Catriona Fallow (University of the West of Scotland) & Sarah Thomasson (University of Queensland)

Theatre companies are the institutional mechanisms that shape and enable theatrical production by bringing together like-minded artists, fostering collaborations, providing infrastructure, and determining ways of working. They help to articulate the identities of artists, regions, and nations as they interact with funding structures, policy environments, and regulatory mechanisms that sustain artistic production across and between projects. Theatre companies’ artistic reputations and aesthetics of past works inform reception and audience experience. Ultimately, theatre companies can represent longevity and continuity within an otherwise precarious industry and shape the meaning-making of the performance work they produce and the context in which it is received.

The long-established history of ‘the company model’, in some cases dating back centuries, produces an understanding of theatre companies as comparatively ‘stable’ entities or nodal points in theatrical networks. But how true is that today? What are the functions of theatre companies now? How do theatre companies continue to endure, particularly in a time of multiple, intersecting global crises?

This talk draws on the co-editors’ experience of the ongoing and collaborative work of curating 50 Key Theatre Companies (Routledge), which examines significant contemporary theatre companies from around the world. Bringing together perspectives from scholars and practitioners across the globe, what has become clear is that the notion of ‘company’ – like so many other artistic practices or processes – becomes increasingly and usefully destabilised when the scope of inquiry goes beyond established examples, many of which replicate a predominantly Western understanding of what a theatre company is or can be. This talk reflects on the collection’s approach, offering a provocation to reconsider how ‘companies’ are conceptualised and defined in an increasingly globalised, changing world.

Catriona Fallow is Senior Lecturer in Performance at the University of the West of Scotland. Her research explores contemporary UK theatre ecologies with a specific interest in theatre company models. Her work has been published in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Modern Drama and Early Theatre, and she has co-edited and contributed to Harold Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborations (2021) for Bloomsbury Methuen’s Engage series.

Sarah Thomasson is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Her research explores international arts festival networks. She is the author of The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and coauthor of the forthcoming Performing Data: Theatre Practice and Research (Bloomsbury).

Longley Room, 21 University Square, Friday 23rd October 2026, 1-2pm

Image: Dead Centre Theatre Company's production of Hamnet (2017)

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