Despite the presence of numerous suffrage societies, suffrage shops, newspaper-sellers and activists on the streets of London in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there are few traces that remain as physical memorials to acknowledge the legacy, variety and impact of the Votes for Women movement. This is of course a problem not exclusive to suffrage histories, but for women's history more broadly, with urban spaces dominated by monuments, statues and plaques that honour men and male histories. Urban feminist geographer Leslie Kern describes this as ‘patriarchy written in stone’ and twenty-first-century feminist activists like Caroline Criado-Perez are working to make the past and present lack of visibility explicitly visible across their research and writing, not only inviting but demanding a reassessment of who is celebrated through public monuments as well as in popular culture, educational curricula and public histories. Similar attempts to claim more space for women writers and theatre-makers of the past and present are taking place in the theatre industry, in which generations of predominantly male producers and critics have, as Jill Dolan has noted, been ‘unconcerned with not just women's work in the theatre, but with women's place in the world’.

Second-and third-wave feminist theatre-makers and organisations such as Sphinx Theatre Company, Tonic Theatre and Bechdel Theatre are among those attempting to tackle systemic sexist discrimination through exposing how this casual dismissal of women's writing has affected perceptions of its artistic worth and commercial appeal, frequently working with scholars, archivists and practitioners to show how the reticence of mainstream commercial theatre producers, directors and critics to engage with femalecentred stories and to commission and develop women playwrights has resulted in the under-representation of women's work within the canon of nineteenth-and twentiethcentury UK theatre. Feminist theatre historians and historians of feminist theatre are engaged not only in processes of rediscovery and reassessment, but also in critiquing and dismantling dominant histories of theatre that have ignored structures and biases that excluded women from training and working to their full potential in what Tracy C. Davis has called the ‘truly uneven’ playing field of the male-dominated industry.

In approaching the question of whether modernism is still alive, meaningful and salient in contemporary theatre – and if so, how so – the editors of this volume have had the opportunity to discuss our own experiences in theatres around the world over the past twenty years. We have identified most often as audience members, but also as practitioners, facilitators, allies, critics and academics, in a rich variety of cultural contexts across four continents. What these conversations have revealed is a remarkable commonality that pre-dates our collaboration and marks one way of articulating the genesis of this book: each of us reports multiple occasions of sensing the presence of ‘modernism’ (as we understood it at the time) while experiencing a piece of theatre that is ostensibly new. This not only occurred in the case of obvious or external linkages, where the source material or dramaturgy explicitly referenced the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, but also emerged in unanticipated locales, contexts and situations, often in cases where the rhyme between centuries seemed unconscious on the part of the makers.

In online pandemic-era theatre, we found a strange revenge of naturalism (in work that surrounds actors with their own objects) alongside resonance with surrealism (in work that foregrounds the inner life of those objects), despite assurances that livestreaming marked a new era of drama. At experimental theatre festivals in Cairo and Fez, we saw non-narrative work composed mainly of coloured light and geometric shapes – except in lieu of referencing the Bauhaus, these works deployed abstraction to navigate political censorship. In the English theatre, we saw grotesquery and anarchy on stage that ostensibly owed a debt to Alfred Jarry – except the drama graduates who made the work in question claimed never to have heard of Ubu Roi. In the Irish theatre, we saw fierce young companies appear to rediscover the anti-audience activities of dada and futurism and marry them to the earnestness and eschatology of expressionism – except everyone said their strongest influence was the postdramatic, defined as whatever is happening in Berlin.

While modernism seemed to keep arising by surprise, was it also disappearing from the places we would expect to find it?

In Moscow stands the Shabolovka Radio Tower. Designed by Vladimir Shukhov during the Russian Civil War and completed in 1922, it is emblematic of a proletarianinspired avant-garde, not only in its design (reminiscent of the famous constructivist tower designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920), but also in its purpose: to affect the masses by transmitting radio waves across the new Soviet state. The tower still stands, rusting and decrepit – an obsolete yet strikingly beautiful emblem of modernism that perseveres despite the ever-encroaching city.

Radio towers, many of which are still etched on our landscapes, were icons of modernity and technological progress in the early twentieth century, enabling a wide(r)-scale transmission of information and culture. As a broadcast medium, radio was a ‘vital source of entertainment and information implicated in complex networks of transmission, reception and feedback’, notes Ian Whittington in his book on the BBC during the Second World War. Radio also provided a ready means for propaganda and misinformation to enter the home. Melissa Dinsman observes that radio was, and remains, a ‘medium historically connected to both the transmission of language and the military’, reminding us that modern mass media and communication technologies (including telephony, television and, more recently, the internet and social media) can be diverting and emancipatory as well as potentially destructive and repressive.

Transmission is a tremendously generative keyword for both modernity and modernism, and it has special purchase in theatre and dance. Technologically enabled transmission of information, ideas and culture is not unique to modernity, of course, but new forms of media, such as radio, meant that transmission could happen more quickly and at greater scale; such transmission could also be more egalitarian in terms of access. Modernity supercharged a human universal – the conveyance of information from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation. This is fundamental to culture, which, as George Steiner notes, depends on ‘the transmission of meaning across time’ as well as ‘the transfer of meaning in space’. In modernity new technologies and infrastructures, including those pertaining to transportation (trains, cars, aeroplanes), altered spatio-temporal experience and led to increased and enhanced opportunities for informational and cultural exchange.