In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. Here Adrian Curtin investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab. He aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of these collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner. Adrian Curtin is a senior lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019), and principal investigator of the AHRC research network ‘Representing “Classical Music” in the Twenty-First Century’.

In this article Alexander Golovlev offers a comparative examination of the theatre policies of Fascist Italy and Stalinist Soviet Union. He argues that, although the two regimes shared parallel time frames and gravitated around similar institutional solutions, Italian Fascism was fundamentally different in its reluctance to destroy the privately based theatre structure in favour of a state theatre and to impose a unified style, while Stalin carried out an ambitious and violent campaign to instil Socialist Realism through continuous disciplining, repression, and institutional supervision. In pursuing a nearly identical goal of achieving full obedience, the regimes used different means, and obtained similarly mixed results. While the Italian experience ended with the defeat of Fascism, Soviet theatres underwent de-Stalinization in the post-war decades, indicating the potential for sluggish stability in such frameworks of cultural-political control. Alexander Golovlev is Research Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, National Research University, Higher School of Economics / Fondation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and ATLAS Fellow, Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines/ Université Paris-Saclay. His most recent publications include ‘Sounds of Music from across the Sea: Musical Transnationality in Early Post-World-War-II Austria’, in Yearbook of Transnational History 1 (2018) and ‘Von der Seine an die Salzach: die Teilnahme vom Straßburger Domchor an den Salzburger Festspielen und die französische Musikdiplom atie in Österreich während der alliierten Besatzungs zeit’, Journal of Austrian Studies (2018). He is currently working on the political economy of the Bolshoi theatre under Stalinism.

In this article David Barnett documents a practice-as-research project that employed Brechtian approaches to stage dramatic material. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a realist text in which the protagonist, John Proctor, redeems himself for the sin of adultery by taking a heroic stand against the Salem witch-hunts. Existing scholarship has revealed a series of gendered biases in the form and content of the play, yet these findings have never been systematically realized in performance. While appearing to defend democratic values, the play’s dramaturgical strategies coerce agreement, and this represents a fundamental contradiction. Brecht offers a method that preserves the written dialogue, but interprets it critically onstage, deploying a range of devices derived from a materialist and dialectical interpretation. The aim of the production was to re-present a play with a familiar production history and problematize the political bases on which it conventionally rested. The article discusses the rationale for the theory and practice of contemporary Brechtian theatre and offers the production as a model for future critical realizations of other realist plays. David Barnett is Professor of Theatre at the University of York. His publications include A History of the Berliner Ensemble (CUP, 2015), Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014), amd Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (CUP, 2005).

In this article Christopher Collins considers how the rural is represented in contemporary Irish theatre through a performance analysis of WillFredd Theatre’s award-winning production of FARM, staged in an industrial Dublin warehouse. Adopting a relational perspective, the article explores how the rural in contemporary Irish culture is a valuable commodity that is produced for urban consumption, and examines how the representation of the rural in FARM offered a critique of economies of capital that obscure the inherent labour of producing the rural. It also highlights how the performance explored the workings of the Irish cultural economy that produces rural nostalgia as an affective practice at the expense of some of the lived realities of rural life that extend beyond labour to loneliness, depression, and gendered essentialism. Consequently, Collins questions what, if anything, has changed from the representation and reception of the rural as nostalgic utopia, and the role nostalgia plays in articulating regional and national identities. Christopher Collins is an Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modern and contemporary Irish theatre, including two monographs on the plays and performances of J. M. Synge. In 2016 he was appointed as Secretary General (Communications) for the International Federation for Theatre Research.

In this article, David Chandler challenges the often dismissive interpretation of Catherine Johnson’s hugely successful Mamma Mia! (1999) as a sunny, upbeat, lightweight musical. Johnson’s earlier dramatic work was of a more serious cast, and returned repeatedly to scenes of damaging, often exploitative, intergenerational desire. This interest continues in Mamma Mia! though commercial imperatives meant it had to be suppressed and displaced. As Sophie, the heroine, secretly meets the three middle-aged men who could be her father, but who have no idea she may be their daughter, the danger that they may be sexually attracted to her – one of them quickly labels her a ‘minx’ – becomes a subter ranean force shaping the fates of most of the central protagonists and the final surprise irresolution of the paternity plot. Intergenerational relationships blossom in Mamma Mia!, but they are treated differently from the relationships between couples of similar ages. David Chandler is a professor in the English Department at Doshisha Univ er sity, Kyoto. His background is in literary Romanticism, but since 2008 he has also pub lished widely on the history of musical theatre in Britain. He is a director of Retrospect Opera.

Circus in China until the 1760s was primarily regarded as an equestrian court performance to entertain nobles of the Qing Dynasty at the inauguration of the Chinese New Year, or to amuse foreign dignitaries bringing tributes. Since that time, circus has transformed into a popular entertainment art, featuring the integration of human, animal, dance, acrobatics, music, vocal, multi-media, and new technologies. In this article Susan Jia revisits the history of circus in China, and then focuses on its latest form of presentation in Shanghai Circus World (SCW), the premier circus establishment in China. The two core pieces in the SCW repertoire – ‘ERA: Intersection of Time’ and ‘Happy Circus’ – are examined to construct a representative miniature of modern Chinese circus, and from audiences’ perspective, the many comments written for online communities are analyzed to explore their understanding of modern circus. Susan Jia is an assistant professor in the School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University. She researches means of developing the leisure and entertainment services industries.

In this article Maiya Murphy uses the enactive paradigm of cognition to take a fresh look at Edward Gordon Craig’s experiments in the theatre. By focusing on his obsession with movement, Maiya Murphy argues that an autopoietic conception of life can recategorize his problems with, ideas about, and experiments in the theatre as a coherent but multifaceted effort to create a very particular kind of cognitive engagement. She explores how enaction’s concept of the continuity of life and mind can map out a meaningful logic embedded in Craig’s intuitions about the connections between cognition, aesthetic experience, epistemology, and ontology. She also considers how the many media in which he worked and his interest in Asian arts – along with his major concepts such as the übermarionette and the kinetic stage – can be seen as attempts to think through theatre as an embodied and emergent event that is at once concrete, aesthetic, cognitive, and metaphysical. Finally, she traces the philosophical heritages that gave Craig his frameworks for understanding movement, arguing that his limitations and frustrations were fundamentally philosophical. Maiya Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her movementbased collective, Autopoetics. She is author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and of essays in Theatre Survey and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, among others.