I picked up the book intending to read it in stages: instead, I raced through it in two sittings. Some interviews are less compelling than others, but none is bland or merely goes through the motions. Moreover, while the reader comes away with a series of vivid pen portraits of individual interviewees, the effect of the whole is to provide a lively, wide-ranging, and provocative conspectus not just of theatrical styles, conventions and practitioners of the last hundred years, but also of theatre’s continuity and essence.

Almost every interview offers something for both the expert and the general reader, with often surprising aphorisms from unlikely sources. Confronted, for example, with the question: Which theorist proposed that ‘theatre is the great mother art, because it’s the ritual meeting place of all other forms of expressions, a place where music, literature, dance and architecture can express ideas’? I suspect that most theatre scholars would plump for Appia, Gordon Craig, or Artaud. Wrong: it was Frank Lloyd Wright. (Typical that the interviewee who quotes the observation is the theatrical polymath Robert Lepage.)

In fact, irrespective of the book’s many other merits, one could appropriate it for an entertaining game of theatrical Trivial Pursuit. Who, for instance, does Judi Dench think are the two performers you can learn most from if you approach the task of speaking Shakespeare? Answer: John Gielgud (unsurprising) and Frank Sinatra. Who went to see Nicholas Nickleby at the RSC and told an actor who was prancing round before the show pretending to sell hot coconuts to ‘Bugger off!’? Answer: not Steven Berkoff or Oliver Reed, but Harold Pinter. Which of the following actors – Gielgud, Ian McKellen, Willem Dafoe, or Liam Neeson – said: ‘I was repulsed by [the Method] … when you have a tearful moment, think of something from your life and substitute it. I think that’s bullshit’? No, none of the Brits: it was Dafoe.

Revealingly, one of the recurring notes sounded throughout the interviews by a variety of practitioners across the generations is an aversion to the worst instances of the Method in general, and to its high priest in particular, Lee Strasberg. The great German actress Luise Rainer, a performer from the age of sixteen, who worked with Max Reinhardt, was married for a time to Clifford Odets, and won two Oscars, alert as ever at the age of eighty-nine, bluntly informs Eyre that the Actors Studio people ‘were all a little bit nuts … much too much emphasis on “What am I doing?” instead of just doing it …’

While it is perhaps to be expected that a European-trained practitioner might display such scepticism, it is more surprising to find Arthur Miller declaring that Strasberg was:

the one unemployable man around … What [he] was doing was playing to the actor’s weakness. Everyone wants to just express; the idea of being an actor who combines the text, his emotions, and the rest of it was too difficult, so they simply eliminated the text.

This is such a welcome, down-to-earth corrective to the ‘if you have to play sorrow, just think how you felt when your goldfish died’ bastardisation of emotional memory that it should be inscribed over the portals of every acting school.

On the other hand, a number of the interviewees, Miller included (as well as Eyre himself, who acknowledges that the actor transcended the Method), refer to the power on stage of Marlon Brando. For Kim Hunter, who appeared with him in A Streetcar Named Desire, ‘the sense of truth about what he was doing just came to you like a fireball. It brought the best out of you’; more to the point, she quotes Karl Malden’s observation that ‘[Marlon] can make wrong choices, and even bad choices sometimes, but the one thing he can never be is false’.

Reading these interviews and then browsing back through the book – as it prompts the reader to do – is rather like wandering around a packed, lively cocktail party and dropping in on a series of conversations: some overlapping, some pompous, others full of wit and lightly worn wisdom. There are insights from various perspectives into George Devine and the Royal Court, Joan Littlewood, the idea of a National Theatre andthe tyranny of theatrical spaces and funding bodies, and into the contributions of three guests who, though physically absent, tend to dominate the exchanges: Shakespeare, Beckett, and Brecht.

On the first of these, playwright Tony Kushner offers a particularly acute comment from Schiller to Goethe, to the effect that ‘in a Shakespeare play you don’t feel trapped while the parade moves in front of you. The parade is there and you’re moving around it, and you have room to turn around.’ Judi Dench reveals that there’s only one Shakespeare play she doesn’t like – The Merchant of Venice – because ‘there’s no redemption for anybody at all. I just find that at the end, the tunnel closes.’ She has a point.

And while it was perhaps to be expected that Stephen Rea’s views on Beckett spring from an actor’s keen responsiveness to the dialectic of hope and despair, movement, and stasis (‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’), it is disconcerting, though also to be expected, that David Hare appears wilfully loath to acknowledge the playwright’s genius. For him ‘Godot is unplayable now. I’d run a mile rather than ever see it again.’ (Rather like any sensible audience member faced with the prospect of sitting through yet another of Hare’s tergiversations on the state of the nation’s boiled eggs and kippers, middle-class love and lust, middle-class/-aged actresses/vicars, etc.)

Even sillier is his aside thathe would love to see Beckett’s play on the French Resistance. (Is Hare more blind than Pozzo?) But set against such banalities are the sharpness and generosity of the remarks of, say, Jocelyn Herbert, William Gaskill, and John McGrath on both Beckett and Brecht, and the surprising admission from Pinter that Brecht is ‘a remarkable writer, and a totally, really extraordinary individual voice’.

It is this symphony of voices that makes this volume one of the liveliest, most informative theatre books of the past decade. Eyre quotes Paul Scofield’s scepticism about an actor talking about his work: ‘… an actor’s work has life and interest only in its execution.’ Happily, both this book and its contributors give the lie to this (defensible but nevertheless unduly negative) proposition.