This dissertation analyzes youth theatre and how it fares in the interplay between three worlds: the audience of young students and their experiences, interests and values; the theatre as an institution with its ideals and modes of operation; and the school, with its selection and sorting mechanisms. It focuses on what happens when different conditions, relations, tensions and conflicts create meaning and significance. A cultural-sociological approach is used to analyze the social drama that plays out between the ideals of youth theatre and the social contract that regulates the meeting between the stage and the audience. The purpose of the dissertation is to expose this social drama by using an empirical case. The empirical material is drawn from the performance of the play Dear Jelena by the Regional Theatre of Blekinge Kronoberg. The participant observations were carried out in autumn 1997, and approximately 30 performances were studied and followed up with interviews, questionnaires, and analyses of the audiences’ written impressions and reactions to the performances.

The dissertation shows that the encounter between youth theatre and its audience takes place in a socio-cultural space of inequality and tends to create further inequality. The young audience experiences, reacts to, and appropriates the performances individually, but in a manner structured by social background, sex, and course of study. Theatre as an institution is based on certain ideals, esthetic as well as others, and assumes a particular social contract in advance of its meeting with its young audience. This takes place in parallel with the school making space available for youth theatre, its ideals and social contract, via selection and disciplining. The ideals of youth theatre and the social contract are not easily upheld in reality, they are often questioned by the socio-culturally heterogeneous audience with its widely varied attitudes and reactions. This means that theatre, as well as the school, is forced, in a tension-filled and conflictual manner, to deal with the disjuncture between ideal and reality. This dissertation focuses on and empirically concretizes this social drama and how the encounter between the stage and audience is dealt with.