In twenty essays, prefaced by a historical introduction, this volume surveys key features of the last two hundred years of theatre in what was the principal theatrical centre of central Europe until the First World War, relating key playwrights, plays, and institutional developments to the political and intellectual context that has helped shape them. The studies combine to give a picture of conservative and progressive movements in Viennese theatre from the aesthetic and political conservatism of the early nineteenth century to the innovations of the great period of Viennese modernism at the turn of the century, renewed conservatism in the inter-war years and the resurgence in the last two decades of the twentieth century of an outspokenly critical treatment of right-wing politics.