In a deliberate and self-conscious defiance of prevailing business norms, a group of twenty-six theatre historians gathered in Bloomsbury in central London on 4–5 January 2018, for two days of non-stop talking about ways forward for our subdiscipline.Footnote ² No registration fee, no output, no formal papers – only brief position statements. The core group emerged from the Theatre Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and the extended invitation list created a balance between UK and international scholars, senior and new scholars. A report of our discussions, compiled by myself and Magnus Thorbergsson, accompanies the online version of this article as supplementary material. I shall offer here some reflections of my own, arising from these discussions, about what it means to be a theatre historian in the present academic environment – or should I say business environment? The label of ‘theatre historian’ is one that I'm happy to wear as my professional identifier, and I use it to introduce myself to colleagues in other walks of academic life. This is also the clan to which I seem to belong, and few can survive in academic life without the networking associated with face-to-face clan membership.

To what extent historians at large constitute a clan is, of course, debatable. Organizations like IFTR, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and the UK's Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) provide a focus for predominantly North European and North American historians working within the field of theatre/performance studies. French theatre historians (for example) tend to be resistant to anglophone hegemony, Arabic theatre historians (one example among many) would tend to gravitate at big conferences to an Arabic theatre working group, while historians of post-war theatre often balk at the term ‘historian’, which seems to disconnect them from the urgencies of the present. Many other theatre historians are affiliated to departments of literature, which entails different clan memberships (typically period-based) with different assumptions about the ultimate purpose of our craft: Garrick, for example, matters in an English faculty because ultimately the material circumstances of his performances indicate a different interpretation of the canonical Shakespearean text. Further important work is conducted by independent scholars, for whom the Society for Theatre Research provides a UK focus, and their remit is typically to preserve the traditions of a profession which they cherish. It could not be said, therefore, that we in Bloomsbury were a globally representative group of theatre historians, only that we did what we could to maximize diversity. Intellectually speaking, most people in the room recognized The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009) by Tom Postlewait (long a driving force in the IFTR working group) as a methodological bible for all who seek to quarry archives in order to analyse what he called ‘theatrical events’.

The tenor of our discussions was set by the presence of junior scholars, mostly in precarious forms of employment and acutely aware that (particularly in the UK) there appear to be no jobs for anyone who wears the label of ‘theatre historian’. The brand is a problem. In the view of junior participants, the only way to get hired as a historian in a theatre department is to be identified as a specialist in a more desired area such as Chinese theatre, women's theatre or community theatre. This problem reflects the pressure of market forces. Students are seen to want more and more practice, along with more and more concentration on present-day theatre, a trend that goes hand in hand with an intellectual refocusing upon globalization and diversity in response both to market forces and to powerful ethical drivers. Furthermore, since I began teaching in UK drama departments at the end of the 1970s there has been a shift from the old drama canon of Sophocles/Shakespeare/Ibsen/Beckett towards figures like Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Grotowski and Boal, whose canonical writings seem not to need the same cultural contextualization.

Our discussions began with an epistemological crisis: what is the nature of the knowledge that lends us our academic authority? Postmodernists have long set themselves up in opposition to Leopold von Ranke's nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ ideal of describing the past ‘as it really happened’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen).Footnote ³ A generation of pedagogues nourished on Derrida and Foucault has delighted in deconstructing historical myths and junking grand narratives in order to demonstrate how far truth lies in the language and culture of the beholder. Meanwhile, a generation of students has emerged whose sense of broad historical timelines derives from the media rather than the schoolroom. Donald Trump's cheerful defiance of plain historical truth reflects deeper historical currents, for – despite the admirable efforts of the Wikipedia team – there is no identifiable source of authority in a fragmented mediatized world. ‘Post-truth’ was the term around which our discussions revolved. Mechele Leon, who teaches at the University of Kansas in Trump's heartland, lamented that her students no longer seem to know what truth is, and questioned her wisdom in the current environment in continuing to champion the ‘death of the author’.Footnote ⁴ Bruce McConachie argued that truth matters, but there are multiple truths, though he acknowledged the risk that the number of truths could slip out of control. Jan Lazardzig contrasted his experience in Amsterdam, where a ‘historical-survey’ course is maintained, with his present post in the Freie Universität Berlin where this traditional pedagogic foundation has been swept away. I think most of us in the room felt the dilemma. If students need a voice of authority to tell them ‘what really happened’ in theatre history, then we can tell lots of local stories; but, with hand on heart, what big story are we to narrate? McConachie provocatively argued that the true story which matters now is not that of the nation but that of the Anthropocene. From this perspective, if the future of the planet is at risk because no one will accept conclusions drawn from incontrovertible scientific evidence, can we continue to luxuriate in the contortions of postmodernism?

Historical writing has always been bound up with identity formation. Your sense of self is related to the stories you tell about your past. Much current historical writing is energized by the decision to give voice and identity to some group perceived as oppressed or marginalized – for example, Scottish theatre-makers, female actor–managers, or comedians on the industrial circuit. Writing history is and should be a creative act based on personal passion as much as it is a science. However, when no one in the room spoke up for now familiar forms of minoritarian history based on gender and ethnicity, Mechele Leon voiced the obvious question: was there a difference here between the USA and Europe? Was this a reflection of the persons present in the room? Or is there a change in the zeitgeist? I suspect it was all of these.

The IFTR working group has had many discussions about writing national histories, and there clearly remains an appetite for such histories amongst scholars from smaller nations. Magnus Thorbergsson set out the principle that, for him, writing a history of Icelandic theatre is a means to contest conservative nationalistic narratives in his native country. Nurit Yaari, by the same token, seeks to construct an Israeli theatre history that challenges dangerous Zionist accounts of the past. Scholars in larger nations are caught in the conundrum that although their deep knowledge is nation-based and language-based, they feel no impulse to contribute to a sense of nationhood. Two current German research projects focused on cross-cultural encounters reflect the emotional and moral commitment of so many theatre historians to the idea that we should be citizens of the world.Footnote ⁵ There is a catch, of course, to this cosmopolitan ideal, for even within the embodied domain of theatre, cross-cultural exchanges tend to be mediated by the hegemonic English language.

A major difficulty for the theatre historian concerns the object of our enquiry. Is Postlewait's category of the ‘theatrical event’ sufficient and satisfactory? The German word Theater has a broader semantic range than the English ‘theatre’, happily embracing arts like circus and opera, captured also by the French term arts du spectacle, which has no English equivalent. When we sought to ask ourselves how far the insights of ‘performance studies’ can or should inform theatre historiography, the resulting discussion created a Tower of Babel since the English word ‘performance’ has no equivalent in other European languages, and UK scholars tend to be more interested than their US counterparts in the issues thrown up by ‘performance-as-research’. Tracy Davis commented on the enduring significance of the USA being a land of settlers, the legacy of which is a preoccupation with performing diverse cultural identities. It is clear that in the USA monumental theatres do not stand at the axis of metropolitan centres in the way they do in Europe, and the moral legacy of Judaism and Puritanism fosters, I think, a democratic insistence that everyone can be an actor alongside an enduring suspicion of theatricality. However we explain the phenomenon, the challenge of ‘performance studies’ to ‘theatre studies’ has been driven by US theorists, and Davis rightly insists that it carries profound implications for the agenda of any ‘theatre’ historian.

Davis went on to observe that the word ‘art’ had become a taboo in our conversations, and she sought to reclaim it dispassionately as a historical marker of value. Yet the choices we make in our historical writing perforce reflect our own aesthetic tastes. In my observation, academics in UK theatre departments are reluctant to talk about aesthetics and concepts of the beautiful with our students, yet are constantly engaged in evaluating students’ creative practice, struggling to rationalize our sense of what ‘works’.Footnote ⁶

‘Culture’ featured more largely than ‘art’ in our discussions. The recent publication of a six-volume Cultural History of the Theatre, with several members of the group having contributed or helped to steer the project,Footnote ⁷ focused us on the slippery semantics of the word ‘culture’, with its mixed aesthetic, sociological, anthropological and organic connotations. ‘Culture’ is seemingly a word we cannot do without in order to catch the idea that theatre is – to quote the general editors’ series introduction – ‘the most social of all the arts’. It has always been axiomatic for me that theatre history is a social practice, and an emphasis on the sociocultural dimension of theatre helps us bond with colleagues in other branches of academia. At the same time, however, neglect of the aesthetico-cultural dimension makes it more difficult to achieve interaction and symbiosis with professional practitioners. In the UK at least, much of the energy of our discipline derives from probing the boundaries of artistic practice, and connecting to that energy is a challenge for the book-based ‘theatre historian’ – which all helps to explain the sense of displacement reported by the new scholars in our gathering.

While questions of beauty are not currently on the historian's agenda, questions of feeling certainly are. It was James Thompson's work on applied theatre that first alerted me to the ‘affective turn’ in the academic world.Footnote ⁸ Emotion is now a field of historical investigation, exemplified by important projects in Australia and at Queen Mary University of London.Footnote ⁹ It is no longer enough for us to note the ideological work performed by text: we have to understand how the performance made the audience feel, because it is emotion that actually makes people change their behaviour. The question is, how do we meet the challenge of historicizing affect? There was an unresolved exchange at our gathering between Bruce McConachie and Tracy Davis: while McConachie argued that we have to take on the science in order to understand what ‘affect’ is, Tracy Davis (with support from Jim Davis) argued that archival research should be based upon the way people have in the past verbalized their emotions, in accordance with the language-based traditions of our discipline. Though the risk of dilettantism in any engagement with science is clear, our practitioner colleagues turn increasingly to science in search of new metaphors and new ways of experiencing the body. We as historians can only look through the lens of the present, and it seems to me that neurology is shifting our sense of who we are much as evolution and heliocentric cosmology once did. But just how we are to tread the ever-shifting sands of scientific thought is another matter.

The insistence of UK funding bodies upon supporting only research that has a measurable ‘impact’ has resulted in questionable practices, and in discouraging work that peers into an existential void. The current business imperative has nevertheless focused minds upon the ivory-tower problem, and pushed many of us to think about the wider value of our research. Which leads back to the question of truth. Does the desire for ideological purity lure us into navel-gazing? Or, conversely, does the desire to popularize and reach a wider audience lead to our being manipulated and corrupted by the media? The most confident answers to this dilemma related to our role as educators, where we find ourselves in a face-to-face relationship with our students. Though Jan Lazardzig struck a chord when he remarked that the commodification of teaching and research was leading to new and troubling orthodoxies, it was not clear to any of us how to pin down these orthodoxies. Lazardzig pointed to the covert oppositional work of theatre scholars in the days of the totalitarian GDR, but today the sources of real political power seem opaque. When I started my teaching career, ‘subversive theatre’ was more or less synonymous with ‘good theatre’, but today that confident stance no longer seems accessible; we repeatedly preach subversion to the subverted, and crucially have ceased to quarry the past for elements of a persuasive utopia that might help map out a better future.

The word ‘archive’ had a certain talismanic force in our discussions. The basis of our craft is to dig into real or metaphorical archives, and to construct on the basis of extracted data stories which act upon the world. Discoveries in the archive set our hearts racing, and are the foundation of the clan's camaraderie. Yet the word ‘archive’ has also a retro feel, contributing to the image of the historian as the practitioner of an ancient trade like typesetting or daguerreotype photography, redundant in the modern world of instantaneity. When the now is so complex, exciting and malleable, why waste time pondering how and why then turned into now? In theoretical terms, the answer is obvious: to understand how we got here allows us to orient ourselves and find the route forward. Unfortunately, none of us possesses a satnav to fix precisely where our present location is. We became aware in Bloomsbury of the heterogeneous environments in which we currently operate, driving us in pursuit of different stories for different listeners.

Anke Charton from the University of Vienna told us about her course entitled ‘Making History Great Again’. This was an ironic parody of Trump's election slogan, but its formulation betrayed a ring of wistfulness. The European founding fathers of theatre studies – Max Herrmann, Gustave Cohen, Agne Beijer, Glynne Wickham – were confident about the object of their investigations, but today the term ‘theatre historian’ connotes a professional hybridity. There is no obvious model for what we do. While no one in an English department would classify themselves as a ‘historian of literature’ because that would seem a tautology, art historians have created an autonomous discipline completely cut off from the teaching of fine art. The object of our investigation is problematic. Unlike texts and paintings, performances are, in the familiar mantra, ‘ephemeral’,Footnote ¹⁰ which lends impetus to the belief that theatre studies should focus on the now. Yet any academic study of performance involves looking back at something which happened in the past, and there is no magic moment when half an hour ago turns into history.

I began with our simple, modest act of defiance against the business regime: to devote two days to just talking, with no planned output. The editor of this journal asked me to come up with a conclusion, because that, of course, is what the reader of any essay needs, but it was in the nature of our discussions that there could be no conclusion, no demarcated academic product. I have tried, rather, to describe a circuit of thought. We identified clear disciplinary issues regarding the place of history within an increasingly practice-oriented discipline in the UK, while European and US understandings of what ‘theatre studies’ is threw up different issues of marginalization for those wearing the badge of ‘historian’. Alongside our shared dismay at the marketization of the academic sector, there seemed to be a shared concern with epistemology, and the relativism associated with the postmodern movement, tied to anxiety about adopting models drawn from science. Somewhere in the interface between marketization and epistemology lies my conclusion. I could end with some ringing phrases about the importance of history (in which I believe passionately), and learning from the past in order to move forward – waving the flag for my home team, as it were – but I don't want to do that here, because at the end of the day what I want to evoke for you is practice, not product – an exercise in academic contemplation of fundamentals, as distinct from the Darwinian battle to generate the winning argument, the idea that sells.