This is emphatically not an acting handbook or a general survey of acting practices. Rather it focuses exclusively on a mode of acting that resists the Cartesian binary of mind and body, which, it is argued, has for centuries prevailed in much acting theory and practice. Instead, the authors argue that in ‘psychophysical acting’ physical and psychic impulses and responses are experienced as one.

The implications of this study are exhilarating. The concept of the actor as servant to other theatrical elements – text, ensemble, director, production – is still, perhaps, too much with us, and Zarrilli, Daboo and Loukes offer tantalizing glimpses of a theatre in which actors are their own agents. Much of the terrain is familiar, but its different parts have not frequently, except occasionally in other works by Zarrilli, been discussed in association with each other. Zarrilli explores the psychophysical nature of acting in India, mainly kathakali, and in Japan, mainly nō, which leads to striking insights into how an intensely concentrated psychophysical acting can enlarge and deepen the actor's performance in a way that thoroughly engrosses the audience. It seems, when Jerri Daboo turns to Stanislavsky, that we are returning to the more familiar Cartesian perspective. But, taking as her starting point William James's observation that emotion is sparked by our physical reaction to our immediate environment rather than vice versa, Stanislavsky's unfolding thoughts on acting, which culminate in Active Analysis, trace a growing awareness of the oneness of mind and body, thought and emotion. Rebecca Loukes plots the trajectory of psychophysical acting through modern dance, Grotowski and Lecoq, to conclude with a useful summary of research in acting and cognitive science.

Although the three authors are scrupulous in maintaining thematic consistency and referring to each other's work, no attempt is made to come to a ‘grand theory of acting’, primarily because no such theory can exist. Compelling acting is not compelling because of the actor's mastery of skills, though skills are still crucial in performance, but because in the intensely concentrated process of training, performing and living, they have discovered a creative centre in themselves that can transform both them and the material they encounter and represent.

It is not the concern of the authors systematically to explain how such actors can be trained – indeed, training is an inadequate concept for the actor they envisage – neither do they attempt to imagine the theatre in which such actors could flourish. Every now and then reservations are expressed about textual drama and much of the work of the psychophysical actor takes place through movement and in silence. But the possibility of a sustained encounter between the actor as conceived in this book and a theatre in which text is a prime consideration is excitingly imagined. It might transform, and beneficially so, the occidental theatre.