Provincial Theatres as Places of Social Cohesion and Socio-Political Debate

Provincial theatres have long escaped the attention of researchers. Our current image of nineteenth-century theatres is shaped by historical evidence related to playhouses in European metropolises with vast auditoriums, large stages and big staffs, playing a highly canonised repertoire and accessible only to a tiny elite. Theatre on a smaller scale-especially when pieces are only orally transmitted-is still all too often considered not worth studying. 1 The vast majority of historical theatre practices is still unknown to scholars of theatre studies. 2 According to Robinson, "neglected local histories" of theatres should be considered in order to broaden our perspective of theatre forms and to understand how different performing cultures were and still are interconnected. 3 The exploration of local theatre cultures, according to Robinson, is a first step towards a perspective on theatre cultures that combines the particularities of local practices with a focus on their global interconnections. In putting provincial theatres and their significance for local communities at the heart of our research, we try to avoid advancing an idea of interconnectedness that imposes a 'Western' perspective on theatre practices and blurs differences between local cultures. 4 The close study of provincial-theatre forms and their importance for local populations must be the starting point for the study of interconnections, because only in taking a closer look at regional forms of theatre, the interdependence of different forms can be acknowledged. We also try to avoid what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls "asymmetric ignorance"-the idea that historians of European theatre often feel no need to refer to other parts of the world while historians from the global south are thought ignorant if they do not refer to European research. 5 In this volume, we extend our field of research beyond Europe