On 9 August 2020, Belarus erupted in protest over the falsified election results promoted and endorsed by existing president Aliaksandar Lukashenka. Playwright, director, and member of the Coordination Council for the peaceful transfer of power in Belarus, Andrei Kureichyk was one of the thousands on the streets that month. In early September he finished a new play depicting the events leading up to

In 2012, London staged the Olympic Games and the associated Cultural Olympiad, which produced the ‘London 2012’ Festival, funding a wide series of events including many productions by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). A decade on, this article considers the impact of these overlapping events during a period of unprecedented austerity in the United Kingdom, and how arts events might

This article examines recent controversies sparked by the critical reception of work by Global Majority theatre artists in Canada and the USA, including Yolanda Bonnell, Yvette Nolan, and Antoinette Nwandu. It argues that, when faced with works that fall outside of their presumed expertise and experience, critics commonly resort to a strategy of critical disengagement, which displaces the focus from

The quarterly journal Faslnameh Teatr has been published in the Iranian capital of Tehran since 1977, although with some interruptions. In a country where, since the Islamic Revolution, systematic efforts have been made to erase any trace of past monarchies, the continued publication of this journal proves to be an extremely rare, if not unique, occurrence. Of course, the prominence of the Ta’zieh

In this interview on 22 March 2022 in London, Mesut Gunenc talks to theatre critic and historian Aleks Sierz about how his work has influenced contemporary British drama, why he chose the name ‘in-yer-face theatre’ for 1990s avant-garde plays, and why some writers have rejected the label. They also discuss the differences between experiential and experimental theatre, especially focusing on the work

In this article, the performing body is considered via a three-pronged approach involving affect theory and affective science, a scene from King Lear, and long-distance running. Inspired by the chiaroscuro of painting, this variety and mix of sources act as a methodological device to shed unfamiliar light (and shade) on the elusive topic of affect. While ‘body’ is viewed from the perspective of ‘bodyworld’

In this article Gretchen Minton and Mikey Gray discuss an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy Cymbeline that toured Montana and surrounding states in the summer of 2021. Minton’s sections describe the eco-feminist aims of this production, which was part of an international project called ‘Cymbeline in the Anthropocene’, showing how the costumes, set design, and especially the emphasis upon the

This article uses historical-ecological insights for a re-reading of two little-known mid-twentieth-century Australian plays, Oriel Gray’s The Torrents and Eunice Hanger’s Flood, which highlight developments relevant to the environmental disasters of today. In particular, the article focuses on the significance of key cultural assumptions embedded in the texts – and a revival of The Torrents in 2019

Literary scholars and linguists have argued extensively that language is not simply a purely representational vehicle of thought but its determining medium, whose ordering powers not only shape cognizance of reality but are also actively involved in processes of imperialism and cultural erasure. It is the determinative yet slippery quality of language, prompting the loss of meaning in attempts at translation

Since the 1990s, there has been a large number of ‘how-to’ manuals published in English for aspiring playwrights. By and large, these texts treat the pedagogy of playwriting as a recent phenomenon. However, a series of relatively unknown books from the mid-nineteenth century were written with the purpose of teaching the craft of dramatic writing, emphasizing the importance of a hands-on understanding

This article analyzes the role of pain and torture in the construction and destruction of subjectivity by way of a comparison of the depictions of torture in the theatre of Sarah Kane and Elaine’s Scarry’s highly influential The Body in Pain: On the Making and Unmaking of the World. The essay uses Kane in conjunction with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, as well as relevant work on the history

This article explores the role of theatre in the strategies of cultural diplomacy that developed in Italy between the last years of the liberal state (1919–22) and the rise of Benito Mussolini. It covers the period until 1927, when the establishment of the Istituti Italiani di Cultura (Italian Cultural Institutes) and the approval of a new regulatory framework for migration marked a new era for fascist

This article explores the history of the German theatre in St Petersburg in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a subject forgotten for a hundred years due to historical reasons. Svetlana Melnikova uses cross-cultural research methods, which, as she has discovered, appeared in Russian criticism concerning the arts as early as the nineteenth century. The ideas of Russian scholars turned out to

German film artist Jan Speckenbach ingeniously contributed to the development of live video on the stage, and this discussion focuses on his education, as well his as experimental collaborations with director Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne Berlin, starting in 2000. Speckenbach’s background in film and media studies facilitated his explorations of uncharted territory in the theatre, going from a set

The story of Medea’s murder of her own children to gain revenge against their faithless father has been tackled from many angles by playwrights and directors from Euripides’ time to the present. In recent years, due to highly sensationalized, real-life cases of mothers murdering their children, it has become fodder for sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and feminists. Many recent productions

Although lasting only two and a half years, Edward Gordon Craig’s engagement with the Purcell Operatic Society was his most consistent and productive period of work on the stage. This article re-examines this time during Craig’s life in order to ascertain why he saw it to be the zenith of his career. In particular, it analyzes his work with the amateur group to argue that it was foundational in the

In the interwar period, amateur drama was actively promoted as a means to create or repair, sustain and develop community consciousness in English villages. In this article, Mick Wallis maps such promotion across various fields of practice at their intersection with the village drama ‘movement’ as a field itself. These include gentry patronage, post-war and rural reconstruction, adult education, and

This article explores the role of the traditional Pang Lhabsol festival of Sikkim in India as a medium for political ascendancy and influence in the region – a phenomenon that has continued, albeit with different political inflections, from its founding days until the present. Since its emergence as an indigenous practice in the thirteenth century, it has consistently transformed according to each

In 1917–18, the new republican governments of Russia, Germany, and Austria nationalized their former court property. A monarchic-turned-national heritage of prestigious opera and dramatic theatres weighed heavily on national and regional budgets, prompting first attempts to create centralized forms of theatre governance. In a second wave of theatre reorganization in the mid-1930s, the Soviet government

The recent barbaric murder of an investigative journalist in Malta who was looking into corruption at the top echelons of power sparked off a civil society movement, Repubblika, spurring ordinary citizens into participating in collective protest action. The movement also incorporated a loose grouping of women calling themselves ‘Occupy Justice’. Different forms of protest against government corruption

Provincial touring companies of the late Victorian period, comprising mostly unknown actors and actresses, have received minimal scholarly attention until recently. The sheer number of ‘on-the-road’ artists who were employed in such enterprises from the late nineteenth century onwards increased to such an extent that to establish a framework for their individual and collective study presents significant

This study discusses the potentials and challenges of Zoom theatre performances during the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the utilization and applicability of videoconferencing software Zoom, and other streaming software compatible with it, in creating a viable performance option for theatre practitioners and audiences during mandatory social distancing. Such software can be

This article examines the meaning of the ‘impolitical’ regarding cases of impolitical theatre and associated critical discourse, with reference to Rodolfo Usigli and Raymond Williams, among others. It is argued that ‘impolitical’ theatre represents social relations from the standpoint of the ideal of culture. The analysis starts with Richard Schechner’s critique of the original Broadway production

The relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Samuel Beckett has excited many scholars and continues to be of major interest today. This article explores the Deleuzian concept of multiplicity by considering quantitative and qualitative multiplicities in Beckett’s work. In differentiating between these two types, Deleuze and Félix Guattari indicate that extensive or quantitative multiplicities are essentially

World-renowned for having made a totally new kind of theatre, director-designer Robert Wilson first astonished international audiences in Paris in 1971 with Le Regard du sourd (Deafman Glance) and then with his twenty-four-hour Ouverture at the first edition of the Festival d’Automne in 1972. He also refers in this Conversation to Einstein on the Beach, premiered at the Avignon Festival in 1976, as

This article re-examines Krapp, ou La Dernière bande (1961), an opera adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), which was a collaboration between the playwright and the Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. Beckett’s changes to the libretto give new insights into the writer’s developing concerns around form and his aesthetic of failure. In the programme for the Bielefeld production of

Since 1988, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt has been performed outdoors in the summer at Gålå in Gudbrandsdalen in Norway. Peer Gynt is particularly connected to Norwegian national culture and identity, and this connection becomes particularly poignant at Gålå. The event focuses on giving the audience a celebratory national-romantic experience of the typical Norwegian landscape, traditional Norwegian culture

This article explores the revival of Palestinian indigenous performance practices that were part of the Sufi Nabi Musa festival. Focusing on the 2018 and 2019 government-sponsored performances, it examines how the different sociopolitical changes that took place in Palestinian society, following the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948, have led to the marginalization, politicization

From April to November 2019, eight members of the pandies’ theatre, a Delhi-based activist theatre group, toured Delhi and Rajasthan with a fifty-five-minute version of Euripides’ Medea, in Hindustani. The group gave fifteen performances in the round, in spaces ranging from a tin shed to a plush air-conditioned conference room, addressing diverse audiences. During post-performance discussions in four

UK crises of hospitality, feminism, and democracy are as acute as ever despite ostensible commitment to the values that foster them. This article examines David Greig’s 2016 Edinburgh version of Aeschylus’s Suppliants as it attempts to expand spaces of democracy into the theatre, and investigates the foundations of democratic institutions. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics and

Jan Suk’s book is only the secondmonograph dedicated to the experimental Sheffield-based theatre company Forced Entertainment, and the first to cover their output from 2004 to 2016. The author makes extensive use of Deleuzian ‘poetics of immanence’, described as being ‘connected with their constant interplay with the real and representational, presence-driven, “here-and-now-for-youtonightness”’ in

focuses on the apparently contagious phenomenon of fainting in the horror theatre of Paris’s GrandGuignol. In the final section, chapters by Ana Pais, Mark Pizzato, and Liam Jarvis examine processes of emotional or affective contagion. Theatre’s relationship with contagion has clearly transformed somewhat since the publication of this book. In 2020–21, infectious disease has had a profound and probably

Jan Suk’s book is only the secondmonograph dedicated to the experimental Sheffield-based theatre company Forced Entertainment, and the first to cover their output from 2004 to 2016. The author makes extensive use of Deleuzian ‘poetics of immanence’, described as being ‘connected with their constant interplay with the real and representational, presence-driven, “here-and-now-for-youtonightness”’ in

questioned the terms of her contracts. She tried to find roles on stage and screen in which she could play against type, roles which challenged her as an actress, and roles which could stretch public perception of her abilities as a working actor. There are more recent analyses of her film and stage acting from such scholars as John Stokes or Lucy Bolton, though thesedon’t always cross over themedia

The ecology of the rural setting in which Double Edge Theatre lives and works is as integral to its artistic work as to its principles of social justice, and these qualities mark the ensemble’s singular profile not only in the United States but also increasingly on the world theatre map. Stacy Klein co-founded the company in Boston in 1982 as a women’s theatre with a defined feminist programme. In

The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, the popular label for Samuel Beckett’s theatre, has been challenged over the past decades before its implications were fully explored. This article reconsiders the ‘absurd’ with respect to Beckett and the human/nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. It draws upon affect theory and posthumanism, arguing that the absurd in Beckett’s theatre takes root in the theatricalization

The actor is tasked with embodying text in order to portray the characters’ intentions. This article shows that such a complex task escalates when the actor performs in a second language. In South Africa, where eleven official languages are embraced, the multiplicity and crossover of spoken languages is a daily challenge for actors and theatre makers, leading to a preference for physical performances

Jauría (2019) was the first tribunal verbatim play in Spain and it had a great impact on audiences in the context of heated debate about how national legislation had a long-standing legacy of sexism. Based on the transcripts of the legal proceedings of the La Manada gang-rape case, Jauría not only clarifies this controversial case for different types of audiences, but it also poses very important questions

The team running the Russian Case as part of Moscow’s annual Golden Mask Festival pulled off a major feat in 2021 by organizing a five-day programme online. Deeply disappointed that the Russian Case had been cancelled in the preceding year due to the Covid pandemic, this group made it its mission to succeed in adverse circumstances; and succeed it did by providing works varied enough to engage its

criminology, Walsh draws on an extensive interdisciplinary research base and personal experience to identify the structural and ethical weaknesses of the logicmodels that dominate the existing discourses of women, crime, and imprisonment. The reader should be aware that this is much more than a book about prison theatre and performance, being equally concerned with prison as performance. It achieves

Anglophone scholarship in theatre/performance studies does not warm easily to the concept of ‘aesthetics’. To make publication in English possible, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Ästhetik des Performativen (2004) had for its main title to be rebranded as The Transformative Power of Performance, a rendering which also loses ‘performativity’ as an aesthetic phenomenon separate from the materiality of the performance

criminology, Walsh draws on an extensive interdisciplinary research base and personal experience to identify the structural and ethical weaknesses of the logicmodels that dominate the existing discourses of women, crime, and imprisonment. The reader should be aware that this is much more than a book about prison theatre and performance, being equally concerned with prison as performance. It achieves

the impact of new technologies in print culture and reprographics for the promotion of theatre and film industries in products such as specialist magazines and publicity materials. The book also considers how issues of censorship operated in the period both upon theatre and early cinema. Not surprisingly, the First WorldWar looms large through the ways theatre and film worked as a tool for propaganda

Our bodies have becomemore digital over the past year or so than they were before 2020. Through multiple national lockdowns and international travel restrictions, we have all had to project our bodies through digital technology. The possibilities for creative engagement with technology have become far more broadly evident than they have been for the past three decades. This book was written in the

Elizabeth LeCompte co-founded The Wooster Group with like-minded pioneers in New York in 1975, leading and directing its collaborators as deaths, departures, and new arrivals have changed its composition and emphases over the decades, segueing into a world-wide uncertain present. Kate Valk joined in 1978, the last representative of The Wooster Group’s foundational period, apart from LeCompte herself

Exceptional in demonstrating the political engagement emerging in twenty-first-century performance is the corpus of the writer and director Milo Rau, whose practice is distinguished by its (re)meditation of the real. With detailed reference to Mitleid (2016) and La Reprise (2018), this article examines Rau’s self-reflexive strategies in (re)presenting testimony or an event as a means not of depicting

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has spawned several unauthorized sequel plays, which see Godot arrive on stage in 1960s Yugoslavia, 1980s Ireland, 1990s North America, and early 2000s Japan. The sequel play is a largely ignored phenomenon in literary scholarship, with the sequel form itself routinely dismissed as a derivative and inevitably disappointing text. Yet the sequel also re-situates and

Ivan Medenica here analyzes the cultural shift that the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) experienced after 1989. From its beginnings in the late 1960s until the end of the1980s, BITEF was a representation of the dominant multicultural, modernist, and progressive paradigm of Yugoslavia’s cultural policy. This was not an unambiguous position. On the one hand, modernist values were imposed

interesting because the play premiered in Johannesburg and toured to London with an all-white cast to engage interracial audiences in both locations at the height of the anti-apartheid struggles fighting censorship and racism. Against this historical backdrop, Cole’s analysis of white South African contemporary theatremakers becomes more critical as she moves into the 1990s and the present in the following

Maintaining and nurturing an ensemble theatre have been Anne Bogart’s foremost concerns in these past near-thirty years since she and Tadashi Suzuki founded the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) in 1992. Suzuki had established the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1976, making a secluded mountainous landscape of Japan its home to this day. Bogart’s venture in the United States, although

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans