argentina (Serrano)—consider cultural hybridity “a necessary contextual condition that paved the way for the integration of Stanislavskian practices” (208) in Latin American countries. The spread of Stanislavsky's ideas on this continent frequently encountered the rich amalgamation of local performance traditions. Derived from different cultural sources—Indigenous, African, Hispanic, and European—these existing cultural contexts found themselves in a dynamic dialogue with Stanislavskian approaches in search for an imaginative synthesis, a possible convergence of multiple aesthetic perspectives.

The remaining three parts employ a postcolonial lens to tackle various aspects of Stanislavsky's complicated journey in Africa, Australasia, and India and Bangladesh. One of the book's apparent strengths is in providing theoretical frames that help both to illuminate cultural specifics of each geographic region and to draw a larger landscape of cultural transmission of Western metanarratives across the continents, thereby placing this study in a growing field of intercultural performance. The essays in Part 4 discuss the integration of Stanislavsky in Nigeria (Igweonu), Tunisia (Mrabet), and South Africa (Peimer) and highlight the fundamental connection between each country's colonial practices and the dissemination of Stanislavsky's theory of acting. Finding their path to the Nigerian cultural environment through the British conservatory system, Stanislavsky's principles served as “unifying frameworks” that help to articulate “the diversity of indigenous performance forms” (285). The migration of Stanislavsky's techniques to Tunisia was advanced by French colonization, specifically through the work of Jean Vilar. The transformation of Stanislavsky's ideas in multiple contexts in South Africa was informed by the country's search for “a dreamed-of hybridity” and grounded in the postcolonial project that promotes the fluidity of cultural trajectories between “periphery” and “centre” (310–11).

The essays in Part 5 engage with the concepts of “healthy autonomy” (320) in the case of Australia's cultural-geographic distance as it mitigates Stanislavsky's influence (Maxwell; Tait) and “biculturalism” (321), a conscious attempt at hybridization of Stanislavsky and indigenous Māori theatre traditions in New Zealand (Halba). As the book progresses, common threads begin to emerge in relation to Stanislavsky's transmission in various regions of the world, particularly around the principle of hybridity, which is often determined by the “conditions of acceptance and resistance” (440) in a given cultural and political context. The essays in Part 6 explore the wide spectrum of this hybridity, offering compelling examples of cross-cultural exchange in India (Ryu and Aquilina) and Bangladesh (Ahmed) that highlight the complexities of a bicultural theatre approach and that contemplate the possibilities of transforming “the travelling theory of the Imperial centre” (418) into a new and unique practice in a postcolonial setting.

As with any tome of this magnitude, there are occasional questions concerning uneven quality or the lack of a cohesive methodology among the essays. These concerns aside, Stanislavsky in the World is a major contribution to the fields of Stanislavsky studies and intercultural performance, offering original ways of thinking about cultural hegemonies and bi/multicultural practices in contemporary performance contexts.