The co-editors of New Theatre Quarterly take time out here to reflect on the milestone of the journal reaching its hundredth consecutive issue, in succession to the forty of the original Theatre Quarterly. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the ‘old’ Theatre Quarterly in 1971. He is the author of numerous books on drama and theatre, including New Theatre Voices of the Seventies (1981), Shakespearean Concepts (1989), the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1993), The Faber Guide to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2006), and Will's Will (2007). Formerly Reader in Drama in the University of London, he is now Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College. Maria Shevtsova, who has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since 2003, is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts and Director of Graduate Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of more than one hundred articles and chapters in collected volumes, her books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (co-edited with Shomit Mitter, 2005), Robert Wilson (2007), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (with Christopher Innes, 2009), and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009).

Augusto Boal died on 2 May 2009 at the age of seventy-eight. The following tribute is by Adrian Jackson, who knew Boal not only as translator into English of five of his books and collaborator on many of his workshops, but as a leading practitioner deploying Boal's techniques, notably as founder in 1991 and Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens, the UK's only homeless people's professional theatre company, for whom he has directed more than twenty productions, including two in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company – Pericles, played in a disused warehouse off the Old Kent Road, and Timon of Athens, which toured Stratford and the Belfast Festival. The company's most recent production was Mincemeat, a Second World War epic based on the story of the Man Who Never Was.

In 1946, Eric Bentley published The Playwright as Thinker, a revolutionary study of modern drama that helped to create the intellectual climate in which serious American theatre would thrive in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1964 Robert Brustein published an equally influential study of modern drama entitled The Theatre of Revolt. And in 1966, Stanley Kauffmann began a brief, combative stint as first-string theatre critic for the New York Times. Kauffmann's short-lived tenure at the Times dramatized the enormous gap that had arisen between mainstream taste and the alternative vision of the theatre that he shared with Bentley and Brustein. Collectively, these three critics championed the European modern dramatists, like Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Genet, whose plays were rarely if ever performed on Broadway. They also embraced the early work of performance groups such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater when they were either ignored or deplored by most mainstream reviewers. Above all, they challenged the time-honoured idea that the primary goal of the theatre is to provide the audience with an emotional catharsis achieved by realistically identifying with the dramatic protagonist. By contrast, Bentley, Brustein, and Kauffmann championed a theatre that emphasized poetic stylization, intellectual seriousness, and social engagement. The discussion which follows, held on 27 October 2007 at the Philoctetes Center, New York, examines the legacy of these leading American theatre critics of the past fifty years. Bert Cardullo, who transcribed and edited the discussion, was Stanley Kauffmann's student at the Yale School of Drama and is the author, editor, or translator of many books, among them Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1889–1950, What Is Dramaturgy?, and American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings.

Anatoli Vassiliev must be ranked with the most prominent of the internationally acclaimed directors of the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first; and history will surely place him among the great director-researcher-pedagogues of the Russian and world theatre, starting with Stanislavsky and including Meyerhold and Vakhtangov. In this conversation, Vassiliev discusses the unique situation of theatre activity in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, where the studio, or laboratory, was integral to the very life of the theatre as a specific, collaborative, and ensemble practice and a comprehensive artistic institution. He situates the School of Dramatic Art, which he founded in 1987, in this context, extending the latter's reach to Maria Knebel and Andrey Popov, who were his teachers on the directing course at GITIS in Moscow (State Institute of Theatre Art, now known as the Russian Academy of Theatre Art). He graduated from GITIS in 1973. Vassa Zheleznova, referred to in this interview, was the acme of Vassiliev's explorations of psychological realism, after which he developed forms of what he calls ‘play structures’ (or ‘ludic structures’). Actors working in these structures project externally in clearly articulated ways rather than go inwards, towards and within emotional states of being, as is typical of psychological-realist performance in the Russian tradition. Vassiliev's reversal of established performance modes led to his current preoccupation with ‘verbal structures’, which are underpinned by his understanding of words as ideas oriented to symbolic and metaphysical sense rather than to psycho-emotional interpretation. The spatial and luminary dimensions of play, together with movement, music, and song that is formal, operatic, rather than in any other kind of vein, defines such later works as Mozart and Salieri (2000) and Onegin's Journey (2003). They have won him great acclaim in Russia and abroad for their innovative approach outside the parameters not only of realism but also of a range of other familiar aesthetic configurations. Vassiliev has directed productions in various countries in Europe, and has also conducted prolonged research workshops as well as working demonstrations there. In this conversation, which took place in June 2009, Vassiliev refers to several underlying principles of his work and reflects upon the importance to him of Grotowski, his last mentor.

In this testimony, Carla Pollastrelli charts the main stages leading to Grotowski's settlement in Pontedera in Italy and to the creation of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski. As the Year of Grotowski, supported by UNESCO, draws to a close, her words provide a fitting tribute to a man whose influence has surpassed all geographical boundaries, whether those of his native Poland, adoptive Italy, or place of temporary refuge, the United States. Carla Pollastrelli is the co-director of the Fondazione Pontedera Teatro. Pontedera Teatro. From 1986 to 2000 she was an executive of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski, which in 1996 was renamed the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. She has edited translations of Grotowski's texts in Polish into Italian since 1978, and is the co-editor with Ludwig Flaszen of Il Teatr Laboratorium di Jerzy Grotowski, 1959–1969: testi e materiali di Jerzy Grotowski e Ludwik Flaszen con uno scritto di Eugenio Barba (Jerzy Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre, 1959–1969: Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwig Flaszen's Texts and Materials and a Text by Eugenio Barba (Fondazione Pontedera Teatro, 2001; second edition, La Casa Usher, 2007) and the collection of Grotowski's texts, Holiday e teatro delle fonti (Holiday and the Theatre of Sources, La Casa Usher, 2006).

In 1996, Jerzy Grotowski changed the name of his Workcenter at Pontedera in Italy to that of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, and it was here that Richards and his associate Mario Biagini developed the Actions that had originated with their thirteen years of close collaboration with Grotowski before his death in 1999. Dies Irae was premiered in 2004. Various research projects led by Richards and/or Biagini include Tracing Roads Across (2003–06) and Open Programme, which began in 2007. Such works as I am America, crafted on the poems of Allen Ginsberg, and Electric Party, both directed by Biagini and first performed in 2009, have emerged from Open Programme. A recently ‘finalized’ work, The Letter (2008), directed by Richards, was the result of a long process of development that passed through three major phases and two differently named Actions, starting in 2003. Richards is the author of At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (1995) and Heart of Practice (2008), while Biagini has edited, with Antonio Attisani, the three-volume Opere e Sentiere (2007 and 2008). The conversation below is an edited version, in consultation with Richards and Biagini, of their discussion with Maria Shevtsova in November 2008, as part of her ‘Conversations’ series at Goldsmiths, University of London. These last pupils of Grotowski give uncommon insight into the processes of their work together, continuing their generous and open reflections in their responses to questions from members of the audience.

Seth Baumrin's present research focuses on Grotowski in the context of Poland and the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR, Polish United Party of Workers) during the years 1956 to 1989. For this he has consulted archives in Poland, notably in Wroclaw, and has conducted more than eighty interviews with people close to Grotowski and to the PZPR, as well as with Grotowski scholars. This research was integral to his participation in events in Poland during the Year of Grotowski, including the major theatre festival in Wroclaw, ‘The World as a Place of Truth’, organized and supported by the Grotowski Institute, directed by Jaroslaw Fret. What follows is a snapshot of his personal view of our present conceptions and misconceptions of Grotowski – and of how we relate to him. Seth Baumrin is an Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His numerous theatre and opera productions include Milhaud's Médée, Lorca's As Five Years Pass and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding.

In October 2007 South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun walked across the inter-Korean border for a summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. Although adhering to the primordialist view of nationhood, this state-led border-crossing also indicates the effects of globalization. As the heavily militarized inter-Korean border is permeated by interaction between ethnic nationalism, the nation's anti-colonialist history, and the transnational forces, the image of border-crossing becomes a metaphor for a contested space of national unification. This article examines a selection of works by three contemporary South Korean playwrights who, from a post-nationalist perspective, have emerged to contest the contradictory aspects and trajectories of the past ten years of populist nationalism. Yoo Kim focuses on the ways these post-nationalist plays employ the motifs of border-crossing and borderland encounter to challenge the romantic and exclusionary narratives of the conventional nationalist theatre. Yoo Kim is an Associate Professor in English at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea. His recent article, ‘Mapping Utopia in the Post-Ideological Era: Lee Yun-taek's The Dummy Bride’, was published in Theatre Research International in 2007.

British variety theatre has been largely ignored by theatre historians, in spite of its huge popularity in the early twentieth century. Here, Oliver Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars. The key historical and stylistic aspects of the form typified by Brown's success included the development of a stage persona, novelty, skill, participation, a distinctive musical style, and the ability to exploit the complex relationship between variety and the other types of popular entertainment of the time, notably cinema, revue, and radio. Former comedian Oliver Double is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas is available from the University of Kent website.

In this article Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, in different parts of the world, modern theatre was invented by way of interweaving cultures in performance. Different examples from the early twentieth century and the 1990s show how theatre acted as a laboratory for testing and experiencing the potential of cultural diversity. An innovative performance aesthetics enabled the exploration of the emergence, stabilization, and destabilization of cultural identity, merging aesthetics with politics. Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She has published widely in the fields of the theory and history of the theatre, and is the author of numerous books, including, in English, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005) and The Transformative Power of Performance: a New Aesthetics (2008). In 2008 she established a new research programme, ‘Interweaving Cultures in Performance’, at the Freie Universität. This paper was given as a keynote lecture at the fourteenth Performance Studies International conference, ‘Interregnum: In Between States’, in Copenhagen, 20–24 August 2008.

As The Power of Yes, the third play by David Hare to document recent history, opens at London's National Theatre, J. Chris Westgate examines in this article Hare's Stuff Happens in a regional production in the United States, at Seattle's A Contemporary Theater in 2007. He tracks the emphasis placed on controversy during the advertising and marketing of the play, which stands in direct contrast to the response to the play, which was received with self-satisfaction rather than increased insight in this highly liberal city. From this contrast, he discusses the way that this production of Hare's play – and the play itself – fails to produce controversy because it never holds those actually attending US productions as accountable for the Iraq War. Controversy, then, becomes a marketing device rather than a way of challenging the status quo. J. Chris Westgate is Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He has recently edited an anthology of essays entitled Brecht, Broadway, and United States Theatre and has published articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and The Eugene O'Neill Review.