It was in 1818, after a seventeen-year-old farmhand Jānis Peitāns from the Dikļi Manor had translated a play he had seen at the Riga German Theatre, that the first theatre performance in Latvian was held: it was The Robbers, the most rebellious of Friedrich Schiller’s works.

The whole of our historical existence would probably make a somewhat bitter theatre performance. Theatre as we know it was at first entertainment exclusively for the privileged German public in Latvia. As a peasant nation, Latvians had a natural sense of the mysteries and rites of human life that are connected with the processes of nature; it manifested itself in the mummery and masked parades, ritual enactments and impromptu performances at summer and winter solstice, weddings and other celebrations.

The first stationary German theatre in Riga was built in 1782 by Otto Hermann von Fietinghoff. From 1837 to 1839 the Musical Director of the Riga German Theatre was Richard Wagner. Unfortunately he had to make a hasty departure once his Koenigsburg creditors had managed to track him down. Wagner had also borrowed nice little sums from most of the wealthy Rigans and, being used to living in style, never returned the money. The Rigans have most magnanimously forgiven him.

The beginnings of professional Latvian theatre can be traced back no further than the period when we started to think of ourselves as more than just peasants ― with the first generation of educated Latvians asserting their national and spiritual identity during the so-called First Awakening. The first Latvian theatre performance in Riga (on June 2, 1868) was a local adaptation of a play called Jeppe of the Mountain by the Danish author Ludvig Holberg staged under the title of Bērtulis, the Drunkard. A year later, in 1869, when the foundation stone of the Riga Latvian Society House was symbolically laid on Midsummer's Eve, the first play by Ādolfs Alunāns, the first professional Latvian playwright, was performed in Riga. He wrote and staged plays and singspiels, performed as an actor, wrote theatre reviews and did much to popularize theatre among the ordinary people.

The beginnings of the Latvian theatre were dominated by the influence of the German school with its exaggerated gestures, facial expressions and emotions. Over time, the new European drama, trends of naturalism and symbolism and Russian principles of stage production, drama and acting penetrated our theatre. The best known playwrights were Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Aspazija and Rainis, the authors of psychological and symbolical dramas as well as light-hearted folksy comedies (Blaumanis) popular to this day.

The main trend in Latvian theatre has been psychological realism, and yet Eduards Smiļģis, the founder of the Dailes Theatre, belonged to that European generation of experimentalists known for their stylistic quests: the world-famous directors A.Tairov and V. Meyerhold in Russia, M. Reinhardt and G. Fux in Germany and J.Copeau in France.

In 1925 at the Paris International Exibition of Decorative Art Jānis Muncis’ twenty-three stage models from productions at the Dailes Theatre were awarded Grand Prix and Eduards Smiļģis received a gold medal. The Dailes productions were magnificent in their imaginative staging, and the talented actors were able  to carry out the most daring of Smiļģis’ ideas.

In the period between the two world wars actor, director and educator Mikhail Chekhov, directors Fyodor Komisarzhevsky and Nikolai Driesen, singer Fyodor Shalyapin, conductor Leo Blech and other cultural figures known all over Europe gave guest performances or worked in Latvia for a longer or shorter period of time.

After World War II, the Latvian theatre was subjected to ideological pressures from the Soviet authorities and forced to resort to Aesop’s language. At that time theatre was one of the few public places where Latvian was still spoken, the hope to regain political independence preserved and the idea of personal and national freedom kept alive. In the 1960s a new generation of stage directors brought a greater variety of styles to the Latvian theatre, among them Pēteris Pētersons, Alfrēds Jaunušans, and Ādolfs Šapiro in Riga and Oļģerts Kroders in Valmiera. In the 1970s the colourful stage traditions of Smiļģis’ era were revived by Arnolds Liniņš who staged a number of plays by contemporary Latvian authors Gunārs Priede, Pauls Putniņš and Harijs Gulbis. In the late 1970s and early 80s new trends were launched by Māra Ķimele, Valdis Lūriņš, Kārlis Auškāps and Valentīns Maculēvičs. Since the 1990s a new generation of stage directors — Alvis Hermanis, Viesturs Kairišs, Dž.Dž.Džilindžers, Regnārs Vaivars  and Gaļina Poļiščuka  -- have been persistent in their quest for stylistic innovation, daringly combining stage technique with visual arts, influences of Oriental drama and post-modern thought and now and then returning to the psychological theatre traditions.