General Introduction

Abstract

We are at a point in the history of drama/theatre/performance studies when the relative merits of theory and practice are under renewed scrutiny. Since the inception of the first British university drama department in the 1940s, a still-unresolved debate has gone on over the nature and purpose of practical drama/theatre work within a university drama department.¹ Indeed, in the early years, the debate focused on the question of the validity of such an activity in the scheme of a university faculty of arts. It is all too easy to say that this debate is well behind us. There are many academics (of many ideological persuasions) who see, at worst, the engagement with practical theatre-making as contrary to the essential verities of scholarship in the humanities: at best an enjoyable addition to the curriculum, but a great consumer of time, when the students should be engaged in the more serious matter of readily quantifiable scholarship.

the inflexible rule that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

(Attributed to Engels and Brecht)