Kara Reilly's edited collection Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities reveals the historical lineage out of which contemporary digital performance has emerged. The collection participates in an exciting current of scholarship that links what C. P. Snow has famously referred to as the “two cultures” of sciences and humanities: the science–performance project historicizes the present moment's fascination with digital technē (craft) against a long history of analog technology (mechanical arts). Reilly's curation and introduction trouble the relationship between humans and machines, as she demonstrates a reciprocal process by which “[h]umans shape technology, but … technologies can help to shape human ways of knowing (epistemology) and by extension our ways of being (ontology)” (3).

Historiography is Reilly's primary method: she asserts that although humans are amazed by feats of digital performance, the emotional state of wonder in response to technological innovation has remained a constant throughout the history of performance. Her transhistorical assemblage of essays depicts performances of the past and present that reflect a public enjoyment of state-of-the-art technologies. Reilly's focus is on wonder, not horror, and marks World War I and its use of mechanical weapons as the beginning of Western culture's mistrust of technology. This cutoff contains Reilly's historical data set to analog performances predating 1914—and neatly avoids a discussion of performances created in response to the atrocities of technological, nuclear, and global warfare—though it also neglects arguments that have been made regarding cultural suspicions of technology during earlier epochs. Reilly's historiographical constraint allows her to include essays that consider technological entertainments that pique audiences' curiosities rather than their ire.

A materialist perspective informs Reilly's editorial process, and most of the essays, no matter how object-oriented, prioritize the human element of technological performances within her historical frame. “[A]ll media remediate” (5), she states, as she extends Marshall McLuhan's thesis to support her own: contemporary digital performances are transhistorically linked to earlier, analog technology because parts of the technologies remain the same, and yet are transformed with every new use by historical human agents. Implicit to Reilly's definition of technology is her understanding that, “[t]he tools are simply the product of technology, but media are extensions of our bodies in space, shaping our ontological realities” (4). Technological objects extend sense perception while also externalizing memory. The book's primary themes of epistemology, objects, and mediation come together in Chapter 11, Adrian Curtin's essay “Recalling the Theatre Phone,” in which he argues that telephones used in a performance context allowed remote audience reception, but also served as an auditory memory-enhancement device for listeners who were able to see the performances in the theatres as well as hear them through the theatre phone.

Chapters in the first part of the book, “Interrogating Historiography,” highlight theatrical technologies that have been underrepresented in the archive, and also address moments of theatre history in which manipulation of performance technologies somehow influenced or altered social memories of historical moments. This thread is taken up by Victor Holtcamp's “Performing Technology, Performing Reality: Buffalo Bill and Steele MacKaye's The Drama of Civilization,” in which he interrogates notions of authenticity, embodiment, and mediation through an analysis of the many incarnations of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody's performances of the Wild West. Part II, “Industrial Bodies and Dance,” asks, How have machines influenced the means by which human bodies perform, and how are bodies mechanized through acts of performance? Katherine Newey's “Fairies and Sylphs: Femininity, Technology and Technique” analyzes the mid-nineteenth-century human dancer in British fairy pantomimes as an analog technology whose expressive capacity is extended through the pointe shoe and behind-the-scenes, human-powered stage technology. Archival news media reveal a public as interested in the work that went into the illusion of gravity-defying fairyland as they were in the spectacle itself. Newey's Marxist analysis nicely introduces “The Tiller Girls: Mass Ornament and Modern Girl,” by the editor, an article that considers the early twentieth-century phenomenon of the precision kick line as a product of Taylor's mechanized work ethic. Part III, “Performing Science and Technology,” comprises chapters that examine entertainment technologies installed in traditional and nontraditional performance contexts in order to probe the impact of objects such as telephones, gas lamps, and early projectors on human ontology. In “Modern Nation and Rural Idyll: Reconciling Progress and Purity through Performance,” Naomi J. Stubbs argues that the transition of a US polis characterized by agrarian ideals to a nation that embraced technological progress as central to its unifying identity was assisted by the introduction of mechanical spectacles like fireworks, fountain displays, colored light shows, and hot-air balloons to the quasi-rural environment of urban pleasure gardens.

Articles that incorporate practice-based research as a historiographical method are included in each section of the book, an editorial choice that clearly connects analog performances from the past with contemporary digital praxis. Richard Beacham's opening chapter, “Heron of Alexandria's ‘Toy Theatre’ Automaton: Reality, Allusion and Illusion,” aptly addresses the analog roots of digital programming through a proof of plausibility for the staging of the drama Nauplius that incorporates textual, mechanical, digital, and empirical media from the first century a.d. and the present. Michael M. Chemers's chapter, “‘Lyke Unto a Lively Thing’: Theatre History and Social Robotics,” closes the book with a comparison of early modern religious automata and social robots of the twenty-first century.

Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology is a good source of provocative essays for theatre and performance scholars interested in the intersections of science and performance. An introductory section for each part of the book, and a conclusion, would have helped readers to keep Reilly's thesis in mind while engaging with a wide variety of historiographical interrogations. However, Reilly embeds references to thematically related chapters within individual pieces, and in that way reminds the reader that each chapter supports her larger premise: that humans have understood themselves through technology for as long as machines have assisted the spectacle of performance.