At a time when we live fragmented lives, have accustomed ourselves to anomie, are increasingly alienated from one another in an urban environment in which we teach our children to distrust the friendly stranger and suspect the request for help, when we bar our door against the unexpected visitor and fear the dark, the theatre represents a world in which a lost sense of community is momentarily restored. Here, the dark contains no terrors that are not controlled. The community of actors – interdependent, occupying the same moment and sharing the same linguistic world – offers a paradigm of communality echoed by the audience similarly conjoined to share if not a single experience then at least a field of meaning.

How much more true is this of the avant-garde theatre whose performing spaces – from the Provincetown Players to the Performance Group – have been intimate areas into which the individual is welcomed as an acknowledged member of a select community. Certainly that was how the playwright Paul Goodman, later produced by the Living Theatre, saw things in 1949: ‘the essential present-day advance garde is the physical re-establishment of community’. In the 1960s, that community was increasingly to be enacted through a physical contact between audience and performer, a feature of the Living Theatre's Paradise Now, the Open Theatre's Viet Rock, and the Performance Group's Dionysus in 69.

The Living Theatre began by self-consciously celebrating modernism which Julian Beck, one of its co-founders, admired for putting language under strain and thus provoking a new perception of the real.