Some of the most thoughtful analysis of the theatre during this century was generated by a group of semiotically-oriented linguists and aestheticians in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s and 1940s. These Prague theorists considered all aspects of the theatre experience—the dramatic texts, the various production elements, the audience—but they gave special attention to the complex matter of acting, developing a three-part model for the analysis of this phenomenon that may be taken as typical both of their strategies and of their theoretical concerns. They began with the actor, the living being appearing on the stage. This actor utilized expressive work, physical and vocal, to create the impression of an absent personage. The sum of this work resulted in the creation in the theatre of the stage figure. This figure was then interpreted by the audience, using whatever strategies seemed appropriate to them, to result in their mental image, the character. The character in short was the stage figure as received by the audience.

These remarks made by the actor, Fritz Kortner, stem from a 1932 book in which the leading stage performers of the Weimar Republic portray themselves in photographs and through their own words. In response to the editor's questions, Kortner—among other artists—analyzes his role as an actor within Germany's greater cultural and historical context, linking the crisis in theatre to existent economic and intellectual crises. Given the unstable socio-economic situation at the end of the Weimar Republic, the cultural years ahead looked particularly grim. The actor's commentary reveals the vulnerable situation of German theatre in a country on the brink of dictatorship.

The characters whose interaction constitutes the plot of a play are sets of meanings which build up images of the persons supposedly involved in the “story” the play represents. Just as the “story” can be inferred from the plot, through not always completely with assurance, so the person can be discerned through the character. But in both cases the playwright's artifact includes features that are extraneous to the represented events or persons and arises from the process of dramatic representation itself.

Communism was not always hated and feared by everyone in Eastern Europe. At a certain moment in recent post-war history, a group of influential intellectuals in Poland—now a place where even ex-communist politicians are careful to swear their allegiance to free markets—wanted to reform but still keep a Communist system. That moment was the Polish October, named for the month in 1956 when Wladyslaw Gomulka, a man who believed in a “Polish road to socialism,” took power as First Secretary of the Communist Party. Just as the Czechs in 1968 believed in “socialism with a human face,” the Poles in 1956 believed that Communism could be, in the jargon of their day, “revised” to better fit people's needs. The Polish October was the result of a complex network of events beginning with Stalin's death in 1953, coming to a climax with workers' strikes in June, 1956 in Poznan, and ending in Khrushchev's acquiescence to Gomulka's election in October, 1956. During this period, one of the important contributors to the intellectual ferment that led to the October, the theatre group Studencki Theatr Satyryków or STS, established a cultural niche for alternative theatre that mocked the Communist system and led to one of the most political, vital alternative theatre movements in the world.

After a century of carefree source research conducted against the background of positivist objectivism, theatre historiography now finds itself in the throes of a methodological paradigm shift. Quite independent of its historical disciplinary affiliations, whether as an extension of literary criticism of the various national literatures or as a subsidiary of the historical sciences, theatre historiography is no longer able to resist engagement with fundamental and increasingly complex methodological debates. Particularly in North America there has been a broad discussion on the crisis of traditional, positivist theatre history. The result has been to open up theater historiography to other approaches such as semiotics and diverse theories and methodologies of a poststructuralist provenance. Despite this intensifying and often broad-ranging methodological debate there have been hitherto hardly any attempts to bring theatre history into a dialogue with historical anthropology or ethnohistory, both of which are strongly influenced by the methodologies of cultural anthropology. The deficit is all the more remarkable as these areas have ignited a veritable explosion of interest amongst historians and ethnologists which has transcended the narrow disciplinary borders of both fields of scholarship.

From its origins and throughout its history, Western theatre has engaged, represented, and/or attempted to affect the course of history. Phrynichus and Aeschylus wrote plays on the Persian wars when they were still fresh in the memories of their auditors—too fresh in the case of Phrynichus, who was censured by the Athenians. Early in the sixteenth century French sotties commented on Papal politics; late in the same century Elizabethan playwrights began to exploit contemporary crime stories. During the French Revolution hack writers issued dramatic accounts of Marat's death within a month of its occurrence. Astley's had spectacular recreations of Crimean War battles on stage almost before they occurred. In the twentieth century, technological innovation has stimulated this tendency and extended it throughout the mass media in numberless examples of reality-driven representation.

The circumstances surrounding the national premieres of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire reflect not only the play's vibrant theatre life but also the particular culture that responded to it, validating past or anticipating future critical interpretations. Within two years of the Broadway (and world) premiere of Streetcar in December 1947, the play had been staged in Austria, Belgium, Holland, France (adapted by Jean Cocteau), Italy (with sets by Franco Zeffirelli), England (directed by Sir Laurence Olivier), Switzerland (with a translation by poet Berthold Viertel), and Sweden (directed by Ingmar Bergman). In March of 1950, Streetcar premiered in U.S.-occupied Germany, at Pfozheim. The premiere of the play in some of the former Communist Bloc countries followed in the 1950s or early 1960s. Streetcar opened on the same day—December 21, 1957—at Torun and Wroclaw (Breslau in pre-War Germany), Poland, and in Warsaw the subsequent April of 1958. The Czechoslovakian premiere of Streetcar was in November 1960 in Moravia and its Hungarian debut occurred shortly after.

“That night, a blind singer recited a Michinoku ballad to the accompaniment of his lute. He performed not far from where I was trying to sleep, and I found his loud, countrified falsetto rather noisy … But then I realized how admirable it was that the fine old customs were still preserved in that distant land.” In writing The Narrow Road of the Interior (Oku no hosomichi, ca. 1694), from which these lines are taken, the poet Bashō (1644–94) recalled a trip he had taken a few years earlier through Japan's northeast—what he referred to as “that distant land.” In the work Bashō reflects on the past as it survives in the present, on places made famous by poets of earlier times, and on the traditional performing arts that live on in such places. Even today Japan's northeast is known as a region where many traditional performing arts are still preserved.

Almost half a century ago, the late Alan S. Downer argued that the work of Alfred Wigan, Leigh Murray, and Fanny Stirling marks the transition to an increasingly colloquial and realistic style of acting on the London Stage usually attributed to the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Of those three performers, only Mrs. Stirling has not received subsequent scholarly attention. The single detailed twentieth century account of the neglected actress, The Stage Life of Mrs. Stirling, published by her grandson, Percy Allen, in 1922, is useful but suffers from the pitfalls all too common to familial obsequies and lacks both theatrical and social/cultural context.

Following the translation of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, we have come to see “the public” and “the private” as historically contingent categories bearing upon nests of social practices. The public and private are not just distinctions of geography—so that beyond our front doors we are necessarily and unavoidably in the public—for they bear on authority, authorized voice, citizenship, and credibility in democratic societies. Whereas the Hellenic Greek social order recognized freedom only in the public realm, and only embodied by household masters, the nineteenth-century model of separate spheres cast the public realm as the place where individuals defended the family (equated to the private) from state domination while debating the proper roles for the sexes. Unacknowledged in both models is that agents of the state and the private individuals who have access to the public realm are normalized as exclusively male and of the hegemonic class. The Greek and Victorian models—explicitly relegating women to the home (private) and men to the marketplace (public)—are equally open to critique for being as class-blind as they are hyperbolically universalizing of all cultures and sub-cultures, as if they obeyed a natural law instead of ideological preferences. If we write theatre history with either model in mind and assume that “the public” does not carry with it connotations of power, then we are distorting the evidence and misfiring on our interpretations.

In his Paradoxe sur le comédien, written around 1770 but not published until the nineteenth century, the French philosophe Denis Diderot argued that the great actors of his day suppressed their individuality onstage; rather than personally experiencing the emotions called for by the playwright, they denied their own private subjectivity in order to create a more seamless public illusion. By an act of self-effacement, therefore, they paradoxically rendered themselves capable of impersonating anyone. In his essay, Diderot repeatedly turned to the example of his contemporary, the Comédie-Française actress Mlle Clairon, to illustrate this phenomenon. Off the stage, the philosopher claimed, Clairon was physically unimposing, and displays of her true feelings in the privacy of her home seemed artificial and unconvincing. In the theatre, however, she swelled in size and emotional presence until she dominated an audience and deepened the sentiments invoked by the playwright. According to Diderot, in the moment of public performance she was double: both the “little Clairon” and the “great Agrippina”, the socially inconsequential actress and a mythic heroine of the French stage.

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.

Ecstatic religious trance and spirit possession occur across a broad cultural and socioeconomic range, from Pentecostal possession by the Holy Ghost to Ethiopian zar possession cults. Interestingly, this phenomenon is most frequently experienced by young women in their early teens. Folklorists such as Felicitas Goodman postulate that this generational and gendered proclivity for trance reception is a response to the powerlessness of girls within their communities. As such, spirit possession allows young women to claim a degree of cultural power through the performance of a spiritual manifestation. Although I want to make it clear that I am not questioning the very real physical (and perhaps metaphysical) effects of the trance state during religious ecstasy, I argue that the trance state is a consciously induced performance and the enactment of spiritual power.

Despite the many admirable qualities of Mr. Clyde Fitch's play, The Way of the World at the Victoria Theatre is not so much a dramatic entertainment as a social function. Any well-ordered comment upon it must take cognizance of the audience as well as of the mummers who perform on the far side of the footlights. They are as much a part of it as the stage setting, and the result of their presence is that the five-act drama and its four intermissions and final curtain form a continuous performance the like of which New York has never seen before.

In the third week of December 1908, a group of 300–400 prominent actors, actresses, and dramatists gathered at the Criterion Theatre in London to celebrate the formation of the Actresses' Franchise League. The inaugurating resolution, passed with one dissent, read: “That this meeting of actresses calls upon the Government immediately to extend the franchise to women, that women claim the franchise as a necessary protection for the workers under modern industrial conditions, and maintain that by their labour they have earned the right to this defence” (Votes for Women 24 Dec. 1908, p. 211). The resolution's emphasis upon labour as the enabling criterion qualifying women for the franchise reflects the roots of the British suffrage movement in the working class industrial north, where, as David Rosen notes, the Independent Labour Party had supported early suffragists (57).