Hopeful Futures: Theatres in Towns

Closing this book, this chapter looks to the future and explores the imaginative potential of theatre in towns. Smaller than cities but larger than villages, towns are multi-layered spaces that can be understood as places that support social experiment and innovation. Here, we draw on the histories of two English towns and the social experiments that underpin them: Rochdale – as the birthplace of the cooperative movement – and Letchworth as the first Garden City. Tracking the ways that theatre intersects with the cultural histories of these movements, we move from the nineteenth and twentieth to the twenty-first century and turn to a number of social experiments active in towns, including transition towns, practices of mutual aid, and 20-minute neighbourhoods. This chapter argues that theatre events, companies, and venues often sit within or alongside these practical social experiments, figuring as a cultural technology for practicing new and alternative ways of living. From the Rochdale Pioneers to twenty-first century practices of mutual aid, we make the case that towns themselves have long been theatres of social experiment in which new ideas are born and old ones are recycled, and argue that towns promise to be places of radical cultural practice in the future.