Between 1926 and 1934 the Moscow Kamerny Theatre staged a cycle of six American plays: Eugene O’Neill's The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, and All God's Chillun Got Wings; Sophie Treadwell's Machinal; Rosita, a stage adaptation of a Hollywood film; and John Dos Passos's Fortune Heights. In this article Dassia N. Posner analyzes and contextualizes two of these productions: The Hairy Ape (1926) and Machinal (1933). By the mid-1920s, Kamerny Theatre director Alexander Tairov was under intense pressure to stage work that aligned with the Soviet Union's political goals. A significant portion of the Kamerny's repertoire had long consisted of foreign plays that celebrated the individual's struggle against oppression. The Hairy Ape and Machinal provided Tairov with a unique opportunity to combine artistic, political, and human relevance in a way he had not achieved before, using the artistic language of the theatre's earlier stylistic and acting innovations. Drawing on rich archival sources, Posner illuminates ways in which stylistic juxtaposition allowed these productions to address a specific political context while also reflecting on oppression more broadly as it relates to class, gender, national origin, artistic freedom, and individual thought. Dassia N. Posner is Associate Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Her books include The Director's Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance.

In current scholarship the obscurity of the early years of Thomas Dekker is akin to his opacity in Philip Henslowe's Diary, which awaits full analytical interpretation. While the Diary usefully tells us about Henslowe's theatre business, it also imparts interwoven stories about many playwrights whose works are being rigorously tested in today's theatres. In this essay Chi-fang Sophia Li offers a theatre-based critique of the early life of Dekker, when, she argues, he quickly became a ‘fully paid-up member’ of the theatrical community. Thus his theatrical strengths, productive potential, writing interests, collaborative patterns, earning power, and working relationships with Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Henry Chettle can be interpreted afresh. The Diary supplies frequent, intensive sightings of Dekker, whose biographical implications mutually inform a cultural life of Dekker's peers. This is the first attempt to elucidate in full Dekker's presence in the Henslowe–Alleyn papers alongside other historical and literary documents. Chi-fang Sophia Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. She has published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, English Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, and in Chinese in Review of English and American Literature. She gave public lectures for the anniversaries of Shakespeare's birth and death for the Globe Theatre on tour to Taiwan in 2014 and for the Shakespeare Exhibition in 2015 for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Following the success of The Gondoliers (1889), Gilbert wrote to Sullivan: ‘It gives one the chance of shining right through the twentieth century.’ However, while this prophecy was largely fulfilled, clouds of cultural disapproval have darkened over the Savoy operas since the start of the present century, especially with regard to the mockery of women's education at the heart of Princess Ida (1884) and, most pointedly, the demeaning and ostensibly racist depiction of the Japanese in The Mikado (1885). On the other hand, the largely overlooked Utopia, Limited (1893) has experienced a boom in productions over the last decade, seemingly due to its subject matter, which, as one recent critic put it, make it ‘an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist comic opera’. He also argues that, while some of the traditional performance practices associated with The Mikado ought to be re-evaluated, recent objections to the spirit of the opera as a whole are not entirely justified, and that a re-evaluation of the validity of some (but not all) of the performance practices traditionally associated with The Mikado is both just and timely. Alan Fischler is a Professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. He is the author of Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (University of Virginia Press, 1991) and ‘Drama’ in the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (2014), among many other articles on Gilbert and nineteenth-century theatre.

In this article Roger Porter analyzes five plays about Oscar Wilde, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, David Hare, Eric Bentley, Moises Kaufman, and Terry Eagleton. He focuses on various aspects of the three Wilde trials of 1895, and shows how, while the plays employ verbatim transcripts of the court records, they use the latter in quite different ways and with different emphases, suggesting how the several playwrights regard Douglas in his relation with Wilde, as well as Douglas's implication in the verdict. Several of the plays focus almost exclusively on Wilde's personality, while others engage with larger issues, including Victorian moral regulation of sexuality, the relation of art to society, and English attitudes towards the Irish. He also stresses how the plays’ dramaturgy relates to their perspectives on Wilde, especially on his cultural role. Roger Porter is Professor Emeritus of English, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA. He is the author of Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections (University of Nebraska Press), Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (Cornell University Press), and co-editor (with Sandra Gilbert) of Eating Words: a Norton Anthology of Food Writing.

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 plays and sketches drawing on Yiddish and Scottish popular theatre tropes, and experienced through its members’ range of international diasporic networks, specifically with Jewish theatre makers in New York. It is argued that the internationalizing experience of the company and, specifically, its sustained exploration of immigration and of immigrants, achieves an important, even defining, role in the formation of a modern theatre industry and identity in Scotland. Historically interesting in and of itself, this article is also timely given a wider social and cultural ‘fear’ of contemporary migrants. The research encompasses a range of previously unexplored primary material including scripts, reviews, photographs, and company papers, including correspondence with New York-based playwright Sylvia Regan and new interviews with surviving company members. Paul Maloney and Adrienne Scullion work at Queen's University Belfast.

In this article So-Rim Lee closely investigates the Mahābhārata in relation to – but quite distinct from – The Mahabharata: a Play (1985) by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière. Since the ancient text of the Mahābhārata does not have a definitive author, version, or form, So-Rim Lee argues that Brook and Carrière's framing of their modern reading as an adaptation of the ancient text poses a series of questions regarding the politics of recontextualizing a South Asian text in Western terms, the methodological process involved in doing this, and the ethical stance espoused by the transcultural adapters. She then questions whether the audience actually finds Brook and Carrière's international, multi - racial production as cosmopolitan and multicultural as the authors claim it to be. If The Mahabharata: a Play is a matter of cultural appropriation rather than adaptation, what transgressions are involved in reframing the source text and how does it produce what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’? Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. She has previously reviewed for Theatre Survey and Performance Research.