What is a theatre laboratory? Why a theatre laboratory? This book attempts to answer these questions, focusing on the experiences and theories, the visions and the techniques, the differences and similarities of European theatre laboratories in the twentieth century. It studies in depth the Studios of Stanislavski and Meyerhold, the school of Decroux, the Teatr Laboratorium of Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen, as well as Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret. Theatre laboratories embody a theatre practice that defies the demands and fashions of the times, the usual ways of production and the sensible functions that stage art enjoys in our society. It is theatre that refuses to be only art and whose radical research forges new conditions with a view to changing both the actor and spectator. This research transforms theatrical craft into a laboratory that has been compared to the laboratories of the alchemists, who worked not on material but on substance. The alchemists of the stage did not only operate on forms and styles, but mainly on the living substances of the theatre: the actor, seen not just as an artist but above all as a representative of a new human being. Laboratory theatres have rarely been at the centre of the news. Yet their underground activity has influenced theatre history. Without them, our very ideas of theatre, as shaped throughout the course of the twentieth century, would have been quite 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.