Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories in Europe

What is a theater laboratory? Why a theater laboratory?

This book tries to answer these questions focusing on the experiences and theories, the visions and the techniques, the differences and similarities of European theater laboratories in the twentieth century. It studies in depth the Studios of Stanislavki and Meyerhold, the school of Decroux, the Teatr Laboratorium of Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen as well as Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret.

Theater laboratories embody a theater practice which defies the demands and fashions of the times, the usual ways of production and the sensible functions which stage art enjoys in our society. It is a theater which refuses to be only art and whose radical research forges new conditions with a view to changing both the actor and the spectator. This research transforms theatrical craft into a laboratory which has been compared to the laboratory of the alchemists who worked not on material but on substance. The alchemists of the stage didn’t operate only on forms and styles, but mainly on the living matter of the actor, seen not just as an artist but above all as a representative of a new human being.

Laboratory theaters have rarely been at the center of the news. Yet their underground activity has influenced theater history. Without them, the same idea of ​​theatre, as it has been shaped in the course of the twentieth century, would have been different. In this book Mirella Schino recounts, as in a novel, the vicissitudes of a group of practitioners and scholars who try to uncover the technical, political and spiritual perspectives behind the word laboratory when applied to the theatre.

Source: (AbeBooks, 2026)