Michael Patterson is Professor of Theatre at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is a major British authority on German Theatre, especially twentieth-century political theatre in Germany. He is author of German Theatre Today; The Revolution in German Theatre 1900–1933; Peter Stein; The First German Theatre; German Theatre: A Bibliography and is editor of Georg Büchner: Collected Plays. He has published numerous articles on German Naturalist theatre, Reinhardt, Pirandello, Brecht, concentration camp theatre, Kroetz and East German theatre.

• Acknowledgements; Brief chronology, 1953–1989; Introduction; Part I. Theory: 1. Strategies of political theatre: a theoretical overview; Part II. Two Model Strategies: 2. The 'reflectionist' strategy: 'kitchen sink' realism in Arnold Wesker's Roots (1959); 3. The 'interventionist' strategy: poetic politics in John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959); Part III. The Reflectionist Strain: 4. The dialectics of comedy: Trevor Griffiths's Comedians (1975); 5. Appropriating middle-class comedy: Howard Barker's Stripwell (1975); 6. Staging the future: Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play (1974); Part IV. The Interventionist Strain: 7. Agit-prop revisited: John McGrath's The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973); 8. Brecht revisited: David Hare's Fanshen (1975); 9. Rewriting Shakespeare: Edward Bond's Lear (1971); 10. The strategy of play: Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979); Conclusion; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.

'… an authoritative and challenging addition to the woefully short list of scholarly books on some of our best neglected dramatic assets.' Theatre Notebook