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.

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

• 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.