The first major posthumous London revival of a play by Harold Pinter was Moonlight at the Donmar Warehouse in April 2011. There was a striking difference between the critical reception of this production and the way the play had been greeted on its 1993 premiere, when Moonlight – then framed as Pinter's return after fifteen fallow years and a number of increasingly controversial political interventions – prompted an extremely mixed response. In 2011, by contrast, the critical community was more or less united. This progression can be seen to illustrate more than just the benefits of hindsight, and in this article Harry Derbyshire considers responses to Moonlight in 1993 and 2011 as a means of illuminating the range of competing interests that underlie the journalistic and academic infrastructure within which the merits of cultural products are assessed. He also considers the emotional investment commentators often have in the triumphs and reversals of those they follow on the public and cultural stage. Harry Derbyshire's doctorate, on ‘Harold Pinter: Production, Reception, Reputation 1984–1999’, is from King's College London, and he currently lectures in Drama and English at the University of Greenwich. Publications include articles on Roy Williams, on human rights and verbatim theatre, and on the Reminiscence Theatre Archive of Pam Schweitzer, recently acquired by Greenwich.

In this article John Freeman focuses on theatre after postmodernism as exemplified by the Belgium-based Needcompany. If, as is suggested here, we are all more than a little ‘postmoderned out’ through an over-dependence on individualism, the shadow cast by postmodernism remains large in the contemporary Western world, and its impact is still clearly felt. As the postmodern came to offer a safety net through which bad practice could not easily fall, the modernist theatre it followed offered its own elusive ideal. In arguing this, Freeman forges links between Brecht's knowing embrace of amateurism and the faux uncertainty of much contemporary work, where Brecht the arch-dramatist becomes the archetype of the postdramatic, as twenty-first century theatre moves in the shadow of the past. John Freeman has written extensively on contemporary performance, creative learning, and arts policy. He is currently Associate Professor at Curtin University, Western Australia, where he leads the Humanities Honours programme.

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk here discuss with Maria Shevtsova The Wooster Group's work with the Royal Shakespeare Company on Troilus and Cressida and the challenges posed for them by this joint venture. The project was initially proposed by Rupert Goold, but was brought to fruition by playwright Mark Ravenhill, his first directing experience. Troilus and Cressida was part of the World Shakespeare Festival, during which all Shakespeare's plays were performed by different companies from countries across the globe. The Festival, four years in the making and spanning eight months, was part of the cultural programme of the Olympic Games held in London in 2012. Troilus and Cressida was first performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 3 to 18 August 2012, and then at the Riverside Studios in London from 24 August to 8 September. This conversation took place at the Riverside Studios on 30 August 2012, and pairs with the discussion of The Wooster Group's Hamlet, the company's first Shakespeare production, published in NTQ 114 (May 2013). Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Her most recent book is the co-authored Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

A milestone development in a practice-as-research investigation led to the identification of ‘habitational action’ as a term that resists a priori restrictions of inner–outer problematics when discussing performer processes. In this article Frank Camilleri cross-references the term with ‘neutral action’ to locate it conceptually and historically; first with Jacques Lecoq's pedagogical mask work, and then with Yvonne Rainer's conceptualization of the ‘neutral doer’. The cross-referencing to specific theatre and dance contexts is also intended to problematize psychophysicality as a central aspect of current actor training discourse. Frank Camilleri is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Malta and Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project. In 2007 he co-founded Icarus Publishing with Odin Teatret and the Grotowski Institute. He is also Visiting Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Huddersfield.

The focal point of this article is sensory perception in terms of action and experience. Perceptual constructs are both physical and cognitive acts that carry meaning in themselves, thus being a vital element of expression in performance making. Liora Malka Yellin's theoretical discussion here draws on J. J. Gibson's information-based model of perception and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, relating aspects of their thought to that of theatre practitioners and their practice. At the centre of these reflections are references to the shifts undergone by Butoh since its beginnings in the 1960s, and an analysis of Shijima, a dance-theatre work by the Japanese group Sankai Juku, based in Paris. This analysis of the perceptual constructs embedded in the configuration of bodily movement directs attention to what can be called corporeal narrative. Liora Malka Yellin is a Lecturer in Theatre and Dance Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts and the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at Tel Aviv University.

Reinhard Goering's play Die Südpolexpedition des Kapitäns Scott (1929) tells the story of the famously tragic British polar expedition led by Robert F. Scott in 1911–12. As the first public staging of the story, the play created considerable controversy in Britain when it premiered in Berlin in 1930. A late Expressionist drama, it offered perspectives on the expedition quite different to those coming out of Scott's homeland. In this article, Hanne Nielsen and Elizabeth Leane contextualize the play within Goering's own career; outline its performance history; examine its reception in both Germany and Britain; and analyze the play text in terms of its innovative treatment of Scott's story. Hanne Nielsen is a postgraduate student at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury. Her background is in Antarctic Studies and German literature and she is currently undertaking a study of representations of Antarctica on stage. Elizabeth Leane is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, where she holds a research position split between the School of Humanities and the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies. She has written and edited several books, most recently Antarctica in Fiction (Cambridge University Press).