In the third volume of The Cambridge History of British Theatre (2004), editor Baz Kershaw initiates his chapter ‘Alternative Theatres, 1946–2000’ with a short discussion of ‘contesting terms’ used by commentators to describe theatre outside the mainstream in the second half of the twentieth century. Kershaw's discussion serves as a necessary preface to ground his use of multiple historiographical strategies to address the subject with necessary brevity. But teasing out the terminology used to describe alternative theatre remains a fascinatingly complex task, constitutive of precisely the issues at stake in the variant historiographical approaches to the post-war period. Using a genealogical approach inspired by Foucault, and drawing on first-person interviews with artists who worked with alternative theatre companies such as Joint Stock/Out of Joint, Gay Sweatshop, and Women's Theatre Group/The Sphinx across the closing decades of the twentieth century, Sara Freeman analyzes the branching relationships of these terms, arguing the need to develop useful rather than funerary or bewildered historiographical approaches to the 1980s and 1990s. Sara Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on contemporary women playwrights and British alternative theatre, and she has published articles and reviews in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New England Theatre Journal, and Theatre Journal. Work on this article was supported by an Artistic and Scholarly Development Grant from Illinois Wesleyan University.

‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.

With hopes for a repeal of Clause 28 poised for imminent realization or disappointment, a successful European challenge to Britain's policy on gays and lesbians in the armed forces, and an overwhelming House of Commons vote to equalize the gay ‘age of consent’, gay issues are high in the public consciousness. But to what extent are these political events being reflected in contemporary theatre? In this article, Brian Roberts considers the fluctuations in gay visibility, and asks what happened to the gay theatre that sprang to prominence in the 'eighties. He situates the best of present gay theatre work as standing in a critically defining role to mainstream theatre culture, not only through its political conscientizing of ‘queer’ and theatricality, but also in its opposition to an assimilationist gay subculture. Brian Roberts lectures in Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is presently revising his book Artistic Bents: Gay Sensibility and Theatre for publication.

David Greig is one of Britain's most versatile and exciting playwrights, whose awardwinning work – commissioned by, among others, Suspect Culture, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Traverse Theatre – has been performed all over the world. His personal voice is characterized by the sensitive musicality of his text, an individual sense of humour, and an acute awareness of the world around us. Whether his protagonists are Cambridge ornithologists, Scottish lords, or American pilots, Greig creates works of extreme visual beauty and emotional directness in lyrical soundscapes. In the interview which follows, completed in June 2010, he discusses the themes of politics and national identities; language, music, and experimental forms; directors, directing, and adaptations; and watching bodies on stage. Greig believes that theatre is a form of voyeurism, ‘a consensual exchange’ to ‘look at people and watch how they behave’. In his work, the act of watching thus acquires a new role surpassing the simple function of pleasure, and enabling the viewer to engage further with the theatre's mediation to comment, justify, explain, and promote a better understanding of the complexities of human nature – voyeurism in theatre being re-read as a new freedom of the gaze, and its fetishistic attributes re-evaluated as an emancipation of restrained energy, testing the boundaries of taboo. George Rodosthenous is Lecturer in Music Theatre at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds. He is Artistic Director of the Altitude North theatre company, and also works as a freelance composer for the theatre. He is currently working on the book Theatre as Voyeurism: the Pleasure(s) of Watching.

In this article Anselm Heinrich argues for a renewed interest in and critical investigation of theatre in Britain during the Second World War, a period neglected by researchers despite the radical changes in the cultural landscape instigated during the war. Concentrating on CEMA (the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts) and the introduction of subsidies, the author discusses and evaluates the importance and effects of state intervention in the arts, with a particular focus on the demands put on theatre and its role in society in relation to propaganda, nation-building, and education. Anselm Heinrich is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Entertainment, Education, Propaganda: Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945 (2007), and with Kate Newey and Jeffrey Richards has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009). Other research interests include émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe, contemporary German theatre and drama, and national theatres.

A recent study of single-ticket buyers and subscribers at a major regional theatre – Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky – focused on measuring quantitatively the psychological benefits of engaging with theatre and gathering qualitatively observations by focus groups. Both confirmed the hypothesis that regular attendance promotes flourishing and meaningful social interaction, psychological stimulation, and positive emotions. The study also affirms that attending theatre contributes to a shared sense of community, this at a time when such community appears starkly diminished in the United States. In addition, focus groups wished that audiences better reflected the demographic diversity outside the auditorium. Evident disparities include urban vs. rural, prosperous vs. not, more education vs. less, black vs. white – reflecting those that splinter national politics. One microcosm of one theatre's audience provokes suggestions to foster a more democratic audience and plural istic culture that endeavours to cross rather than ignore the divides. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice & Con flict Transformation programme. He was previously Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. Suzanne Meeks is Professor and Chair of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, University of Louisville. Her research focuses on mental health in later life.

The critical concept of ‘montage’ has been familiar in film studies ever since Eisenstein. But the fixed focus and apparently continuous flow of live theatrical performance seemingly makes it an inappropriate tool for dramatic analysis. Franco Ruffini argues, however, that actors and audiences find their own ways of ‘selecting’ from and emphasizing aspects of the full theatrical vocabulary and its many means of expression, which make live performance no less subject to creative self-assembly and juxtaposition than film. Ruffini develops the distinction between ‘horizontal’ montage in time, and ‘vertical’ montage as a sort of cross-section of performance; and examines ways in which the ‘audience's performance’ can, both fruitfully and otherwise, differ from the ‘director's performance’. Franco Ruffini is Professor of Theatre Semiotics in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Bologna.

The functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is, as Gordon Armstrong argues in this article, among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to physical science. According to this view, the theatre, as a substrate of consciousness, was part of the package that defined modern man as a reflective species: whereas for the first four million years of human existence man was silent about a probable inner life, the dawn of empathy some 200,000 years ago saw a neural explosion – the enlargement of the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere of the brain, unlocking a new kind of reflective consciousness. In isolation, this aberrant neurological connection proved so advantageous for hunting and for communication that members of a tribe who possessed this aberration prospered: and adaptation to the ice ages that began 200,000 years ago was a motivating factor in stimulating the emergence of what we can recognize as art. Gordon Armstrong is immediate past Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research, and Review Editor for Theatre Research International. He has taught at UCLA, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Rhode Island, and has designed and directed productions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. His full-length works include the revised Golden Ages of the Theatre and Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words.

In the following article Benjamin Lloyd uses the work of the noted Swiss psychologist Alice Miller to propose a new archetype – ‘the wounded actor’, a person in the throes of a narcissistic disorder, as defined by Miller in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child. He suggests that conventional actor training will not help the wounded actor, but that the re-introduction of spirituality into the acting-class curriculum may do so. In this light he looks at Stanislavsky's writings about spirituality, focusing on the chapter in An Actor Prepares called ‘Communion’. Linking Stanislavsky's spirituality to the writings and thought of Leo Tolstoy, he explores the reasons why the spiritual nature of Stanislavsky's work has not been generally explored in the West, and suggests some ways in which acting teachers may introduce spiritual concerns into their curricula. Benjamin Lloyd teaches at Villanova University. His The Actor's Way: a Journal of Self-Discovery in Letters is due for publication later this year by Allworth Press, New York, and he is currently facilitating a workshop on possible intersections between Quaker spiritual practice and theatre-making called ‘Revival: Meetings for Theatre’.

By the early 1870s, the term ‘filth’ had become Wagner’s shorthand for Offenbach. He attacked his fellow composer both publicly and privately and sought to establish a polarity between the two, confining Offenbach to the realm of frivolous and materialistic popular folk culture while casting his own work as exemplary of the new German spirit. Laurence Senelick’s close analysis of Wagner’s writings, including his notorious 1869 essay ‘Jewishness in Music’, shows this critique to be fuelled by jealousy, cultural imperialism, and his growing anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is included here as a counterpoint, challenging his former mentor and celebrating Offenbach as the exemplar of Jewish genius. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent books include Soviet Theater: A Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky) and the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015). This article is taken from his forthcoming The Offenbach Century: His Influence on Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press).

This essay is offered as a tribute to Jan Kott in appreciation of all he has done to stimulate international enthusiasm for Shakespeare's plays.

In this article, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow examine the ways in which performing arts companies and arts policy institutions perceive the needs of children as audiences. Historically, children have been promoted as arts audiences. Some of these represent an attempt to fashion the adults of the future – as audiences, citizens of a nation, or members of a specific community. Other rationales focus on the needs or rights of the child, such as educational goals or the provision of an antidote to the perceived corrupting effect of electronic entertainment. Drawing on interviews with performing arts practitioners, the authors explore some of these themes through case studies of three children's theatre companies, identifying the development of policy rationales for the support of practices directed at children which are primarily based on pedagogical principles. The case studies reveal a shift away from educational goals for children's theatre, and identify a new emphasis on the importance of valuing children's aesthetic choices, examining how these trends are enacted within the case-study organizations, and the implications of these trends for company programming. Hilary Glow is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Arts Management Program at Deakin University, Victoria. She has published articles on cultural policy and the audience experience in various journals, and in a monograph on Australian political theatre (2007). Katya Johanson lectures and researches in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She has published on Australian cultural policy and on the relationship between art, politics and national identity. With Glow she is the author of a monograph on Australian indigenous performing arts (2009).

In this article Catherine Diamond examines the flows of transcultural hybridity occurring in dance between Spanish flamencos, Japanese exponents of flamenco, and Indian dancers interacting with flamenco within their classical dance forms. Japan and India represent two distinct Asian reactions to the phenomenon of global flamenco: the Japanese have adopted it wholesale and compete with the Spanish on their own ground; the Indians claim that as the Roma (gypsy) people originated in India, the country is also the home of flamenco. Despite their differing attitudes, flamenco dance offers women in both cultures a pathway toward participating in an internal androgyny, a wider spectrum of gender representation than either the Asian traditional dance or contemporary Asian society normally allows. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre and environmental literature. She is Director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia, and the director/choreographer of Red Shoes Dance Theatre in Taiwan.

Unlike Avignon, still active after more than forty years, the once notorious Nancy Festival has slipped unobtrusively into history. David Looseley sets out here to trace this itinerary. After reviewing the festival's origins and its importance for the experimental theatre of the 1960s, he examines what became of it in the bleaker decades which followed, and assesses the meaning of its decline. David Looseley, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Bradford, is currently engaged in research funded by the Leverhulme Trust into the politics of culture in contemporary France. His published work includes a book on the theatre of the twentieth-century French dramatist Armand Salacrou.

The original Theatre Quarterly devoted a large portion of one issue-TQ28 (1977—78) to the theatre of South Africa. It is, of course, important to relate new developments in the theatre of that troubled nation to the context of its changing political situation – considering, for example, how far a reflection of the realities of the urban black experience is now more typical than the ‘acceptable’ face represented by the once-popular ‘tribal musicals’. Here. David Graver and Loren Kruger contrast two approaches to the theatre of anti-apartheid. The internationally known (and now relatively stable) Market Theatre of Johannesburg, they argue, today largely reaches an educated, liberal, and elite audience, and sustains what is essentially a European literary tradition: but other plays written and directed by blacks — notably since the Soweto uprising of 1976 — have developed a more appropriately African style. Often, these, have emerged from the theatre companies within the black townships, such as the Bachaki Theatre Company - whose Top Down is here the focus of analysis. David Graver is currently Mellon Fellow in Drama at Stanford University: his articles have appeared in Theatre Journal and in NTQ, and he is now completing a book on the theory and practice of the avant-garde. Loren Kruger teaches in the University of Chicago, has published in Theatre Journal and the Brecht Yearbook, and is working on a study of theatres with national aspirations in Europe and the USA.

Postgraduate programmes in performance studies are playing an increasingly important role within drama departments in the British university sector, and require that both staff and students confront with greater rigour than at undergraduate level the relationship between theory and practice – more precisely, how that theoretical relationship should and can be related to practical aspects of the programme. Taking her own cue from bedside-reading ranging from Foucault to the latest titles from Routledge to the influential article on ‘Geographies of Learning’ contributed to Theatre Journal in 1993 by Jill Dolan, Susan Melrose here debates the dilemma, and in particular the problems posed to actors by challenging their approach to their work at precisely the moments when they may most need to fall back on old strategies and securities. Susan Melrose recently took up the post of Head of Graduate Studies and Research Development at Rose Bruford College, London. She presented an earlier draft of this article at the SCUDD Conference at the University of Glasgow in March 1998, which was concerned with issues relating to the teaching of theatre and drama studies in the university.

The importance of Granville Barker’s association with J. E. Vedrenne in the seminal Court seasons of 1904-1907 is one of the ‘givens’ of twentieth-century theatre history, as are Barker’s later, groundbreaking productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy. Yet these and much of his intervening work were also in many ways collaborative achievements, now in association with his wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy – their later divorce helping to rewrite the history of their partnership. Lillah McCarthy was also a prominent suffragist, and Granville Barker allied himself with many other men and women who were working actively in support of the extended franchise. Susan Carlson argues that many of Granville Barker’s productions should be seen, in part, as artistic extensions of suffrage activism, and in this article she explores the ways in which his support for the suffragists manifested itself on as well as off the stage. Susan Carlson, Associate Provost and Professor of English at Iowa State University, has most recently published essays on suffrage theatre, focusing on its political use of comedy and its connections to productions of Shakespeare.

British pantomime between 1985 and 2005 has undergone an evolutionary reconstruction based on practices of branding. Within this broad field, Martina Lipton distinguishes two competing pantomime models, investigating the contrasting ideological and cultural positioning of dominant representations of modern pantomime by a major production group, Qdos Entertainment, and the Nottingham Playhouse and York Theatre Royal repertory companies. She reads these models as identifying collective experiences and taste communities after the categories identified by Pierre Bourdieu as conferring ‘distinction’. While these companies both offer a somewhat similar mediatized product, they successfully co-exist within a dynamic and competitive marketplace by branding their pantomimes as respectively embracing and resisting the influence of mass-media popular culture. Both branding practices have succeeded in restoring the genre to high visibility and economic success. Martina Lipton is working on a PhD at the University of Queensland.

The numerous interrelated ‘popular’ theatres of Indonesia provide important evidence for the study of artistic interaction and change. The West Sumatran Randai theatre emerged in a culturally hybrid space and has been a sensitive index to local, national, and international flows and conditions. Matthew Isaac Cohen traces the origins of Randai in the late-colonial period and discusses its associations with rantau – a time of temporary migration, traditionally associated with the rite of passage to adulthood, but increasingly a semi-permanent exile for many Sumatrans. He then traces how and why Randai has now become more than a local art form, having been exported out of the province of West Sumatra to be utilized as source material for modern theatre by Indonesian theatre makers in Jakarta and Australia. Matthew Isaac Cohen is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow, a scholar of Indonesian theatre and performance, and a practising shadow puppeteer.