ABSTRACT
Scholars have looked at a range of representations of war in performance at key moments during the period. This chapter, however, takes the broader idea of conflict – both military, political and generational – within the period as a whole in order to explore how war narratives came out of existing contexts for civic and political unrest as well as feeding into post-war explorations of conflict. The performance industries negotiated and circulated reactions to war in numerous ways, some of which were jingoistic, some of which showed little understanding of the realities of conflict, others of which attempted to either re-position or critique its significance in terms of understandings of nationhood, masculinity/femininity and public/private life.
