The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre.

The authors identify the absence of sustained critical debate around amateur theatre as a consequence of the academy's complicity in "upholding a cultural hierarchy in which amateur theatre has been largely disregarded" (6). The study goes much further than offering detailed case studies of amateur theatre practices: the foregrounding of this hitherto under-examined field within the ecology of theatre-making provides a distinctly different lens through which to view the theatre ecology as a whole. As the authors rightly claim, "taking amateur theatre seriously as a subject of enquiry presses us to rethink orthodoxies surrounding cultural value, and to look at theatre from another perspective" (6). [Extracted from the article]