As spaces that have the potential to explore differences in opinion, social injustice, and enact memorials of past events that influence collective memory, the politics of theatres themselves is significant since they frame the dialogues housed within. Jacques Rancière wrote in The Emancipated Spectator (2009), that “Good' theatre is one that uses its separated reality in order to abolish it.’ The power and potential for the resurrection, questioning and transformation of points of view within theatre is largely enabled through the envelope of its entertainment value.

The writers of Theatres of the Left describe the sway theatrical works have had on politics in presenting progressive or transgressive ideas which later become normalised: ‘Thus the free woman, in the person of Ibsen’s Nora, was walking the boards of the London stage for some years before the emancipatory movement of women forced itself on to the agenda of national politics; while at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, the magic of Irish nationality was being proclaimed dozen years before it was taken up by the heroes of the Easter Rising. A number of other examples suggest themselves, where the stage might be seen as anticipating politics rather than reflecting it’ ‘Theatre, as the most public of the arts, is second cousin to politics, and even when the relationship is a forbidden one’.