About the Archive

Welcome to the Total Theatre Magazine Print Archive.

Here you will find every single print issue of the magazine, which was published for almost 25 years, between 1989 to 2012. Each magazine has been digitised so that the full history of Total Theatre Magazine in print has been preserved, and made available for free online. We hope you will agree that we have created a valuable resource for scholars, journalists, artists, students, and anybody interested in Britain’s alternative theatre and performance history.

Each digitised edition of the magazine can be viewed as a PDF, preserving the original design and layout features of that issue of the magazine; but all major articles and reviews have also been extracted and reformatted into a fully-searchable archive, which can be approached and searched via issue number, writer, artist, festival, venue, artform or topic.

You will also find a number of New Writings published in response to the archive; some by the magazine’s editorial team and established writers, and some by emerging writers mentored under our Artists as Writers scheme. There are also interviews with key artists whose careers have run in tandem to the history of Total Theatre Magazine.

For over 30 years, Total Theatre Magazine (now online) has been at the forefront of the advocacy, celebration and documentation of contemporary theatre and performance – including the support of forms such as circus, street theatre, site-responsive performance, puppetry, and visual theatre, which have often been ignored, or not treated with the seriousness they merit, by other publications. The print magazine encompassed 100 issues over almost 25 years. See here for more about the history of the magazine and the organisation that founded and published it.

Please do dip in and explore the wonderful record of alternative theatre and performance history that this archive offers!

Dorothy Max Prior
Editor
On behalf of the Total Theatre Magazine Editorial Team
editorial@totaltheatre.org.uk