ABSTRACT
In 1912 Edith Craig's British feminist theatre group the Pioneer Players performed a version of Irish George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, a play about prostitution and the rise of the ‘new woman’. Responding to the subject matter, some members resigned from the company in moral outrage (Eltis 2013: 163). Eight years later the self-proclaimed dadaist group appeared in Paris where its Romanian leader Tristan Tzara was due to speak for the first time. After a selection of bewildering poems, musical performances, and rude art from figures such as Francis Picabia, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Erik Satie, Tzara got up to speak only to be drowned out by offstage bell-ringers. The audience finally lost its temper crying ‘Enough, Enough!’ (Melzer 1994: 6). Why begin with these two examples? Certainly they appear to have little common ground aesthetically, thematically or geographically. Yet they set up the central themes of our enquiry; European modernist theatre is an extraordinarily diverse collection of performance happenings, some script-based, others rejecting language altogether, some almost educational, others virtually impossible to decipher in a reasoned manner, some maintaining a linear story, others fragmenting narrative by including different art forms such as music, dance or poetry. Appearing in different geographical locations (with personnel frequently moving between these locations often due to war or the rise of authoritarian regimes), modernist performance in Europe defies easy demarcation and can be defined only by the broad sense of antagonism suggested by these two initial examples.
