Christmas 1911 saw a remarkable collaboration in London between the Austrian director Max Reinhardt and the protean English impresario C. B. Cochran, to create what Margaret Shewring here calls ‘the most remarkable Christmas pantomime ever presented’ – The Miracle, a religious spectacular with a cast of two thousand, staged in the huge arena of the Olympia exhibition centre. Although subsequent revivals of the show, generally in more orthodox performing spaces, have already been documented, there has previously been no full account of this inaugural and in many ways most successful production. Margaret Shewring. who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, has drawn on the previously untapped resources of Olympia, now held at Earl's Court, in this account of the spectacle from inception to reception.