This paper, presented at IDEA 6 World Congress, Hong Kong, in July 2007, is about the investigation into the uses and impact of performance as a medium of learning in museums and at historic sites currently being undertaken by Centre for Applied Theatre Research at the University of Manchester. Often referred to as 'museum theatre' or 'live interpretation' or 'living history', none of which adequately captures the characteristics or varieties of the medium, many claims are made for it: it's a powerful way of opening up aspects of a museum's collection or an historic site to a wider audience ? of reaching, engaging many for whom such cultural displays or sites might usually seem remote, irrelevant or intimidating, not least to young people or to minority ethnic communities whose command of English let alone of British culture may be partial at best. It can aid interpretation, helping us to understand the social meaning of the artefacts or architecture, animating the inanimate; sometimes it will throw light on, or fill gaps in, the partial knowledge offered by the exhibition or the ruins of a castle or 19th century workhouse. Many will claim it is above all a medium of learning ? a means of helping visitors (whether general public or organised school groups) grasp the significance of what it is that they're seeing and offering a unique opportunity to make their own meanings from it ? to relate it to their own world, to make connections and understand difference.

But the use of drama within the museum or the historic site has also been controversial. For example, are dramatic re-enactments (of battles, of 19th century cotton operatives working their weaving looms, of a lesson in a Victorian schoolroom) symptomatic, as some have argued, of a general shift towards a 'theme park society' in which the cultural establishment promotes a nostalgic, reassuring, entertaining and profoundly inaccurate view of history? Is performance always deployed genuinely to enlighten people about the past, enabling them to 'read', to re-think their 'heritage'? ? or does it dilute, distort or even sabotage the educational intent of the curator? Does the process of drama tend to impose a narrative structure on history, tidying it up, reducing it to cause and effect? Does it risk trivialising in the process of popularising, and making fun out of fashions, behaviours and beliefs different from our own?

Or ? is it arguable that the use of interactive performance can actually generate more engagement with and insight into the past than the safer and more traditional methods which privilege the word, the document and the well-packaged textbook? That it can open up the past precisely to those multiple perspectives and to the complexities and minutiae of the social context that most historians now stress?