The book opens with an introductory chapter which contextualises recent trends in approaches to theatre-making. In the ensuing eleven chapters, eleven different writer-observers describe, contextualise and analyse the theatre-making practices of eleven different companies and directors, including Japan's Gekidan Kaitaisha and the Québécois director Robert Lepage. Each chapter is enriched with extensive illustrations as well as boxed-off 'asides', giving the reader different perspectives on the work. Chapters usually focus on a single production, such as Complicite's 2003-04 The Elephant Vanishes, allowing detailed investigations of complex practices to emerge. The book concludes with a brief manifesto for making contemporary theatre by the editors, plus a bibliography suggesting further reading.

Making contemporary theatre is a rich resource for the theatre-making student and the theatre-goer alike, full of diverse examples of how the most exciting theatre is actually made.