Fringe theatre before the fringe

There is much debate about, as well as new research into, what constitutes the fringe and when it began. In the British context, the fringe as a term originated at the first Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, in relation to those protesting at the lack of Scottish representation in the official programme. The label reached a wider audience in the 1960s through the revue Beyond the Fringe, and was subsequently applied to the flowering of counter-cultural theatrical activity later that decade and in the 1970s when the term became established in its current usage. The talk reproduced here, which launched the Society of Theatre Research 2009/2010 lecture series, explores the London antecedents of the contemporary fringe, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century.