Between the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second World War, avant-garde theatre artists challenged traditional norms through experimentation and radical innovation. Blurring the boundaries separating drama, theatre, and performance, these artists employed deliberate provocations and welcomed the audience’s displeasure. In subject matter, the theatrical avant-garde was equally pathbreaking, addressing a number of issues crucial to early twentieth-century modernity: war and revolution, gender roles, technology, rationality and the subconscious, futurity and the new, and the role of art in a rapidly transforming world. Futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism – three of the leading avant-garde movements – incorporated new materials and activities; brought theatre into dialogue with cabaret, variety show performance, circus, and the art of declamation; and dramatically redefined the actor’s role. Their innovations inspired contemporary experiments in non-realist staging, environmental theatre, performance art, and immersive performance.

This epilogue offers a rumination on the continuing place of the modernist theatre in the plays and performance practices of the latter twentieth century and beyond. It begins with the aesthetic disputes staged within Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, written and set at the cusp of the transition from the modern to the postmodern. The shadow of modernism looms large over Hansberry’s characters, just as it does over many of the plays and productions to follow. From the evergreen influence of the avant-gardists to the long-lasting legacy of a figure like Bertolt Brecht to the perpetual restagings and radical rewriting of works by Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg, the figures and aesthetics of the modernist era permeate and help give shape to the postmodern. Far from a retrograde revolution, modernism may best be regarded as a still-living mode of aesthetic and theatrical practice.

The academic concept of ‘intermediality’ presents a challenge to traditional artistic boundaries, offering a refreshed sense of the relationship between different kinds of media. This chapter relates such ideas to modernism, considering the work of a group of writers who showed a fascination with the stage but primarily achieved fame in genres other than performed drama. It begins by examining a tension within Ezra Pound’s work: his desire to engage with the stage and yet to dismiss the significance of theatre. The discussion then references the work of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rabindranath Tagore, and Kōbō Abe. Ultimately, although ‘intermediality’ is sometimes assumed to apply more specifically to a later historical era of advanced media technology, this chapter shows how intermedial thinking can apply productively to modernist cultural products of the earlier twentieth century.

Interests, desires, and appropriations by modernist theatre practitioners of aspects and materialities of other cultures for the renovation of their theatre traditions cohered under the term ‘orientalism’. Later twentieth-century postmodernist theatre practitioners revived the practice in a largely postcolonial world, but under the umbrella term ‘interculturalism’. Using the tenets of postmodern theories (simulations and bricolages) or the principles of rituals from traditional cultures, intercultural theatre thrived in a globalised world. While globalised culture came under critique for appropriation and exploitation, early twenty-first-century scholars sought to revive interest in the study of otherness in theatre but operated again under such new terminology as ‘interweaving performance cultures’ and new interculturalism from below. Simultaneously, scholars from the Global South and from Asia further contested West/East axes of intercultural borrowing and theorising as well as the trajectory of western-centric modernism. This chapter traces those trajectories and their histories.

While modernism has been historically bounded by time and characterised by shared aesthetic and philosophic elements in Europe and the United States, the project of identifying modernism in other contexts around the globe is less straightforward. While modernism in the theatre of Europe influenced modernism throughout the world, the modernist movements of East and South Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not derivative. Rather, they are unique and organic, borrowing and blending European themes and forms with indigenous ones and adapting the material to the tastes and politics of each region. The timelines of these modernist movements also unfold differently within different regional and national contexts, sometimes extending well beyond the traditional endpoints of modernism in a European context. This essay examines several key developments in Japan, China, India, the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, and Argentina as case studies of the modernist theatre in non-European contexts.

The introduction makes the case that while theatre has tended to be ignored or marginalised in modernist studies, it deserves a central place in accounts of modernism alongside poetry, prose, cinema, and the visual arts. It further contends that while there is an impressive variety amongst its practitioners, the hallmarks of modernist theatre are antagonism and provocation. Indeed, modernist theatre-makers rebelled against dominant genres, conventions, institutions, and audiences by creating new artistic forms and advocating for different values and worldviews. In so doing, this chapter argues that scholars need to go beyond the usual Euro-American cultures to consider how modernist theatre was manifested in the wider world and to recalibrate the historical trajectory of modernism that such broader geographies demand.

This chapter traces naturalism, a radical outgrowth of realism and one of the earliest movements in modernist theatre, beginning with its first articulations by Émile Zola and his French contemporaries through to manifestations, variations, and subversions of naturalist ideas across Europe, the United States, China, and India. Based in scientific epistemologies and a rejection of aesthetic idealism, naturalism introduced still potent innovations in dramatic form, scenography, audience experience, and the division of labour in theatre. Through confronting depictions of character and agency as fundamentally shaped by physiological, hereditary, and environmental forces, naturalism paved the way for later reformist theatre while seeding subsequent modernist movements that rebelled against its physicalist and materialist accounts of human experience.

This chapter discusses the variety of modernist theatrical practices grouped under the rubric ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ by Martin Esslin in the 1960s and demonstrates that absurdist theatre was a much more politically attuned and transnational phenomenon than commonly acknowledged. Esslin’s original aim was to understand theatrical practices in France that were related to, but stood outside of, the boundaries and timelines of the symbolist and surrealist movements, in particular the work of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet. The chapter sets French absurdist drama of the 1950s and 1960s in a wider historical context and calls for the better recognition of a global absurdist canon, tracing the blossoming of a new absurdist drama through playwrights including Virgilio Piñera (Cuba), Halide Edib (Turkey), Issam Mahfouz (Lebanon), Osvaldo Dragún (Argentina), Kobo Abe (Japan), Yusuf Idris and Tawfiq al-Hakim (Egypt), and through the contemporary legacies of Beckett’s absurdist model.

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.