The introduction makes the case that while theatre has tended to be ignored or marginalised in modernist studies, it deserves a central place in accounts of modernism alongside poetry, prose, cinema, and the visual arts. It further contends that while there is an impressive variety amongst its practitioners, the hallmarks of modernist theatre are antagonism and provocation. Indeed, modernist theatre-makers rebelled against dominant genres, conventions, institutions, and audiences by creating new artistic forms and advocating for different values and worldviews. In so doing, this chapter argues that scholars need to go beyond the usual Euro-American cultures to consider how modernist theatre was manifested in the wider world and to recalibrate the historical trajectory of modernism that such broader geographies demand.

Science and theatre were intertwined from the start of ‘modern drama’ in the works of Georg Buchner and Émile Zola, who ushered modern ideas about science into the theatre and made conscious engagement with science an intrinsic part of a break with the theatrical past. This chapter traces the explicit, conscious interaction between science and the modern stage, from August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen’s works through to those of Bernard Shaw, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Robins, Eugène Brieux, Harley Granville Barker, Karel Čapek, Tawfiq al-Hakim, James Ene Henshaw, Mary Burrill, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell; the probing of race science on stage by Harlem Renaissance playwrights; the Federal Theatre Project’s science-inflected productions; and Bertolt Brecht’s changing depiction of science and scientists. In addition, there is another meaning of ‘science in the theatre’ that the chapter draws out: the hidden, often unacknowledged roles played by science and technology in staging.

Classifying Stravinsky’s rich diversity of stage works is no easy matter. Each composition appears to be a unique, sui generis experiment – an impression conveyed by the sheer variety of ways in which music, words and gesture are combined, contrasted and juxtaposed. To which genre do they belong, apart from those obviously classifiable as ballets? The operatic and music theatre works present quite a challenge in this regard. Stravinsky’s subtitles often allude to past theatrical conventions, but these only further highlight the diversity of genre, indeed their very uniqueness. For example, ‘opera-oratorio’ – the label tied to Oedipus rex – refers to its frequent allusions to both nineteenth-century Italian opera and Baroque oratorio; and Perséphone’s subtitle mélodrame clearly refers to this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genre where a spoken, not sung text is accompanied by and intercalated with instrumental music. However, these labels only have the function of recalling an ideal model and cannot be considered as true genre definitions such as might usefully be applied to an entire set of works. When considered as a whole, in fact, Stravinsky’s operatic/music theatre output is not based on any single consolidated or stable system of genres. Rather, it is as if Stravinsky is working to a more general aesthetic principle by which he considers the artistic means of the work, that is, its words, gestures and music to be autonomous and capable of being combined in a different way in each work.