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.

1. What does the statement “The shortest distance between two people is a story” mean to you? 2. What do you think might inspire growth after loss? 3. How might you, as a social worker, amplify hope in the most complex of times? 4. What strengths do you have that promote positive human connections?

1. In what way can we develop stories while working in conflict-ridden, unpredictable, and violent environments? 2. What are the human rights issues in this story? 3. What role does poverty play in relation to human rights? 4. What issues of security and safeguarding arise from this story?