Scottish playwright and director John McGrath dismantles the idea of theatre as a refined, passive, middle-class ritual.

He writes from touring productions, working men’s clubs, regional audiences, television, pubs, labour politics, and the practical realities of trying to make art that people actually want to attend after work. The tension running through the book is less “high versus low culture” and more whether culture can survive institutional sterilisation at all. Raymond Williams’ foreword situates the work inside broader conversations around class, media, and cultural ownership, but the prose itself stays unusually direct and readable for theatre criticism.

McGrath is preoccupied with accessibility without flattening complexity, political art without dead rhetoric, and entertainment that still retains structural bite. A lot of contemporary arts institutions still haven’t solved the problems he’s diagnosing here in 1981.

1984 Methuen paperback edition in very good condition with light shelf wear and clean interior.