This book explores the organisational and institutional structures, systems and modes of practice which shaped the experience of theatre in communities across the British Isles during the twentieth century. The selection of historical data for explication and analysis is not primarily driven by criteria of artistic innovation or value; rather the intention is to construct an overview which demonstrates the interdependence of social and economic factors in the creation and maintenance of theatre as cultural practice. It is my contention that these factors impose structures which might override other conceptual frameworks for historical analysis, such as those based on notions of discrete national identity or formed from binary oppositions of ideological and political allegiance or intellectual and aesthetic preference.

The key questions which the book seeks to ask are: How and where was theatre in the twentieth century organised, by whom and why? What different models of theatre were created, or indeed retained, and whose interests did those models serve? What different communities of interest and agency can be identified? What difference did it make to these diverse communities that theatre functioned within the political construct of the British nation state, and what difference does it make to the historical record if that diversity is more equitably represented? What happens to the historical record if the experience of the greater majority of the theatre-going or theatre-making population is examined, rather than the minority experience memorialised through the dominant historical discourse?