Introduction: what is world Theatre?

The renowned British director Peter Brook famously said, “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (The Empty Space 9). Indeed, most theatre scholars agree that all you need to have “theatre” is (1) an actor, (2) an event, and (3) an audience. As you can well imagine, this covers an enormous amount of activity; and if we say “world” theatre, the project of examining all such activity throughout history and all over the world becomes an impossible task. How then do we talk about “world theatre?”