With a title promising to cover the entire range of theatre studies and even beyond, leading performing arts professor Josette Féral's latest book strikes one as nothing if not ambitious. Of course, the considerable breadth of its author's publication record should already put this concern at rest. Moreover, in her own words, the field of theatre studies thus far has been in need of an overview that would address all available analytical models while also insisting on the creative process behind the productions under scrutiny (pp. 9–10). Accordingly, such a resource could credibly contribute to bridging (part of) the methodological chasm that traditionally has separated the academy and the profession. By analogy, however, the gap between theory and practice, ambition and execution obviously haunts many creative enterprises – not in the least the writing of textbooks. No such danger here, though, for Féral effectively vows to takes us ‘beyond the limitations’ in a general sense.

That said, despite the self-promotional braggadocio, the latter is hardly exaggerated. For, as early as the foreword an impression of great structural lucidity is conveyed in an atmosphere of unassuming expertise. The book's five-act configuration takes us successively from a theoretical opening ‘in search of a practice’, over a pivotal chapter revisiting the key concepts of theatricality and performativity and a third one broadening the perspective to the more general notion of performance, before finally ‘reaching’ said practice in the two final parts entitled ‘Observations’ and ‘Interculturalism’. This progression is by all means a fluid one, and the order of subchapters such that the reader gradually comes to realize that theatre theory and practice need not be abysmally disconnected but can, on the contrary, reciprocally feed off one another.

The structuring notion of reciprocity itself should not come as a surprise when taking into account Féral's professional background, which allows her to fuse francophone and Anglo-Saxon traditions in a discourse that is all the richer for it. If anything, her experience allowed the author to move even ‘beyond’ these two contexts and develop a genuinely integrative perspective – as demonstrated by the wide, ‘intercultural’ range of theatre practices and practitioners she incorporates into her argument. Yet it is, above all, the clarity with which Féral presents the different dimensions of ‘theatre’ (social, industrial, critical) as heterogeneous constituents of a compendium all striving to attain a functional – if precarious – balance, that ultimately makes the book's claims to universality credible. On countless occasions we read about the absence of a unifying theory of the theatre; however, it does not take this book's full four hundred pages to realize that such a lacuna is not to be lamented but rather celebrated. On the other hand, one could also argue that Féral progressively loosens her grip on her theoretical overview to make room for more descriptive exegeses, yet these actually strengthen the aforementioned reciprocity between concept and object. In this sense, then, Théorie et pratique du théâtre closely resembles its subject by aspiring at representation via the acknowledgement of, indeed, its limitations.