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This research represents a new kind of critical investigation of the renowned Fun Palace as a complex cultural project, one that exceeds its remarkable architectural significance. The Fun Palace maps an extensive network of practices and agencies involved in the project's complex constitution and constant regeneration. Initiated in London 1961 as an interdisciplinary collaboration between radical theatre entrepreneur Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price, it engaged main personalities throughout its development up until 1975, such as cyberneticist Gordon Pask, engineer Frank Newby, journalist Tom Driberg and trustee Buckminster Fuller, amongst other. It aimed to construct situations in which self-directed, pleasure-led and open exchange could transform mass-audiences into active citizens. By 1964 the Fun Palace had gained momentum, and a giant cybernetic infrastructure featured within the Civic Trust's plans for Lea Valley. By the end of the decade, and under the leadership of Littlewood, the idea was reconstituted into local activism to engage Stratford youth amidst violent redevelopment in the area neighbouring Theatre Royal, where Littlewood's Theatre Workshop was based. Over and above, the struggle for a site in the institutional map of London prompted the realization of the Fun Palace as a media event. Broadsheets, films, journals, grids and press cuttings, all these media actively produced and disseminated the Fun Palace's distinctive cultural agenda of emancipation through pleasure in Britain in the 1960s and early 70s. Meanwhile, an excited architectural scholarship celebrated the challenge that the Fun Palace issued to the determinism of modern architecture and planning. Paying close attention to the role of Joan Littlewood in the project, this research analyses the conditions of production, circulation, storage and reception of these media as a way to unpack the complexity embedded in the Fun Palace's cultural agenda. On one hand, the radical plurality, ephemerality and dynamism of the project reflects transformations in British society from the immediate postwar period across the 1960s and 1970s and the pressures that these exerted upon interrelated areas of cultural production - architecture, theatre, education, leisure, (mass) media, and information and communication technologies. On the other hand, the analysis of the distinctive periodization and the modalities of the Fun Palace reception during its fifty-year long history and up until today, questions the agency of the uneven Fun Palace archive. Ultimately, through the interrogation of all this situated activity and agency, I argue for the central role that media plays in the constitution of the Fun Palace's complex cultural agenda.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the development of political audio/radio drama in the context of modernism. It seeks to make an original contribution to the knowledge of sound drama and modernism by closely studying representative texts before and during the Great War (1914-18), the 1920s and 1930s and subjecting them to discussion of the following theoretical themes: the modernist aesthetic and historicist and empirical context; Agitational contemporaneity versus Institutional containment (Macmurragh-Kavanagh, M.K.) and dramatic censorship (Tony Aldgate, & James Crighton Robertson). There are three phases that divide into the three core chapters of the thesis. Phase 1 explores the origin of the sound play in the medium of the phonograph at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and how those foundations developed into the question of whether there were modernist dimensions to audio drama before and during the First World War. Phase 2 investigates the modernist sound playwriting during the 1920s of Great War veteran Reginald Berkeley and his political agitational contemporaneity in the context of the BBC as a media institution. Phase 3 investigates the modernist sound playwriting of D.G. Bridson and Joan Littlewood, produced by Olive Shapley, and under the editorial leadership of Archie Harding at the BBC in Manchester in the 1930s. They were involved in creating political radio dramas that also negotiated issues of institutional and cultural censorship. All three phases are framed by a broadening understanding of audiogenic and radiogenic modernism during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The contribution of new knowledge in this research is the investigative discovery of the aesthetic origination of the sound drama form as proto-audio drama before and during the Great War. The thesis analyses new censorship dimensions to Reginald Berkeley's experience as a modernist playwright writing for the BBC and makes a further contribution to new scholarship through the discovery of original modernist scripts by D.G. Bridson that were directly censored by the BBC through the banning of their broadcast while in mid-rehearsal and after Radio Times scheduling. The analysis seeks to demonstrate a modernist interrelationship between the phonograph age of sound dramatic production and expression, and that developed on the early broadcasting platform of the BBC during the 1920s and 1930s. A key imperative of the thesis is to address the question of whether the political subversion in theme combined with the origination of form can be successfully argued to be a clearly identifiable dimension of modernist sound drama.

Tracing the work of three community-engaged theatre projects in different UK urban contexts, this thesis considers the ways in which contemporary theatre might constructively and proactively engage with and mobilise community as a progressive political force. Set against sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's contention that, in the context of contemporary neoliberal society, community can no longer be seen to reflect a realistic model of social relations but, rather, a symbolic articulation of 'everything we miss and what we lack to be secure, confident and trusting', I consider ways in which theatre could be understood as a performative framework through which different models of interrelational praxis and productivity might be imagined and realised. In dissociating community, as it is implicated in the practice of theatre, from an inherent relationship to social context as it exists outwith or beyond theatre practice, I draw attention to the contingent relationship between the circumstances in which theatre takes place and the modes of social, cultural or political agency that might be associated with its practice. I argue, in particular, that contemporary efforts to mobilise theatre as a political force are required to articulate ideological ambitions through and, at times, in collaboration with the systemic conditions in which they operate, even when those conditions represent values, practices or ideals that appear contrary to theatre's progressive aims. It is from this perspective that I argue for a model of practice that overlooks representational or epistemic registers of affect to privilege an ontologically informed measure of relational praxis, agency and politics. Framed by a consideration of the history and development of community theatre since the late nineteen-sixties, I attend to three contemporary case studies that sit within the rubric of community, socially-engaged or participatory theatre: The Create Course, a collaboration between the Battersea Arts Centre, the Katherine Low Settlement and lead artist Naomi Alexander that took place in London and, over eight weeks, aimed to replicate the praxis of socio-political action framed by theatre maker Joan Littlewood's imagining of a Fun Palace. Albert Drive, led by Glas(s) Performance, which took place in Pollokshields, Glasgow and, over the course of eighteen months, sought to engage residents in a shared consideration of neighbourliness, and the ways in which this connection might be leveraged to influence the socio-affective environment in which they lived. And, Seeing Red by Melodramatics, a drama group that emerged out of a partnership between the Octagon Theatre, Bolton and social housing charity Bolton at Home, who sought to mobilise theatre to address issues of domestic abuse in the Farnworth area of Bolton. Methodologies differ depending on the circumstances of the practice, however, all projects were studied in the field and most studies are based on observation over several months, in-depth, qualitative interviews with artists and participants, and combine elements of discourse and performance analysis.

El Fun Palace, el emblemático complejo cultural iniciado en Londres en 1961 por Joan Littlewood y Cedric Price y cuya agenda iría progresivamente ganando en contingencia e inestabilidad hasta 1975, circula sin cesar en la investigación académica de la arquitectura en la actualidad. Sin embargo, el programa cultural del proyecto que emana del archivo y el papel de Littlewood en él aparecen en cierto modo neutralizados en estos discursos. Este artículo reconstruye los casi sesenta años de historia de la recepción del Fun Palace para investigar críticamente las condiciones que influyeron en la construcción de sus distintivas imágenes. La compleja topología del archivo del Fun Palace se vislumbra como un actor principal en la constitución de los modos de recepción del proyecto en la actualidad: la investigación académica y el activismo.