LITTLE THEATRE MOVEMENT. In its beginnings, the history of community drama is the history of the drama in general. That history is dealt with in another place (see DRAMA). Here it is only necessary to recall that the origins of theatre art are bound up with the ritual of the tribe, and that the tribal rite offers the purest type of community drama which it is possible to conceive. Throughout the great period of Greek classical drama the method and atmosphere of stage production was more nearly allied to that of community drama as we know it to-day than to the modern professional theatre. The same may be said of the drama in mediaeval times. For in both periods stage pro duction was not primarily the work of a definite class of pro fessional stage workers or managers. It was undertaken by a whole community as represented by the City State (in Greece) or by the Church or the Trade Guilds (in mediaeval Europe).
While the Renaissance was changing the whole intellectual and artistic world of Europe, we find the religious guild plays be ginning to decline; a new professional theatre was being born, but at the same time there came a new impetus of community drama from the universities and schools. In England, some of the first Elizabethan dramatic literature was written for academic performances. Classical Latin plays were translated or adapted for English use, and one Nicholas Udal, head-master of Eton college, wrote one of our first English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister. While the modern schoolboy might find it somewhat lengthy and involved, it is, nevertheless. full of healthy humour, interesting as one of the first examples of the modern school play. How far the earlier guild drama had degenerated at this time may be seen from the skit on the amateur play of "rude mechanicals" which Shakespeare gives us in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom, the weaver, and his associates were obviously drawn from life, and their crude art might be paralleled by some of the less developed types of village drama which are to be seen at this day.
The Puritan movement was a severe setback to the English theatre as a whole, and at the Restoration the drama developed mainly on professional lines. On the Continent, however, amateur
playing had continued to flourish, e.g., the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau, first performed in 1633, and, with only one period of suppression, continued ever since. "Private Theatricals," how ever, were not unknown in England throughout the 18th century. In the 19th century, Charles Dickens was an enthusiastic amateur, and there came into existence a somewhat debased form of ama teur drama conducted mainly as a fashionable social exercise under the cover, often, of some charitable object. In 1855, how ever, an important event occurred ; the foundation of the Cam bridge University Amateur Dramatic Club by Sir Francis Burnand, and some years later, Oxford followed suit. From that time a new interest in amateur drama became prevalent which was to cul minate in the modern Little Theatre movement. These tendencies were by no means confined to England. In Russia, Stanislayski's Moscow Art Theatre, in Paris the theatres of Antoine and Copeau, in Ireland the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, were instances of stage work initiated outside the professional theatre and destined to in fluence the whole conception of the theatre's aim and method. At the end of the World War the new spirit in the theatre was so well established that drama at once occupied an important place in all schemes for social and cultural reconstruction.
In Soviet Russia, community or proletarian drama was offi cially encouraged. One of the first acts of the revolutionary Gov ernment was, indeed, to turn the whole Russian theatre into a community theatre. Every professional playhouse was declared national property, and the work of every theatre company was placed under Government control, and supported by Government finance. The Government also encouraged the production of revolutionary drama written, acted and produced by the workers themselves. But, according to Bakshy, there is no sign that this amateur movement is destined at any time to take the place of the professional theatre.