Queer Theatre: Reclaiming histories, historicising, and hope

In this chapter I seek to document queer performance histories lest they be lost; concurrently I examine the persistent, plural, and collective engagement of queer theatre with histories. I outline how queer theatre in Britain has been configured by the historical conditions of its production before examining the ways queer performance has persistently sought to make and remake histories. I begin by documenting the emergence of queer performance in Britain, identifying its distinctive homes and practices, before arguing that queer theatre in this context is aesthetically and thematically inflected by the legislation of LGBT+ lives, critically engaged with the legacies of queer (and queering) pasts, and politically committed to staging the recovery of absent stories marginalised from mainstream narratives.