Open a season brochure for a theatre today and you will most likely come across a new production of an old warhorse by one of the major playwrights associated with modernism. The promotional blurb may state that the play is as relevant and timely now as it was when it was first written – an overused turn of phrase, but often apposite. Many modernist plays are over a century old and have become canonical. Like the work of Shakespeare, they are regularly produced on the world stage in a wide variety of theatrical reimaginings. Indeed, some modernist plays have continually been produced since they were first staged. One would be hard pressed to find a single decade from the twentieth century in which there was not a production somewhere in the world of one of Ibsen's plays, for example. Emerging and established directors love to tackle canonical texts, including modernist drama, stamping their vision on a play, sometimes transforming it almost beyond recognition. Theatre companies use modernist drama as inspiration for the creation of newly devised work. Playwrights continue to offer their own versions of modernist texts, creating works that are designated ‘after’ that of their predecessors. It isn't only well-known plays that are reworked and re-produced, either. Little-known modernist plays, including texts that have rarely or never been performed before, also find favour among contemporary theatre-makers and practice researchers, especially those who are experimentally inclined. Decades after they were first conceived, relatively obscure offerings by modernist dramatists are belatedly being spotlit as theatre-makers transform these artistic curiosities and give them a new lease of life, using current technologies and staging practices.

Conceiving a play as an extended ‘temporal and cultural process’ – as something that can perpetually be remade and modified through (re)writing and performance – means that modernist drama, like work from other genres, is not just a historical artefact but, potentially, a vital spark in contemporary theatre-making. (It's alive!) A new production of a modernist play can theoretically be considered both modernist and contemporary, further blurring the lines between these categories, or else it can have elements of the former intermixed with other sensibilities, such as postmodernism. Conversely, it might not be regarded as modernist at all, or only in an outmoded manner that follows the letter, but not the spirit, of the movement.