This chapter surveys a range of engagements with religion in the modernist theatre, from T. S. Eliot’s vision for a new Christian drama to Bertolt Brecht’s fascination with the Bible, and from Sylvia Wynter’s staging of Afro-diasporic ritual practices to Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatisation of Buddhist legend. Such works, this chapter shows, tend to favour syncretic and heterodox expressions of religious subjects, frequently drawing together multiple doctrinal or ritual traditions within a single performance. These modern dramas of religion are examined across four sections: ‘Modernist Iconoclasms’, on dramatists who sought to dismantle religion’s influence; ‘Temples of a Living Art’, on artists who sought to remake theatre in the image of religion; ‘Ritual and Sacrifice’, on theatre and metaphysics; and ‘Allegories and Parables of Renewal’, on the intersection of religious allegory with social change. Throughout these sections, the chapter illustrates the plural and paradoxical roles for religion assigned on the modernist stage.

Between the First and Second World Wars, many thousands of working-class and avant-garde theatre-makers created and performed in agitprop – a topical, accessible, and highly physical genre that aims to inform and persuade audiences. Although agitprop has Russian revolutionary origins, it proved so flexible and transmissible that well-known troupes like Moscow’s Blue Blouse and Berlin’s Red Megaphone stimulated waves of performances, adaptations, and original work in other cities and countries, including the UK, US, Japan, and Mexico. Epic theatre, as developed by Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and their co-workers during the interwar and early post-war years, shared agitprop’s pedagogical priorities and many of its elements, including loose, episodic structures and anti-mimetic acting styles. This essay follows Piscator and Brecht themselves by emphasising the formal and historical connections between agitprop and epic theatre, refusing to consign the former to the category of juvenilia.

Comedy is the least considered aspect of modernist theatre – commonly framed as formally conservative and crowd-pleasing, leading towards harmony and continuity rather than rupture. However, comedy’s distinguishing features ally it to core modernist techniques and concerns: metatheatrical self-consciousness, disjunctions, disruptions, repetitions, and anarchic pleasures. Comic structures from farce and the comedy of manners to jokes, sketches, knockabout, and punchlines are central to a wide range of modernist plays. From Ibsen and Chekhov onward, the tragicomic mode is a common keynote of modernist theatre with the balance between comedy and tragedy dependent on the choices of the performer or the sensibilities of the viewer. Far from being inherently conventional, comedy can be viewed as modernist in its impulse to satirise and destabilise. Comedy is perhaps where the distinction between modernist and simply modern, between oppositional avant-garde and popular mainstream, is least identifiable and most intriguing.

Science and theatre were intertwined from the start of ‘modern drama’ in the works of Georg Buchner and Émile Zola, who ushered modern ideas about science into the theatre and made conscious engagement with science an intrinsic part of a break with the theatrical past. This chapter traces the explicit, conscious interaction between science and the modern stage, from August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen’s works through to those of Bernard Shaw, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Robins, Eugène Brieux, Harley Granville Barker, Karel Čapek, Tawfiq al-Hakim, James Ene Henshaw, Mary Burrill, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell; the probing of race science on stage by Harlem Renaissance playwrights; the Federal Theatre Project’s science-inflected productions; and Bertolt Brecht’s changing depiction of science and scientists. In addition, there is another meaning of ‘science in the theatre’ that the chapter draws out: the hidden, often unacknowledged roles played by science and technology in staging.

This chapter covers the multivalent, multidirectional relationship that developed between theatre and philosophy during the modernist era. It begins with the rise of German idealism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its influence on Friedrich Nietzsche’s landmark The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. From Nietzsche’s own sway over a new generation of dramatists worldwide, the chapters expands to consider other thinkers taken as influences by global theatre-makers as well as leading philosophers and theorists around the world who took explicit interest in the stage. The chapter also explores the tensions inherent in these relationships, including open disavowals of philosophic influence by prominent dramatists and outright criticisms of the entire philosophical project by members of the avant-garde. In both its avowals of influence and disavowals of the same, the interaction between theatre and philosophy in the modernist age proved to be enormously generative for both.

In the early twentieth century, Black American theatre pioneers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook sought to redefine the stereotypical minstrel figure for white audiences. Their efforts gave rise to the ‘coon’ character, a complex representation of Black urban life that challenged traditional norms while perpetuating some harmful stereotypes. This figure played a significant role in global modernism and shaped discussions about race, appearing in works by Eugene O’Neill and Jean Genet. By the 1960s, Black American artists felt the need to reimagine the ‘coon’ character to align with a more radical political agenda, reflecting the evolving social and cultural landscape that included the advent of Black radical politics and postcolonial thought. The new figure that emerged directly challenged political disenfranchisement and cultural appropriation, creating a theatre that was far more confrontational in its exploration of race.

Stand-up comedy is performed in front of an audience, a point both self-evident and critical. Comedians construct their material to best elicit the desired aesthetic responses, laughter being chief among them, from any given crowd that might be assembled before them, and the audience’s engagement is constitutive of the thing produced in that moment of performance. This chapter explores multiple senses of ‘audience’ – as the market for and tradition-bearers of stand-up, as the followers and fanbase of a specific comedian, and as those present at the moment of a performance – before demonstrating the nature of the creative collaboration in completing the prepared ‘text’, in allowing for more spontaneous displays of wit through crowdwork and handling hecklers, and in the breakdown of performance when expectations are breached and the audience withdraws its support.

The ability to disarm through amusement distinguishes humour from other rhetorical forms. And humour’s function as an ‘anti-rhetoric’ uniquely equips it to advance agendas and disavow its own potency simultaneously, rendering even the most acerbic critique ‘just a joke’. As they engage audiences with material that seeks to redress power imbalances, whether through subtle jabs or blatant attacks, LGBTQ comics create awareness and identification, enlightening their audiences through humour. This chapter provides an analysis of contemporary LGBTQ comics, focusing on the rhetorical functions of LGBTQ stand-up comedy. Specifically, examining the acts of ten gay, eight lesbian, and two trans comics reveals the way this discourse educates audiences about LGBTQ culture, critiques homophobia, and creates identification and empowerment for performers and audiences alike.

Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings to politics, race, sexuality, and the question of offensiveness. Chapters also consider the performance dynamics of stand-up in detail, examining audience, persona, and trauma. Interspersed throughout the chapters are a series of originally commissioned interviews with comedians from nine different countries, including Maria Bamford, Jo Brand, Aditi Mittal, and Rod Quantock, providing rare insights into their craft.

This chapter examines the locations – performance venues, physical spaces, virtual outlets – in which stand-up comedy in the USA takes place. It opens with a discussion of the different types of venues in which stand-up has existed historically -theatres, nightclubs, bars, clubs, music venues, arenas, etc. – before moving on to explore contemporary comedy clubs in New York City. Throughout the chapter, particular emphasis is given to the organisation of the venues and shows, the performance conventions they incorporate, and how their spatial and aesthetic properties as venues shape the work of the comics who play them. The chapter is based on the author’s extensive ethnographic research carried out on the New York comedy scene among up-and-coming local comics at both the comedy club and in the so-called alternative comedy scene.

The Introduction starts by considering stand-up in Mort Sahl’s terms, as ‘a primitive form of theatre’. Using a quote by Tony Allen to pin down its key feature, it argues that stand-up is defined by centring on the performer themself, a direct relationship between performer and an active audience, and the appearance and possibility of spontaneity. After briefly considering the history of stand-up in the USA and UK, it goes on to recount the less familiar story of how it developed in Australia, from the emergence of Rod Quantock to the rise of the modern comedy club in the 1980s. It then considers its rapid expansion around the world in the last 30 years – paying particular attention to India, Estonia, and Belgium – and its continuing relationship with the English language even in non-anglophone countries. It finishes with an explanation of the scope and structure of the rest of the book.

This chapter considers how gender as a social framework has shaped and informed stand-up comedy, with a particular focus on the UK. Gender identities entail certain cultural expectations, especially when these identities interact with race, class, and sexuality. The chapter explores how gender impacts on all stand-up performers, addressing the unavoidable nature of gender stereotypes as well as historical and contemporary debates about feminism, femininity, and the role of women within the comedy industry. In addition to considering how gender is represented in stand-up material, the chapter examines how wider power structures influence the business of comedy, specifically problems faced by women stand-ups in terms of their access to comedy venues and their treatment by audiences. This chapter tracks the evolution of comedy’s relationship to gender from music hall to working men’s clubs through to the ‘alternative’ comedy boom of the 1980s and stand-up on television.

Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings to politics, race, sexuality, and the question of offensiveness. Chapters also consider the performance dynamics of stand-up in detail, examining audience, persona, and trauma. Interspersed throughout the chapters are a series of originally commissioned interviews with comedians from nine different countries, including Maria Bamford, Jo Brand, Aditi Mittal, and Rod Quantock, providing rare insights into their craft.