Philip Ridley is one of the most imaginative and sensational playwrights working in Britain today. Born in 1964, he began by studying painting at St Martin's School of Art in London and wrote the highly acclaimed screenplay for The Krays (1990). He made his theatre debut at the Bush Theatre in 1991 with The Pitchfork Disney. Since then, other plays have included The Fastest Clock in the Universe (Hampstead, 1992), Ghost from a Perfect Place (Hampstead, 1994), Vincent River (Hampstead, 2000; Trafalgar Studios, 2007), and the highly controversial Mercury Fur (Paines Plough/Plymouth, 2005). This was followed by Leaves of Glass (Soho, 2007) and Piranah Heights (Soho, 2008). He's also written five plays for young people and many books for children, as well as directing two films from his own screenplays, The Reflecting Skin (1990) and The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995). Ridley continues to divide opinion: depending on your point of view, he's either Britain's sickest playwright or a singular, prolific, and amazingly visionary genius. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz talking to Philip Ridley in one of the ‘Theatre Conversations’ series at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London, on 25 October 2007. Aleks Sierz, a Contributing Editor of NTQ, is theatre critic of Tribune and author of the seminal study In-Yer-Face Theatre (Faber, 2001).

PETER SCHUMANN's Bread and Puppet Theatre began 25 years ago as a new way of making modern theatre, and as Schumann sees it, still is. As he recently stated, “there are two aspects to this newness: (1) the proposal for a much bigger, wider space for the arts to exist in than the space that the arts occupy now – a way for painting, music, sculpture, and language to exist together and in response to the questions of the time in which they live; and (2) the puppet theatre aspect: puppet theatre not as a special branch of theatre but as a challenge to theatre, as a concrete proposal for the overcoming of its shortcomings – a liberation from that fixed old schmaltz – a proposal for much bigger form, much more compositional freedom and adventure than an actors' theater can ever come up with.”

In one sense Tara belongs to a loose grouping which could be described as ‘companies of identity’, which might include the Black Theatre Co-operative, Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group), Graeae, and Gay Sweatshop. The classic funding pattern here is that the company is initially founded by individuals with shared educational, cultural and political backgrounds: then, after a number of projects or productions, the group receives funding for a specific proposal, either from a special-interest organization, a trust, or local government.

The functions of the critic in the theatre and of his or her responsibilities towards the theatre have long been debated and disputed, and are now in a state both of flux and contradiction – flux, because of the rapidly changing state of the media in which criticism is published and the new forms which ‘publication’ can now take; contradiction, because of the dual perception of criticism as at once an ‘offensive’ art and an ‘art of solidarity’. Especially for the critic of theatre, the dilemma has always been heightened not only by the ephemerality of the art to which the review gives a vicarious and subjectified after-life, but also by the shifting sands between the journalistic and the academic landmarks of the craft. Rather than attempting impossible solutions, Josette Féral offers illuminating definitions and suggests helpful boundaries – aesthetic, cultural, social, and historical. Josette Féral is full professor in the Drama Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has published several books, including Mise en scène et jeu de I'acteur, (two volumes, 1997, 1999), dealing with many European as well as North American directors, Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (1995) and Trajectoires du Soleil (1999), both on Mnouchkine's work, and La Culture contre I'art: essai d'économie politique du théâtre (1990). She has also published several articles on the theory of theatre in Canada, the United States and Europe, in journals such as The Drama Review, Modern Drama, The French Review, Discourse, Theaterschrift, Cahiers de théâtre, and Théâtre Public. She is currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the characterization of the big city as evil incarnate – a veritable latter-day Sodom – had achieved the status of national myth in both the United States and Britain, and had become a popular theme for journalists, novelists, and playwrights alike. John Frick examines this phenomenon – what came to be known as the ‘wicked city motif’ – as it manifested itself on the antebellum American stage. Originating in the urbanization of the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the French feuilleton roman and coalescing in Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, the city mysteries narrative successfully negotiated the unstable border between the public and private spheres to examine the depravity and danger of the modern metropolis. Disseminated through populist politics, sensationalized journalism, popular fiction, and – the focus here – dramatic renderings, the apocalyptic vision of the modern city with its inexplicable and impenetrable secrets became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s. John Frick is Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches in the M.Litt. program at Mary Baldwin College. His most recent book, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Years ago, NTQ co-editor Clive Barker was tantalized by a passing and lost reference on a radio programme to a source of inspiration for musicians of the Be Bop generation: this had showed them ‘a way forward by taking them away from music based on chords and riffs to music based on modes’. Can acting aspire to an analogous state to the improvisations of jazz musicians, in which spontaneity is modulated by the discipline of true respect for the ensemble? Drawing on his own experience as an actor with Theatre Workshop – whose orchestration came close to that of jazz – and on teaching actors to break down inhibitions through the work described in his seminal Theatre Games (1977), Clive Barker looks towards a ‘next step’ in actor training and rehearsal techniques. This would work towards integrating the controlled freedom of jazz with the results he knows can be achieved through his own work with actors – the creation of ‘great and beautiful physical poetry in small rooms’. Oh – and can anyone offer a lead towards that elusive book which inspired the jazz musicians of the 'forties?

The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.

In 1996 Graham Ley compiled for NTQ a record of the first twenty years of Tara Arts, the London-based British Asian theatre company. In this essay, he tests the theoretical concept of a third space for diaspora culture against the experience of two leading British Asian theatre companies, and considers the contrasting role of an Asian arts centre. From 2004 to 2009 Graham Ley led an AHRC-funded research project on ‘British Asian Theatre: Documentation and Critical History’, and has co-edited with Sarah Dadswell two books soon to be published by the University of Exeter Press: British South Asian Theatres: a Documented History and Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre. He has earlier published in NTQ on Australian theatre and enlightenment and contemporary performance theory, and is presently Professor of Drama and Theory at the University of Exeter.

In this essay the social historian Simon Featherstone examines the theatre of the Scottish medium Helen Duncan and argues that her strange, illicit performances offer a way of re-reading British popular performance in the 1930s and 1940s. This critically neglected period has been characterized by the decline of the radical energies of nineteenth-century music hall and the variety theatre which displaced it. Duncan's performances, however, with their extravagant display and management of her body and deployment of a range of references to popular materials, including puppetry, melodrama, children's games, and sentimental narratives, suggest the existence of other trajectories. Like the ‘dark village’ that Eric Hobsbawm identified as the illegal shadow of nineteenth-century social practices, Duncan's ‘dark theatre’ can be seen as a shadow world of mid-century performance styles. It provided a knowing yet emotionally fulfilling theatrical experience for her audiences while at the same time posing radical questions about the limits and meanings of the representation of gender and class in the unregulated venues of the spiritualist circuit. Politically ambiguous in their mixture of entrepreneurial exploitation and willingness to offer forthright challenges to social and legal authorities, Duncan's performances indicate the persistence of complex spaces and traditions of popular theatricality in the period.

The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, the popular label for Samuel Beckett’s theatre, has been challenged over the past decades before its implications were fully explored. This article reconsiders the ‘absurd’ with respect to Beckett and the human/nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. It draws upon affect theory and posthumanism, arguing that the absurd in Beckett’s theatre takes root in the theatricalization of posthuman affects, which connect the human body and the non-human world. Posthuman affects subvert human sovereignty and disintegrate humans into nothingness. Yet they also give birth to a different cosmic ontology, which involves a call for change in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Revisited from the perspective of posthuman affect, the absurd in Beckett’s theatre acquires new complexities that bring glimmering possibilities of endurance and comfort in the face of catastrophe. Chen Chang is an assistant researcher of the English Department at Nanjing University, where she recently completed her PhD dissertation on Beckett and the posthuman body. She has published several articles on Beckett as well as in gender studies.

This paper explores some of the many factors which affect the way in which the critical response to a production is made manifest. Using the reception of Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale and Our Country's Good as case studies, Susan Carlson contrasts the enthusiastic response to the first production of the latter play at the Royal Court, where its supposed celebration of the redemptive effects of theatricality were widely acclaimed, with the subjection of the former to the ‘atavistic guilts of male theatre reviewers’. Examining the reception of later productions – and even the West End transfer – of Our Country's Good, she proceeds to show how different theatres, companies, and senses of cultural, sexual, and national identity shaped ever-changing attitudes towards what was presumed to be the same play. Susan Carlson, whose article ‘Comic Collisions: Convention, Rage, and Order’ appeared in NTQ12 (November 1987), is Professor of English at lowa State University, and the author of Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners (1985) and Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is now working on issues of performance and collaboration in contemporary theatre, and writing about the work of the Omaha Magic Theatre and the playwriting of Karim Alrawi.

Chris Vervain is a mask maker who has for a number of years directed masked Greek drama. On the basis of the research she has undertaken using her own masks, in this article she considers some of the practical issues involved in a masked staging of the plays today, drawing specifically on her experience of directing the Bacchae and the Antigone. Here she extends the discussion started previously in ‘Performing Ancient Drama in Mask: the Case of Greek New Comedy’ in NTQ 79 (August 2004). Earlier, with David Wiles, she contributed ‘The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance’ to NTQ 67 (August 2001). In 2008 she completed a doctorate on masks in Greek tragedy at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This is the third in a series of interviews with women who are involved in various capacities in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, set out to provide an update of previously published information, and thereby to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. The second interview, with playwright Charlotte Keatley, put forward a new vision of a ‘map’ to women and (play)writing. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by putting forward the responses of one of Britain's strongest young performers, Tilda Swinton, to questions about the challenges and expectations involved in performing gender roles and reversals, or of ‘playing woman’, on film and on stage. Tilda Swinton was born in London in 1960. She studied Social and Political Sciences and English at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1980 to 1983, under the supervision of Margot Heinemann. It was at Cambridge that Swinton first met and worked with director Stephen Unwin, her closest colleague throughout her career. In 1983, she went to Southampton and worked for six months at the Nuffield Theatre, where she earned her Equity card. In 1984–85, she worked with the RSC, but has chosen not to work on the main stages of the nationally subsidized theatres since. Swinton is primarily known for her work in political theatre, based at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, the Almeida (most notably on The Tourist Guide in 1987 and Mozart and Salieri in 1989), and the Royal Court in London, where she starred in the celebrated Man to Man – a transfer from the Traverse – in 1987, and where she assistant-directed Conquest of the South Pole in 1988. Swinton has also worked at the National Theatre Studio, and has just played Nova at the Cottesloe in a production of Peter Handke's The Long Way Round. She has worked in Italian opera (1988), and has collaborated on and been featured in films by John Berger (Play Me Something, 1988) and Derek Jarman (most notably, Caravaggio, 1986; The Last of England, 1987; and War Requiem, 1988): she continues to collaborate with both. Current and future projects include work on a TV series written by John Byme, which began filming in late September 1989, and work with director Sally Potter on a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in which Swinton plays Orlando.

Teatr ZAR has been developing its Gospels of Childhood triptych since 2003, when the company was founded after several years of research in Armenia, Iran, and Georgia. It was in Georgia that ZAR learned polyphonic songs from the Svan oral tradition, which it developed in its unique song theatre. In this article Maria Shevtsova maps the first of a series of expeditions, the latter notably including Greece, Corsica, and Sardinia. She describes how the ancient hymns and chants gathered through direct oral transmission (ZAR's choice of material reflects its interest in the songs of early Christianity) provide the subject matter and the spiritual dimension of the group's performance pieces. The idea of the ‘spiritual’ is here distinguished from the strictly religious/denominational as well as the ritualistic or cultic framings of the word. Details from the triptych show how breath, vibration and energy are the forces of ZAR's sonic compositions in which singing, instrumental music, sound making, and movement are vehicles for experience other than immediate material sensation. Reference is made to ZAR's link to the Grotowski legacy in the song theatre of Poland today. Maria Shevtsova, Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, wishes to thank the International Research Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin for hosting her research, of which this article is an integral part.

Taking mobile theatre in Assam as an example, Ina Ross questions in this article how professional, contemporary theatre can be successful in India, where it is considered to be a niche culture and economically precarious. She examines what would be needed for contemporary theatre in India to appeal to all segments of the population and asks how the theatre can compete with its omnipresent big brother, the cinema. A brief historical introduction to the mobile theatre movement is followed by an analysis of recent performances, complemented by interviews conducted with the major players in Assam's mobile theatre movement. The article shows that the success of mobile theatre is not to be found on the stage alone: it is also a social and societal model that is lived and experienced with the audience, and this ultimately is the key to its success. Ina Ross is a cultural manager with a focus on the performing arts. She has held the position of Associate Professor at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Art in Berlin, and since 2015 has been teaching arts management at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi. She is the author of Wie überlebe ich als Künstler? (How to Survive as an Artist, 2013).

This conversation took place during the Gdansk Festival, 1–10 August 2009, where The Wooster Group performed its internationally acclaimed Hamlet (2006), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. The conversation, led by Maria Shevtsova and edited by her for publication, was part of the conference organized under the auspices of the Festival by Jerzy Limon, the Festival's director. Here LeCompte and two performers from the company, Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos, discuss how they generated the work, and develop their thoughts in answers to questions from the audience. Later this year The Wooster Group will perform Hamlet on 10–13 August at the Edinburgh International Festival. Maria Shevtsova is the Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, acknowledged by Derek Paget in NTQ 12 (November 1987) as a formative influence on the emergence of what he called ‘Verbatim Theatre’, have been given a new lease of life following their recent release by Topic Records; but his theatrical experiments in multi-media documentary, which he envisaged as a model for ‘engendering direct creativity in the common people’, remain largely unknown. The most ambitious of these – The Maker and the Tool, staged as part of the Centre 42 festivals of 1961–62 – is exemplary of the impulse to recreate a popular culture which preoccupied many of those involved in the Centre 42 venture. David Watt, who teaches Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, began researching these experiments with work on a case study of Banner Theatre of Actuality, the company Parker co-founded in 1973, for Workers' Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970, co-authored with Alan Filewod. This led to further research in the Charles Parker Archive at Birmingham Central Library, and the author is grateful to the Charles Parker Archive Trust and the staff of the Birmingham City Archives (particularly Fiona Tait) for the opportunity to explore its holdings and draw on them for this article.

Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Elmina's Kitchen was a landmark in British theatre history as the first drama by an indigenous black writer to be staged in London's commercial West End. The play's success since its premiere at the Royal National Theatre included a national tour and a season at Center Stage, Baltimore, directed by August Wilson's director Marion McClinton. In this interview with Deirdre Osborne, Kwei-Armah testifies to Wilson's considerable influence and the inspiration he derives from Wilson's project to account for the history of black people's experience in every decade of the twentieth century. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams.

In the autumn of last year, two events took place which marked in very different ways the recognition that feminist thinking has affected theatre more profoundly than through the necessary logistics of job and role redistribution. In August, the first-ever festival of women in experimental theatre, known as Magdalena 86, took place in Cardiff. Then, in the following month, the International School of Theatre Anthropology devoted its congress in Holstebro, Denmark, to the subject of ‘The Female Role’ – a title we borrow for this short feature, in which Susan Bassnett. who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor both to NTQ and its predecessor, analyzes and evaluates these occasions in successive reports. The core paper presented at Holstebro by ISTA director Eugenio Barba, which discusses the balance between the qualities of ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ necessary to the actor's energy, ‘completes’ a feature which, in the questions it raises for further discussion, remains necessarily inconclusive.

Hysteria, first performed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro's Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the show's critique of Western feminism's claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).