Edelman, J., 2025.

Interlude 1: Portraits of Four Cities

The first, and highly consequential, decision made by our project was the selection of cities to study. One of the values of STEP has traditionally been smallness; the group was consciously formed from members representing smaller European countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia, rather than their larger and more culturally dominant neighbours such as Germany, Britain or Russia. Our logic was that, in smaller countries, it was easier to understand and study a theatre system as a whole and thus describe and analyse it at the meso level that we aim for.