Once Arnold Daly and Bernard Shaw had got through their baptisms of fire in the transatlantic theatre of the 1890s, the circumstances for their future collaboration must have seemed propitious to them both. However, the Irish-American's inflexibility and the Anglo-Irishman's passion for control led to the fracturing of the relationship within the span of a few years in the first decade of the new century. The exposure of their work – in tandem in American vaudeville and later as competitors on the English variety stage – marked points of their disagreement and quirks in their difficult personalities as they scrambled for audiences who rarely appreciated them as much as both felt they deserved. Leigh Woods, Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the breakdown of a partnership that launched one man on a course to oblivion and the other on a path to greater glory.

In this article David Overend proposes a concept of ‘audience’ that accounts for a complex process of fluctuation between observing or spectating performance as part of a wider group, and becoming part of the aesthetic – forming individual relationships with the artwork and its environment. It is proposed that developing Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ as a model for ‘relational theatre practice’ responds to the continually shifting modes of engagement of those encountering and becoming part of a performance event. Focusing on the Arches arts centre in Glasgow, and drawing on the theory of clubbing, Overend develops a performance for a club night, comparing the experience of the clubbing crowd to that of a theatre audience in order to interrogate the relationship of two cultural practices that remain largely autonomous within the day-to-day operations of the site. Midland Street (September 2009) was a one-off performance for ‘Death Disco’, the monthly electro club night at the Arches. Using cars parked outside the venue, a chaotic poker game, and an array of overtly theatrical characters, including a clown and a pack of urban animals, the performance attempted to move outside the boundaries of the theatre programme as well as the studio theatre space, entering another dynamic relational realm, which is central to the Arches' cultural identity and funding structures. Combining a practical and theoretical approach, this research interrogates Bourriaud's relational aesthetic model through its application to the development of theatre practice within the specific context of an arts venue.

The recent work of the South African dramatist Athol Fugard has addressed the present realities of a country undergoing traumatic change. But on whose behalf does it speak today? The common claim of critics has been that his work ‘bears witness’: but what does this claim amount to in the context of current debates about culture in South Africa? Central to these debates is the contextualizing work which has arisen out of the neo-Marxist emphasis on previously marginalized black dramatic forms: tending to supplant the liberal, universalizing approach which helped promote Fugard, this is fast becoming a new orthodoxy, diminishing his contribution and historic influence alike. In this article, Dennis Walder looks more closely at the European origins among the liberal-left of the idea of ‘bearing witness’, and considers its continuing potential as taken up by Fugard himself at a turning-point in the development of his plays – the moment from which sprang both Boesman and Lena and the collaborative Sizwe Bansi and The Island. These plays can still be understood to offer a voice to the voiceless – above all to Lena, the ‘Hotnot’ woman, an outcast among outcasts, who affirms her identity through her body and her language. Dennis Walder, who was born and brought up in South Africa and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is now Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University: a Dickens scholar, whose Dickens and Religion appeared in 1981, he also wrote the first book-length study of Athol Fugard (Macmillan, 1984), and is currently editing Fugard's plays for Oxford University Press.

Traditional Chinese theatre seems to appeal to audiences across the world more for its exquisite acting than for its literary qualities. Yet Mei Lanfang, Tang Xianzu and Li Yu all assert that good acting must be firmly rooted in its literary base. What compelled these masters to go out of their way to emphasize the importance of the written text, argues William H. Sun, was precisely the failure of many traditional actors to take it seriously, preferring to rely on superficial virtuosities. From this constant struggle in traditional Chinese theatre between a theoretical respect for textual quality and practical emphasis on performance has emerged the peculiar paradox of acting here explored. The author, William H. Sun, is a Shanghai-born playwright, author, and associate professor of drama at Macalester College. A contributing editor of TDR, he has taught at Tufts University, California State University, Northridge, and the Shanghai Theatre

The Golden Mask and National Theatre Award and Festival, founded in Moscow in 1994, has showcased some of the most exciting theatre to be found across Russia’s vast territories: ‘theatre’ including opera, ballet, contemporary dance, puppetry, and newer forms that have taken root with changing artistic practices. Maria Shevtsova’s brief overview of the 2015 Russian Case, a selection for foreign producers and critics, prominently features ‘new drama’, not least because of the difficulties recently imposed on Teatr.doc, a founding player within this powerful movement. Major young directors appear here, with crossover to their work as represented in past editions of the Russian Case, and with reference to current socio-political factors. Reviews of earlier festivals appeared in NTQ 85, 95, and 103. Maria Shevtsova, Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Her most recent book is the co-authored Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013). Her seminal Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004) has been translated into Romanian, Korean, and Mandarin and, in 2014, Russian.

In this article Frank Camilleri discusses the historical and professional links between Ingemar Lindh and Jerzy Grotowski, with a specific focus on the nature and implications of their separate work on physical action. Lindh's practice, particularly his research on the ‘disinterested act’, is read in the context of Grotowski's ‘doing’ in Art as Vehicle. The individual work of the two practitioners on vocal and vibration techniques is seen as integral to their research on physical action. Frank Camilleri is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent and Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project (Malta). He served as Academic Coordinator of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta from 2004 to 2008, and in 2007 co-founded Icarus Publishing Enterprise with Odin Teatret and the Grotowski Institute.

In this article, Angela Butler explores postdigital community through an analysis of Complicité’s The Encounter. All facets of personal and civic life are permeated by the digital to such a degree that we are living through a period termed ‘the postdigital’. Postdigital communities are commonly formed, and nearly always sustained, through online networks. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s utopian performative and Victor Turner’s communitas, the article argues that rather than acting as an ancillary commentary platform, postdigital communities are now a principal component of certain theatrical experiences. With increasingly isolated lives, there is an evident appeal to work that taps into the joy of being alone, together. Angela Butler is an independent scholar based in Dublin who works in the technology sector. Cultural transformation is the central pillar of her ongoing research. With an eye to new and future technologies, her work is concerned with posthumanism, identities in transformation, and affective encounters.

In 1897 audiences welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson's new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage, and his sane, intelligent Prince was received as an exciting departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell's own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so warmly greeted, critics describing her playing as ‘curiously weak’ and ‘unconvincing and unimpressive’. Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblematic of the prettiness and pathos exemplified by Ellen Terry, and instead offered a vacant, depressive, ‘beaten’ Ophelia. In this article, Fiona Gregory examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress's own experience of mental illness and the notorious ‘rest cure’. The reception of the performance is read in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness, as well as of responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity in the visual arts. Ultimately, Campbell's performance of Ophelia can be read as a ‘witness account’ of neurasthenia and the ‘rest cure’, to stand alongside texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, and has published work on the career of actress Judith Anderson, Australian cultural history, and Victorian and Edwardian writers. She is currently undertaking a wide-ranging study of actresses and mental illness from the nineteenth century to the present day, drawing on historical examples and literary and cultural representations to consider the intersections of ‘hysteria’ and the ‘histrionic’.

David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947, is one of the most talented and eagerly watched young playwrights in America today, whose work has also found a ready response among British audiences. After such plays as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). American Buffalo (1975) and Edmond (1982), his Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), dedicated to Harold Pinter, had its world premiere in London at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, and subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for the best American play in 1984. In the same year, American Buffalo (seen briefly on Broadway in 1977) won an award for best revival, while the London production of Edmond, which opened at the Royal Court in December 1985, was favourably received by English critics in contrast to its mixed reception in New York. In addition to Mamet's work for the stage, he has written the screenplays for the films The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Noteworthy for their sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of American speech, including its unmistakable penchant for banalities and obscenities. Mamet's best plays, as the accompanying essay demonstrates, carry with them an implicit attack on American business values, usually through a confrontation between two individuals, one of whom tries to exploit or dominate the other. The interview which follows was conducted in New York City on 2 January 1986 following a performance of Mamet's latest work, a double bill of one–act plays entitled The Shawl and Prairie du Chien, selected by Mamet's friend and close associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher, to reopen the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.

So close was the relationship between women and the Irish literary and theatrical renaissance that the severely diminished feminist role in contemporary Irish cultural and theatrical life contrasts all the more revealingly with the early achievements. In this article, which is an expanded version of a paper given at the 1990 conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research at Glasgow University, Steve Wilmer etches in the historical perspective, notably the significance of women's writing to the nationalist as well as the suffragist movement, and outlines the present situation, in which the solid advances being made by women directors and administrators are only slowly being reflected in an increase in women's theatre writing and support for feminist theatre groups, let alone the assumption of real theatrical power. Steve Wilmer teaches in the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and is the author of several plays, including Scenes from Soweto.

The pressures of Thatcherism on theatre funding in the 'eighties were severe, but the early harshness was tempered by several factors. One was the positive influence of the Cork Report, particularly on touring and experimental theatre. Another, the authors believe, was a careful strategy of reallocation of funding to support creativity in English theatre, notably through the touring franchise scheme. Here, they analyze in detail the ways in which the English Arts Council operated the scheme in an attempt to revitalize aspects of English theatre from 1986 onwards, trace the change in the values of ‘political’ theatre over that period, and critically examine some received ideas in the light of the available evidence. Ian Brown is Dean of Arts and Professor of Theatre at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford. Douglas Brown is Assistant Director, Scottish Centre for Cultural Management and Policy, at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.

Before the October Revolution, political exiles and Jewish refugees spread the image of Russia as a vast prison, riven by violence and corruption. After the Revolution, émigrés who scattered across the globe broadcast their idea of a fabulous, high-spirited Russia. Cabaret – an arena for theatrical innovation, stylistic experimentation, and avant-garde audacity – was a choice medium to dramatize this idea to non-Russian audiences. Throughout the 1920s, émigré cabarets enjoyed great popularity: Nikita Baliev's Chauve- Souris in New York, Jurij Jushnij's Die Blaue Vogel in Berlin, J. Son's Maschere in Italy, among others. Although the acts were polyglot and the compère pattered away in a pidgin version of whichever language was current, the chief attraction was an artificial Russian - ness. Cabarets promulgated a vision of a fairy-tale, toy-box Russia, akin to the pictures on Palekh boxes. This candy-box depiction was then perpetuated by nightclubs staffed by waiters in Cossack blouses and balalaika orchestras. Nostalgic regret for a factitious homeland deepened among the departed. In contrast, Soviet Russia came to look even more hostile and desolate. With time, the distance between the lives they had lived and those portrayed to foreigners increased, and became unmoored from reality. Laurence Senelick's most recent books include Soviet Theater: a Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky), the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015), and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

In an earlier issue of New Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.

The jihad of Uthman dan Fodio in the early ninteenth century had by 1806 established Islamic cultural and religious hegemony over the Hausa territory of present-day Northern Nigeria. In the process, Islam had succeeded in pushing indigenous religious and cultural practices such as Bori to the margins or underground. However, while most of the other indigenous forms died or became inactive and ineffectual, Bori has managed to hold its own against the persecution and cultural war waged against it by Islam, mainly because the belief in the power and ability of the spirits to influence human life which is at the centre of Bori practice was never lost. In this article, Osita Okagbue argues that marginalization has made Bori attractive to groups and individuals in Hausa society who feel themselves similarly marginalized and oppressed for articulating alternative identities and viewpoints to those of the mainstream society. He also examines how the possession performances of the Bori cult enable members to subvert and occasionally to use moments of trance and possession to invert the power relationships between oppressed groups and their oppressors. Osita Okagbue teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of African Theatres and Performances (Routledge, 2007). He is President of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) and editor of African Performance Review.

Comedy, argues Laurence Senelick, is the form most indigenous to the Russian stage; so while its great players may still vie to make Hamlet their own, it is the comic figure of Khlestakov in Gogol's Government Inspector (Revizor) who most fully absorbs and enacts the concerns of the times in which the role is recreated. Here, while tracing the history of the role during the nineteenth century, Laurence Senelick is chiefly concerned with its performance by Mikhail Chekhov in Stanislavsky's first post-Revolutionary production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1921. Stanislavsky's earlier revival in 1908 had placed Khlestakov amidst a ‘community of fools’; now – reflecting the view of Gogol's anti-hero given by Dmitry Merezhkovsky in his influential essay of 1906, ‘Gogol and the Devil’ – Chekhov accomplished the challenging task of embodying a nullity, an ‘empty vessel’, the odd one out in a ‘normal’ society which he manages briefly to plunge into delirium. Laurence Senelick is Distinguished Professor at Tufts University, and has published widely in the fields of Russian theatre, the history of popular entertainments, sex and gender and performance, and theatre iconography. His most recent works include A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (Scarecrow Press, 2007), The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov as translator and editor (Norton, 2005), and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (Routledge, 2000).

In this article, George P. Pefanis discusses two major aspects of the ‘event’, as formed and developed in late Derridean philosophy – namely, the ‘possibility of the impossible’ and the ‘experience of perhaps’. These aspects are examined in order to reveal the potential for precariousness and uncertainty engendered by performance art, as in the case of the animal-event. With its increased degree of indeterminacy and its projected singular, here-and-now character, performance art could leave open the way to the ‘other’, the unpredictable, and the unexpected that is the ‘animal-event’, since an animal can never be fully controlled or have its behaviour predicted by the theatre mechanism. Two performances are taken as case studies to demonstrate this: the emblematic I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys (René Block Gallery, New York, 1974), and Dragon Heads by Marina Abramović (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990). It is argued that both cases pose certain moral issues around the presence of animals on the stage. George P. Pefanis is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistreian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013) and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (Athens, 2016). In 2006, he received the award for best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

John McGrath is one of those few writers who, having begun his career in a success-fully orthodox manner, came to prefer working through ‘alternative’ channels – notably, in his formation and continuing work with the two 7:84 Companies, England and Scotland, their names reflecting the persistent fact that 84 per cent of the nation's wealth is owned by seven per cent of the population. Thus, McGrath's early work as one of the creators of the vintage TV series Z Cars, and his major ‘commercial’ success with the film version of his play Events while Guarding the Bofors Gun, has been succeeded by numerous plays and productions less familiar to conventional audiences, but which have made an enormous and often stirring impact in touring venues (frequently of a less expected kind) both north and south of the border. The full range of his work is charted in the ‘NTQ Checklist’ which follows this interview, and its development through to the mid– 'seventies was discussed in the earlier interview with McGrath in TQ19. reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). Here, Tony Mitchell talks with John McGrath about some of his more recent work, and discusses his views on the nature of popular theatre, as set out in his important study of the subject, A Good Night Out (Methuen, 1981).

The Footsbarn company had its beginnings in a Cornish commune, very much in the spirit of the early 'seventies: yet unlike most companies formed in those years, it has not only survived but developed its work in ways which now communicate as fully to the cultural elite at international festivals as to non-theatre audiences in rural England. Geraldine Cousin, a lecturer in theatre studies at Warwick University. talked with members of Footsbarn at the time of their production of Hamlet in 1980, and again four years later while they were performing King Lear. Her descriptive analysis of those productions here runs parallel with the company's own assessment of how their work has developed. offering both a documentary retrospective of Footsbarn itself, and an individual approach to playing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences.

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

The visit to Britain in the spring of 1994 by the St Petersburg Maly Drama Theatre – described by Peter Brook as ‘the finest theatre ensemble in Europe’ – was warmly received by audiences and critics alike. Yet in Britain the idea of this kind of ‘permanent’ theatre company, so dear to earlier generations of actors and directors, seems not to have survived the climate of the 'eighties, and there is a sense that such remaining permanent companies as the Moscow Art Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble are dinosaurs from a more collectivist past. In an interview with Izvestiya, however, the Maly company's director, Lev Dodin, castigated western theatre for being ‘just a branch of the economy’ and having no permanent companies on what he called ‘the Russian model’. What is the truth about ensembles and permanent companies? In 1991, as part of research for an essay on Chekhov and the ‘company problem’ in British theatre, Patrick Miles interviewed Peter Hall on the subject of ensembles and companies. Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company as a permanent ensemble in 1960, directed the National Theatre for fifteen years – but not as a permanent theatre company – and since 1988 has been running his own, impermanent company in the theatrical market-place. At the time of the interview, here edited for publication, Peter Hall was rehearsing Twelfth Night at the Playhouse Theatre, London. Patrick Miles's essay ‘Chekhov and the Company Problem in the British Theatre’ was included in Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993).