Keeping the War Alive: British Theatre of the 1920s

Turning away from the professional, metropolitan theatres offers an alternate history of war-themed plays in the 1920s. In the theatrical activities of amateur and regional theatre makers the war remained very much alive, and not only through revivals of wartime ‘hits’ but also through premiers of new plays about the war. It is this ‘other’ theatrical landscape that this paper focuses on, arguing that amateur and regional war-themed performances provided participants and spectators with the opportunity to absorb, process, and make meaning from their diverse war, and post-war experiences, in a way that the increasingly commercially-driven professional theatre did not. By drawing attention to the role that these ‘other’ theatres played in constructing the memory of the war and confronting the challenges of the post-war world, we also become aware of the ways in which industry distinctions have misleadingly erased theatre from our understandings of both interwar culture and the memory and memorialisation of the Great War.