What different kinds of festival are to be found on the ever-expanding international circuit? What companies are invited or gatecrash the events? What is the role of festivals and festival-going in a global theatrical economy? In this article Murray Edmond describes three festivals which he attended in Poland in the summer of 2007 – the exemplary Malta Festival, held in Poznan; the Warsaw Festival of Street Performance; and the Brave Festival (‘Against Cultural Exile’) in Wroclaw – and through an analysis of specific events and productions suggests ways of distinguishing and assessing their aims, success, and role in what Barthes called the ‘special time’ which festivals have occupied since the Ancient Greeks dedicated such an occasion to Dionysus. Murray Edmond is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His recent publications include Noh Business (Berkeley: Atelos Press, 2005), a study, via essay, diary, and five short plays, of the influence of Noh theatre on the Western avant-garde, and articles in Contemporary Theatre Review (2006), Australasian Drama Studies (April 2007), and Performing Aotearoa: New Zealand Theatre and Drama in an Age of Transition (2007). He works professionally as a dramaturge, notably for Indian Ink Theatre Company, and has also published ten volumes of poetry, of which the most recent is Fool Moon (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004).

In this essay Ilka Saal examines one of the most perplexing aspects of Neil LaBute's work: his deployment of excessive and gratuitous violence. She insists that such deployment of violence has little to do with a humanist critique of the propensity for evil in all of us, nor with the playwright's biography (as suggested by a number of critics), but instead functions as a satirical interrogation of the mythological significance attributed to violence in American culture. The casual cruelties of LaBute's ordinary mid-Americans point up the central and ‘ordinary’ role that violence has played in the nation's history and self-understanding. Focusing on the example of the one-act play a gaggle of saints and drawing on the theories of Jan Assmann and Richard Slotkin, she shows in what ways LaBute uses violence to interrogate the country's cultural memory and to alert us to the general lethargy that has settled over the nation with regard to the historical violence it systematically exerted against its Others. Ilka Saal received her PhD in Literature from Duke University, North Carolina and is now working as Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia, where she teaches modern and contemporary American literature and culture. She is the author of New Deal Theater: the Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Dramatizing the Disease: Representations of AIDS on the US American Stage (Tectum, 1997), and co author of Passionate Politics: the Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).

Puppets are inanimate objects that, when watched by an audience, are invested with life and motion and character. This is particularly the case, we imagine, with children's theatre, where there is a cultural assumption that young audiences engage with the illusion and imaginative experience. In this article Matthew Reason uses innovative visual arts-based audience research to explore this question, asking how children respond to puppets in live theatre. In doing so he engages with questions of reality, illusion, belief, and disbelief in the theatre, as well as with questions about the respect and sophistication of young audiences. Matthew Reason is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Head of Programme for MA Studies in Creative Practice at York St John University. In 2006 he published Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave), and a full-length exploration of children's experiences of live theatre, The Young Audience, will be published by Trentham Books in 2010.

Eric Wolfensohn was one of a small group of British lighting designers to emerge in the 1940s. In this article, Nigel Morgan records how, as he plied his trade, Wolfensohn established a blueprint for the working pattern of the modern freelance lighting designer. Starting as a technician and operator, he progressed to designer and consultant, crossing between the genres of ballet, opera, and plays, and moving seamlessly into shop display, exhibition, film and television, borrowing techniques from each particular form and fusing styles in a quest for aesthetic satisfaction. Nigel Morgan qualified as a music teacher, and playing in a rock band introduced him to the stage and a fascination for stage design and technology. For the next twenty years he followed a career in theatre, lighting world premieres of plays by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Jeffreys and Tom Kempinski. He developed a highly successful lighting business in retail, with Harrods and Daks-Simpsons the principal London clients. Parallel to this, he was the innovator of lighting programmes in higher education, including the first European undergraduate programme in lighting design at Rose Bruford College in 1996. Nigel gained a PhD in 2003 for researching the origins of lighting design in Britain, and has published Stage Lighting for Theatre Designers and Stage Lighting in Britain: the Emergence of the Lighting Designer.

This article explores the introduction of Chekhov's plays to Italy through émigré circles in the first decades of the twentieth century, and traces how they were appropriated to suit the ideological exigencies of the time during the fascist period. It concludes with observations about Luchino Visconti's celebrated productions of the 1950s, which stressed the idea that Chekhov was first and foremost a political writer, and suggests how this particular view of the dramatist evolved in the early 1960s as the theatre once again reflected social attitudes and values. Anna Sica is a lecturer at the University of Palermo. She has published monographs in Italy on the commedia dell'arte (1997), Arthur Penn (2000), and theatre in New York (2005), as well as articles on Pirandello and contemporary Italian drama in various journals.

In this article Adrienne Scullion reviews the citizenship debate in education policy within contemporary – and specifically post-devolution – Scotland. She identifies something of the impact that this debate has had on theatre-making for children and young people, with a particular focus on projects that are participatory in nature. Her key examples are drawn from TAG Theatre Company's ‘Making the Nation’ project, a major three-year initiative that sought to engage children and young people throughout Scotland in ideas around democracy, politics, and government. Revisiting a classic cultural policy stand-off between instrumental and aesthetic outcomes, she asks whether a policy-sanctioned emphasis on process, transferable skills, and capacity building limits the potential for theatre projects to develop other kinds of theatre skills, such as critical reading and/or spectatorship. With its emphasis on participatory projects rather than plays for children and young people, the article complements her earlier essay, ‘“And So This Is What Happened”: War Stories in New Drama for Children’, in NTQ 84 (November 2005). Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.