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?