Italy

The situation of the Italian theatre since the Second World War is, to a very significant extent, a result of political and social ferment in a country struggling to find its feet internationally and attempting to come to terms with economic and cultural realities in a European context after the traumas of war, occupation and liberation. This is because the parties of the left-wing opposition have always seen cultural activities as an important means of communication with the working classes, and because the left in Italy is stronger and arguably more significant than anywhere else in Western Europe. Hence the (sometimes hasty) identification of all 'official' initiatives, teatri stabili (permanent, established theatres) with an element of state subsidy as tools of the establishment, of authority, of government - therefore of a reactionary right wing associated (for all the thirty years of this per iod) with the ruling Christian Democrat Party. Theatre by its nature is a collective cultural enterprise, and so it is no surprise that the his tory of the Italian theatre since 1960 is often described in terms of authority and freedom, hegemony and influence, communication and revolt, and so on - all terms of political and social relevance. It is a story of repression and state interference, communication and censorship, the heyday of the director and the drafting of manifestos, of influence from, and competition with, the cinema, of interaction with the other arts, but of influence from abroad above all, in the ferment of debate that characterized the opening-up of the country's frontiers and communication with Europe and the world after the walls of fascism had been breached. The post-war years have seen dramatic changes in the Italian theatre, above all and in a rising crescendo, in the years 1960-9, with the discrediting of teatri stabili

formed in the immediate post-war enthusiasm for democratic statesubsidized institutions, disillusionment with the 'official' nature of production by directors (the gurus of this system), the so-called regia critica Ccritical' theatre direction), and that watershed of political debate, the uprisings in France and Italy of 1968, causing rethinking of a fundamental kind about the relations hip of theatre to society and its use as a means of (primarily political) communication.