In this profoundly dialogical exchange, Peter Sellars, theatre director, researcher, and teacher, and Maria Shevtsova open out a whole array of questions on the integral relation between politics and the theatre in its multiple manifestations. These questions not only concern the damages inflicted by the present Covid-19 pandemic but also those developed by the neoliberal economics and politics of

In this article Gretchen E. Minton describes her adaptation of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play Timon of Athens. This adaptation, called Timon of Anaconda, focuses on the environmental legacy of Butte, Montana, a mining city that grew quickly, flourished, fell into recession, and then found itself labelled the largest Superfund clean-up site in the United States. Timon of Anaconda

Reflecting on Derek Walcott’s early relationship with movement, dance and ritual, this article sheds light on the centrality of embodied memory in Walcott’s work for the stage and reflects on the relationship between memory and materiality in his epistemology of performance. Walcott’s ideas shaped his approach to dramaturgy in the late 1950s and position his work in relation to global debates around

In this article, Angela Butler explores postdigital community through an analysis of Complicité’s The Encounter. All facets of personal and civic life are permeated by the digital to such a degree that we are living through a period termed ‘the postdigital’. Postdigital communities are commonly formed, and nearly always sustained, through online networks. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s utopian performative

Chiara Guidi, along with Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, was one of the founders in 1981 of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (now renamed Societas), the Italian company that, above any other, has been at the forefront of the international theatre scene since the early 1980s. She was the soul of dramatic rhythm and vocal composition for the company’s productions, directing numerous plays and researching each

The world around Tennessee Williams in the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s was changing at an astonishing pace, the cultural revolution of the period rendering most of his themes of sexual closeting and repression almost inconsequential. At least the entrenched cultural taboos against which he wrote seem to have disappeared by the mid-1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, Broadway productions of his work

In 1981 Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal established the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). While the Festival is generally recognized as having been highly influential in the field of British theatre over the past twenty-five years, it has received little academic attention. In this article Phoebe Patey-Ferguson examines the founding of the event, arguing that the specific socio-political circumstances

The contemporary post-truth environment imposes limitations and ethical consid erations upon the political theatre-maker’s ability to highlight political leaders’ exceptional acts of deception. By unpacking and applying Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the State of Exception to post-truth political performances, Alex D. Wilson discusses in this article how political deception is an exceptional act of sovereign

Much theatrical work that calls itself ‘immersive’ uses tropes of the erotic to achieve its intended effects. In this article Rose Biggin identifies structural and performative strategies in the use of the erotic in this genre. What does it mean to identify the process of performed seduction as central to much immersive dramaturgy? Through readings of contemporary productions that draw upon (or appropriate)

In this article Hanife Schulte discusses Thomas Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind , a German version of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People that toured to the International Istanbul Theatre Festival in 2014. In borrowing Maria Shevtsova’s notion of the sociology of performance, Hanife Schulte offers a sociological examination of Ein Volksfeind’ s Istanbul performances and demonstrates how the first anniversary

In this article the authors offer an analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 play Huis Clos ( No Exit ) and Reginald Rose’s 1954 play Twelve Angry Men , with particular attention paid to exploring the insights from each theatrical text about communication. The process of communication may be ambivalent or Janus-faced, and one of the objectives of this analysis is to consider communication in terms of its

In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour , by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by Andre Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus , performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously

In this article, David Chandler challenges the often dismissive interpretation of Catherine Johnson’s hugely successful Mamma Mia! (1999) as a sunny, upbeat, lightweight musical. Johnson’s earlier dramatic work was of a more serious cast, and returned repeatedly to scenes of damaging, often exploitative, intergenerational desire. This interest continues in Mamma Mia! though commercial imperatives meant

Between 1986 and 1989, Michael Bogdanov directed The Wars of the Roses (an ambitious seven-play Shakespeare cycle that won him the Olivier Award for Best Director in 1990), introducing an accessible and pertinent Shakespeare to 1980s audiences and paving the way for later politicized versions of Shakespeare’s plays – such as, recently, the New York Public Theater’s 2017 production of Julius Caesar

This essay focuses on analysing the patriarchal nature of Kathakali, a dramatic performance form from the south Indian state of Kerala and the ways in which the female protagonist, Asti, from a new Kathakali play written by a male playwright, unsettles it. I would argue that Asti is an aberration from the long practiced patriarchal gender construct of the female employed by the performance in question

In this article Swati Arora analyzes a contemporary Indian feminist performance, Thoda Dhyaan Se ( A Little Carefully , 2013), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of Delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of India. It highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges

In this article Mario Frendo engages with the idea of ancient Greek tragedy as a performance phenomenon, questioning critiques that approach it exclusively via literary–dramatic methodologies. Based on the premise that ancient Greek tragedy developed within the predominantly oral context of fifth-century BCE Greece, he draws on Hans-Thies Lehmann's study of tragedy and its relation to dramatic theatre

When Harley Granville Barker was invited to stage a theatre season in New York following the outbreak of World War One, senior figures within British politics seized on it as an opportunity to promote the British war effort in the United States. It was, however, Barker’s impromptu decision to extend his stay and tour Euripides’s The Trojan Women to major colleges on the east coast that saw him come

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A recent study of single-ticket buyers and subscribers at a major regional theatre – Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky – focused on measuring quantitatively the psychological benefits of engaging with theatre and gathering qualitatively observations by focus groups. Both confirmed the hypothesis that regular attendance promotes flourishing and meaningful social interaction, psychological stimulation

Postdramatic approaches to performance and Stanislavsky’s methodology seemingly occupy divergent performance traditions. Nonetheless, both traditions often require performers to mine their own lives (albeit to different ends) and operate in an experiential realm that demands responsiveness to and within the live moment of performing. It is this realm that I explore in this paper, through an analysis

In this essay Paul Maloney and Adrienne Scullion investigate the ambitious agenda of theatre internationalism in the context of non-professional theatre making in Glasgow in the mid-twentieth century. For members of the Glasgow Jewish Institute Players, internationalism was represented through a diverse repertoire of classic European texts and contemporary American plays, presented alongside new original

In NTQ 123 (August 2015) Michael Walling, Artistic Director of Border Crossings, wrote about his production of This Flesh is Mine , adapted by Brian Woolland from the Iliad . Here he discusses When Nobody Returns , based on The Odyssey , a co-production with Palestine's Ashtar Theatre that reflected contemporary events in a way that was not allegorical but allusive. He explores how the play related

This essay analyses a number of performance art experiments by significant artists and choreographers, each deploying vocal innovations. The essay is based on extensive archival research in Japan and France. The distinctive form of a final, last-gasp, last-breath monologue illuminates distinctive aspects of the final works of artists and choreographers. Such a monologue, which expires at around the

In this article David Barnett explores the Berliner Ensemble's production in 1956 of Synge's classic The Playboy of the Western World . Although it was directed by Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth, Bertolt Brecht, the company's co-founder, loomed large in planning and rehearsal. This staging serves as an example of how a politicized approach to theatre-making can bring out relationships, material

In this article, Oliver Double examines the process of turning traumatic personal experience into viable stand-up comedy material by offering a detailed account of the creative process behind his 2015 show Break a Leg. Drawing on Bergson, Brecht, and Noel Carroll, he explores the origins of comic ideas in personal observation, and argues for a two-stage process of joke creation. This is fleshed out

Circus training can benefit children diagnosed on the autistic spectrum and their families. In 2010, as Head Trainer at Flipside Circus in Brisbane, Kristy Seymour developed a method for using circus as a therapeutic tool for children with autism. In this article, she and Patricia Wise work between experiential and theoretical positions to explore how circus can open up a new world to such children

This article has been published in a revised form in New Theatre Quarterly, [http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X16000592. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. COPYRIGHT: © Cambridge University Press 2017.

house reminds Ratan Lakhar of the people to whom he owes everything. In Assamese, the inscription reads ‘To my audi ence’, and is placed under four masks symbolizing theatre. ‘All that we have achieved, this house, the plot of land, the training camp for the actors – we owe everything to our audience. It has remained loyal to us for forty years,’ explains Lakhar, who is now almost eighty years old

Arnold Wesker, who died in April 2016, denied having been an ‘angry young man’ and, though the cliche clung, he declared, ‘But I am an angry old man.’ In this memoir, Simon Trussler, while reflecting on causes for the anger, does not attempt an analysis of the life and works, but recollects the times when their shared interests and intentions brought them into contact, and explores some of the reasons

Referring to several European productions of Hamlet between 2001 and 2014, Nicoleta Cinpoes in this article examines the stage struggle to ‘recuperate’ an Ophelia that both discursive criticism and visual objectification bury prematurely, albeit by different means and for different aims, when they claim, in Laertes's words: ‘The woman will be out.’ She takes Laertes's words to mean both taking the

The inspiration for Dion Boucicault's first Irish subject, The Colleen Bawn, in a set of pictur esque views of Ireland after the artist W. H. Bartlett is well documented, and Bartlett's iconography of wild scenery, moonlight, round towers, and ruined abbeys features strongly throughout the Irish plays. Although Bartlett's compositions were widely known in the nineteenth century, there has been little

In this article Natalia Yakubova explores the interactions between theatre and literature as between an actress on one side and a man of letters on the other. The interactions discussed here came at a particular historical moment, when the transition from an actor-centred to a director-centred hierarchy was taking place, and the article deals with the letters written by actresses to the men who were

In this article Ziad Adwan examines the relationship between the Opera House in Damascus and the Al-Assad dynasty. Hafez Al-Assad ordered the building of the Opera House but it remained unfinished at his death. His son Bashar opened it after three decades of construction. Leaving the institution unfinished was, it is argued here, due to uncertainty regarding its identity, place in the bureaucratic

In this essay Michael Dobson considers the evolution of certain habitual cuts to the text of Hamlet between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, identifying in particular a tendency to increase the abruptness with which the play's last act interrupts its otherwise digressive movement. Looking in particular at the fate of Fortinbras, he examines changes to the ways in which these cuts have

What political theatre may be in contemporary times and in what sense it is ‘political’ are the core issues of this article. Examples are chosen from within a restricted period, 2007 to 2014, but from a considerably wide space that starts from Eastern Europe – Russia, Romania, Hungary, Poland – and goes to Germany and France. These examples are principally productions by established ensemble theatre

Hacking – improving software through a process of trial and error – is a mode of rehearsal. Such is the claim made by Miguel Escobar Varela in this article, which he furthers by exploring the similarities between the ways theatre makers and software programmers speak about their crafts. Understanding software programming as an essentially creative process should be of interest for theatre scholars

By the early 1870s, the term ‘filth’ had become Wagner’s shorthand for Offenbach. He attacked his fellow composer both publicly and privately and sought to establish a polarity between the two, confining Offenbach to the realm of frivolous and materialistic popular folk culture while casting his own work as exemplary of the new German spirit. Laurence Senelick’s close analysis of Wagner’s writings

In 1882, a critic of the journal Theatre noted that ‘the theatrical life of the present day might be described as a round of glorified strolling. The ‘circuits’ of Bristol, Norwich, and York of the last century are now replaced by those of the United States, South Africa, India, and Australia, and a modern actor thinks as little of a season in Melbourne or New York as his grandfather did of a week’s

Han Tae-Sook’s Lady Macbeth , a theatre adaptation by a leading woman director in Korea, has been interpreted largely from a feminist and intercultural perspective. In this article Yeeyon Im examines a body of criticism on Han’s production to raise awareness of the danger of totalization in current critical geography in Korea, which may marginalize non-ideological views. The humanist issues of evil