Theatre & Interculturalism is a potent addition to Palgrave's excellent Theatre& series, as Ric Knowles peels away layers of Western-based unidirectionalism to reveal a space where a level playing field might be built, one upon which the fragile ideals of interculturalism could be performed in an equal exchange by all players. Knowles lays out the geography, history, and primary theories of intercultural theatre, and points to why the intercultural tap needs to turn both ways in our era of “late capitalist McGlobalisation” (54). His central argument, that intercultural theatre must resist Western framing and be studied and practiced outside the perspective of Western egocentricity, enlists the theories of Bhabha, Balme, Lo, Gilbert, and Bharucha, while productively critiquing Pavis, in whose Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (Routledge, 1992) the “west and the rest” binary is foregrounded: “our culture and that of others” (quoted in Knowles, 26). Knowles clarifies terms such as transcultural, intracultural, multicultural, and cross-cultural (4), and—although he does not refer to it—a strength of this volume is his years as a player in the field, especially as a dramaturge, among intercultural theatres across Canada; his performance ecologies (58) provide snapshot case studies of ethical theatre making in the multicultural city of Toronto, where dozens of diasporas intersect.

Most theatre departments teach that the origins of theatre are located among the ancient Greeks. Informed reading lists may include Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman or Kālidāsa's Abhijñānashākuntala, yet remain largely frozen in Europe. As for the body of theatre preserved through oral tradition: if we can't read it, it doesn't exist. Moreover, many non-Western plays that squeeze into the canon took root in postcolonial landscapes. Knowles's first chapters sketch how, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, intercultural performance has been molded by the long-term impact of cultural colonialism under imperialism. He then points to an alternative historiography by drawing on examples ranging from the ancient intercultural exchanges of the Maori peoples of New Zealand's marae; to Japan in the Nara period and the exchange of performance traditions with China and Korea; to India, where Kathakali drama remains connected to syncretic performance forged four thousand years ago (8).

Knowles observes that theatre has always been intercultural (6); theatre artists, scholars, students, and audiences need to be reminded of this, as is evidenced by the white agenda that rules the playbills of so many theatres in the West—theatres that possess the resources to bring intercultural theatre to upper-middle-class audiences and, from there, to broader audiences. Western stages in ethnically diverse nations have a responsibility to fulfill the original function of theatre as an agent for social awareness that reveals to citizens how their world works. Are the goals of intercultural theatre, then, political, encouraging us to step away from monoculture and what Paul Gilroy describes as “ethnic absolutism” (quoted in Knowles, 54)? Knowles points out that “[i]t is clear that the relatively belated intersection of postcolonial theory with intercultural theatre studies produced a shift in perspective and politics from an overwhelming emphasis on the idealist and universalist to a more grounded focus on the localist and the historical, particularly as situated within former colonies” (42); he then traces this shift through the rise of performance studies and its intersections with critical theories of race, diaspora, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and whiteness. Knowles observes the intrinsic value of intercultural theatre by citing an interview he conducted with First Nations director Yvette Nolan: Nolan, describing a workshop comprising intracultural indigenous artists in which a syncretic ritual was negotiated, stated, “If we can work it out in this play then maybe we can work it out in our lives too” (67).

Reaffirming that “intercultural performance has the potential to bring into being not merely new aesthetic forms but new social formations, new diasporic, hybrid, and intercultural social identities” (45), Knowles encourages us to reconsider the “standard” practice of reading the material theatre through an exclusively Western gaze. He proposes instead that the examination of interculturality should come from the perspective of the postcolony and of those at the margins, for it is they who are in fact at the center of the planet, both geographically and as ancient creators of mythic ritual whence performance methodology and philosophy have been appropriated by some of the most influential theatrical minds of the twentieth century. For example, Brecht and Artaud, whom Knowles uses to illustrate materialist and universalist schools of thought in his brief third and fourth chapters, respectively, both developed what were hailed as revolutionary theories by grafting ancient performance practices onto their work—practices that were uprooted from their initial sociological contexts.

In his third chapter (“Brecht and the Materialists”), Knowles describes Brecht's simultaneous development of a materialist approach via Marxism in the formulation of his epic theatre, and his creative borrowing from Asian culture to inform his theory of Verfremdung. Today, Brecht's theories have come full circle and been reappropriated in India, Japan, Africa, and, notably, China, where The Good Person of Sezuan received a Sichuan song-dance production at the 1985 China–Brecht Symposium (15). Knowles then discusses Artaud (in the fourth chapter, “Artaud and His Doubles: The Universalists”), his European, male lineage of Grotowski, Barba, and Brook—whom Knowles “loosely group[s] as ‘the universalists’” (16)—and their search for the missing genetic link connecting us all through the deployment of forms borrowed from sources as diverse as yoga and Balinese ritual. Such an ahistorical methodology endeavors to locate the archetype residing deep within the self—an essential humanity preceding notions of alterity.

We've come a long way since the heyday of “the universalists,” but Knowles's book demonstrates how much farther we need to go in order to pay more than lip service to theatrical interculturalism—especially in today's world of neoliberal agendas, and amid struggles to keep matters of diversity on political and theatrical agendas even as productions flow like water across continents. Knowles's critical look at hybridities ancient and new begins with a historiography of intercultural theatre and ultimately calls for placing the means of production firmly into culturally diverse hands across real, acknowledged, and respected differences (79); it calls as well for the radical reexamination of how interculturality is performed in the global village, the creative city, and on stages and in rehearsal halls across the one world.