Historian Matthew Karush delves into tango’s role in Argentina’s political and social history. He specifically analyzes how the art form functioned within Peronism and anti-Peronism of the mid-to-late half of the twentieth century as he seeks to understand how the tango is reflected in the political climate in Argentina through time and amid political upheaval.

As health professionals, Madeleine E. Hackney and J. Lucas McKay demonstrate how widely tango reaches across disciplines. They offer a case study for how medical-research projects incorporate tango therapeutically. Hackney and McKay utilize tango for promoting health and preventing or changing declining conditions, and they illustrate how their current research applies “Adapted Tango” to improve motor and cognitive functions in individuals with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

Anthropologist and social tango dancer Carolyn Merritt had begun to take dance lessons in leading, then the COVID-19 restrictions shut down in-person classes and milongas. As she continued to pursue her quest in leading, Merritt reflects on her experiences and insights about how tango is politically generative, confronts the struggles many women face with tango, and provides a more profound examination into tango’s evolution and future. As she applies such findings of her embodied research, Merritt raises larger questions about how tango impacts the total human experience, especially during the COVID-19 restrictions.

Ortaç Aydınoğlu explores the bandoneón as a symbol of tango, focusing on the great interpreters in Argentina and abroad. The Turkish bandoneonist and tango scholar recounts the international travels and “adventures” of his instrument through time, enlightening the reader about how and why it came to symbolize tango.

This chapter explores queer theatre’s continued preoccupation with history, arguing that its persistent attention to the past is part of a broader cultural project of recuperation. By attending to the legislative and social landscape that has criminalised and excluded LGBT+ people in Britain alongside historic moments of political change, the chapter illuminates how queer theatre has been configured by the historical conditions of its production. The chapter traces both the emergence of queer theatre and the sites it continues to move across, from fringe venues and queer arts festivals to national cultural events. It then examines the multiplicity of ways that histories have been produced, remade, or recovered in performance, drawing on the work of queer theatre makers including Gay Sweatshop, Emma Frankland, Nando Messias, David Hoyle, Drew Taylor-Wilson, Elgan Rhys, Rosana Cade, Jo Clifford, Milk Presents, DUCKIE, and Mojisola Adebayo. In continuing to return to the past, queer theatre recovers previously excluded marginalised lives and experiences in Britain, disrupts linear narratives of progress that accompany LGBT+ politics, and makes space for reimagined futures.

This chapter examines the political economy of British theatre – that is, how the state governs and manages the economics of theatre – and British theatre’s often fraught relationship to these arrangements. It considers the place where state funding of theatre has been most necessary but most reluctant: theatre buildings. The chapter first traces the history of capital investment in British theatre since 1945. It shows how the state has taken up its fiscal responsibilities to finance theatre building fitfully, and sometimes inequitably. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter then examines the reconstructed Battersea Arts Centre in south London, which fully re-opened in 2018 after a serious fire. The refurbished BAC, the chapter argues, makes a distinctive and persuasive case for public investment in theatre. Economically, it realises a Keynesian aim articulated at the foundation of the theatrical mixed economy after World War Two: for public investment to increase theatre’s productive capacity. It also puts the value of that investment on show, suggesting an alternative case for public funding, one in which theatre is not simply a ‘good cause’ but a highly credible investment, economically and aesthetically.

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.

This chapter explores the diversity of theatre outside London in the post-war period with a particular emphasis on work produced in the four nations that make up the UK and in the regions of England. It argues that much of this work has been under-examined and undervalued, and that a persistent metropolitan bias has long distorted existing accounts of British theatre in the period. The recent re-animation of distinctive regional and national identities within the context of an increasingly fractured and unstable UK, makes the continuation of this critical approach untenable. The chapter aims to set the record straight, therefore but also to note that metropolitan bias has been similarly at work in cultural policy and the distribution of funding, with the result that audiences in some parts of the country have been much better served than others. My aim is to consider the impacts of this persistent unfairness in its multiple contexts.

British theatre’s post-war cultural impact would be hard to deny, having produced generations of actors, writers, directors, and designers who have populated the world’s stages and screens. This vitality has often been explained in aesthetic terms, in the successive waves of generational artistic renewal in British theatre (from the ‘angry young men’ onwards). The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 seeks to outline the discursive and material changes that have made this theatre possible; that is, the economic, infrastructural, and legislative structures that underpin what can and cannot be done in theatre and the structures and habits of discourse that govern what can and cannot be said about the theatre. Hence the book focuses on the working conditions of actors, writers, and directors; the economics of the West End, subsidised sector, and fringe; the theatre’s interaction with the British nation-state at the level of policy, theatre buildings, and in its nations and regions; finally, the book considers the theatre’s civic function, its changing engagement with audiences and the development of Black British and Queer theatre.

This chapter focuses on the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and discusses the post-war history of West End and commercial theatre in Britain. It aims to consider the ways the commercial sector and its proprietors, producers, and productions, have been shaped by, and have responded to, the changing conditions of the industry in this period. Starting and mostly staying in one location – resolutely in the heart of London’s ‘Theatreland’ – creates a tight spatial focus in an industry which in many other ways is characterised by movement: of productions, artists, audiences, and influence. The chapter explores a long-running set of tensions between heritage and contemporaneity, culture and development, and artistic and commercial interests that have played out at both the Apollo and across the wider West End and commercial sector. It argues that the Apollo makes for a reasonably representative study of the wider history and trends in post-war commercial theatre. What emerges from its history is a picture of a sector that, despite extraordinary change in both the industry and the world in which it operates, has weathered or absorbed many of these changes and demonstrated continuity, sometimes surprising, sometimes troubling, sometimes remarkable.

Rather than focusing on dramaturgical or thematic developments in the post-war era, this chapter traces the changes experienced by playwrights in their practical working conditions. It begins by disputing widespread arguments against the prominence of playwriting in British theatre (that it is literary, logocentric, and individualistic). It then explores changes in play publishing, which helped raise the cultural profile of the playwright while also forming a new kind of dramatic canon; the industrial conditions in which playwrights have worked, which were precarious for the first thirty years since 1945 but were decisively transformed in the late seventies by an effective campaign of unionisation and collective bargaining; and the growing culture of play development, which has had mixed results, but which, at its best, helps demystify playwriting as a cultural practice, making it more accessible and helping to shepherd new plays and playwrights into being.

This chapter offers a broad account of two key governmental themes in post-war British theatre: policy and censorship. The chapter’s discussion of these themes is informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which embraces both the activities of the state and the broader discursive regimes that constitute groups and individuals, including self-governing. The chapter examines a range of values that have featured in post-war cultural discourse in terms of continuities, ruptures, and changes between the post-war period and earlier moments in capitalist modernity, and within the period itself. The chapter surveys the expansionist arts policies implemented in the decades following the war, before turning to the effects of neoliberal governmental politics from the 1970s onward, which saw the value of the arts become subject to increasing scrutiny and justification. Next, the chapter addresses censorship and the contours of its post-war cultural politics. It notes overlapping shifts in focus from sexuality and gender to racial and religious identities – shifts which speak to the governmental ‘management of populations’. Finally, it analyses David Hare’s I’m Not Running (National Theatre: Lyttelton, 2018) – a work that responded to contemporaneous governmental crisis.