As a theatre professional and university professor, Dragan Klaić watched the ascent of commercial theater and its growing professionalism with great concern about its effects on the noncommercial scene. Bearing in mind the rivalry, proximity and even the networking of these two worlds - one chasing profit and the other surviving on state subsidies - in this book the author advocates their clear delineation. The question that he raises is how these theatres, companies, spaces, festivals, studios and the infrastructure that supports them and which they rely on, can survive the competition with commercial entertainment, in a situation when state support has decreased. Globalization, migrations, European integrations and the digital revolution are changing the way of life of people in cities and villages, and they are pressuring the state theatre to adapt and modify its role or to risk being marginalized and rendered irrelevant.

Dragan Klaić (1950-2011), theatre historian and cultural analyst, was an associate with the Felix Meritis association in Amsterdam and taught cultural policy and art at Leiden University. His areas of interest were contemporary theatrical arts, European cultural policy, cultural development strategies, and international cultural cooperation and interculturalism. He graduated in dramaturgy in Belgrade, and got his doctorate in theatre history and drama critique from Yale University, in the United States of America. He worked as a theatre critic and playwright, he was professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and Amsterdam University, a guest professor in America, Budapest and Bologna, director of the Netherlands Theatre Institute from 1992 to 2001, and co-founder of the European theatre quarterly Euromaske.