These remarks made by the actor, Fritz Kortner, stem from a 1932 book in which the leading stage performers of the Weimar Republic portray themselves in photographs and through their own words. In response to the editor's questions, Kortner—among other artists—analyzes his role as an actor within Germany's greater cultural and historical context, linking the crisis in theatre to existent economic and intellectual crises. Given the unstable socio-economic situation at the end of the Weimar Republic, the cultural years ahead looked particularly grim. The actor's commentary reveals the vulnerable situation of German theatre in a country on the brink of dictatorship.

Communism was not always hated and feared by everyone in Eastern Europe. At a certain moment in recent post-war history, a group of influential intellectuals in Poland—now a place where even ex-communist politicians are careful to swear their allegiance to free markets—wanted to reform but still keep a Communist system. That moment was the Polish October, named for the month in 1956 when Wladyslaw Gomulka, a man who believed in a “Polish road to socialism,” took power as First Secretary of the Communist Party. Just as the Czechs in 1968 believed in “socialism with a human face,” the Poles in 1956 believed that Communism could be, in the jargon of their day, “revised” to better fit people's needs. The Polish October was the result of a complex network of events beginning with Stalin's death in 1953, coming to a climax with workers' strikes in June, 1956 in Poznan, and ending in Khrushchev's acquiescence to Gomulka's election in October, 1956. During this period, one of the important contributors to the intellectual ferment that led to the October, the theatre group Studencki Theatr Satyryków or STS, established a cultural niche for alternative theatre that mocked the Communist system and led to one of the most political, vital alternative theatre movements in the world.

From its origins and throughout its history, Western theatre has engaged, represented, and/or attempted to affect the course of history. Phrynichus and Aeschylus wrote plays on the Persian wars when they were still fresh in the memories of their auditors—too fresh in the case of Phrynichus, who was censured by the Athenians. Early in the sixteenth century French sotties commented on Papal politics; late in the same century Elizabethan playwrights began to exploit contemporary crime stories. During the French Revolution hack writers issued dramatic accounts of Marat's death within a month of its occurrence. Astley's had spectacular recreations of Crimean War battles on stage almost before they occurred. In the twentieth century, technological innovation has stimulated this tendency and extended it throughout the mass media in numberless examples of reality-driven representation.

The circumstances surrounding the national premieres of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire reflect not only the play's vibrant theatre life but also the particular culture that responded to it, validating past or anticipating future critical interpretations. Within two years of the Broadway (and world) premiere of Streetcar in December 1947, the play had been staged in Austria, Belgium, Holland, France (adapted by Jean Cocteau), Italy (with sets by Franco Zeffirelli), England (directed by Sir Laurence Olivier), Switzerland (with a translation by poet Berthold Viertel), and Sweden (directed by Ingmar Bergman). In March of 1950, Streetcar premiered in U.S.-occupied Germany, at Pfozheim. The premiere of the play in some of the former Communist Bloc countries followed in the 1950s or early 1960s. Streetcar opened on the same day—December 21, 1957—at Torun and Wroclaw (Breslau in pre-War Germany), Poland, and in Warsaw the subsequent April of 1958. The Czechoslovakian premiere of Streetcar was in November 1960 in Moravia and its Hungarian debut occurred shortly after.

Almost half a century ago, the late Alan S. Downer argued that the work of Alfred Wigan, Leigh Murray, and Fanny Stirling marks the transition to an increasingly colloquial and realistic style of acting on the London Stage usually attributed to the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Of those three performers, only Mrs. Stirling has not received subsequent scholarly attention. The single detailed twentieth century account of the neglected actress, The Stage Life of Mrs. Stirling, published by her grandson, Percy Allen, in 1922, is useful but suffers from the pitfalls all too common to familial obsequies and lacks both theatrical and social/cultural context.

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.