Time structures are essential to any analysis of drama or theatre performance, and in this article Jerzy Limon takes the final scene from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia as an example to show that non-semantic systems such as music gain significance in the process of stage semiosis and may denote both space and time. The scene discussed is particularly complex owing to the fact that Stoppard introduces two different time-streams simultaneously in one space. The two couples presented dance to two distinct melodies which are played at two different times, and the author explains how the playwright avoided the confusion and chaos which would have inevitably resulted if the two melodies were played on the stage simultaneously. Jerzy Limon is Professor of English at the English Institute at the University of Gdańsk. His main area of research includes the history of English drama and theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and various theoretical aspects of theatre. His most recent works, published in 2008, include a book on the theory of television theatre, Obroty przestrzeni (Moving Spaces), two chapters in books, and articles in such journals as Theatre Research International, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism, and Cahiers élisabéthains.

In this article Liliane Campos links Complicite's Master and Margarita (2011) to the company's previous productions, from The Street of Crocodiles (1992) to Shun-Kin (2008). She develops a close analysis of The Master and Margarita as it was staged at the Avignon Festival in July 2012, arguing that the company's aesthetic is characterized by a tension between narrative fragmentation and visual connections. While Complicite's shows overflow with postmodernist multiplicity and division, the urge to connect these ‘shards of stories’ is a driving force in Simon McBurney's artistic direction. This dynamic is explored here both on a semantic level, as a consequence of Complicite's physical language, and on a narrative level, through the use of framing and frame-breaking devices. The article highlights the company's recurrent themes and the defining traits of its performance style. Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She has published various articles on British drama and performance, and two books about the role of science in contemporary writing and devising for the theatre.

John McGrath is recognized as a leading practitioner and theorist of popular and political theatre, in large part due to his work with 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland), but also through the contributions he has made to the debate surrounding this form of theatre, as summed up in his publication of A Good Night Out in 1981 and of The Bone Won't Break in 1990. McGrath has also written numerous articles, including those to be found in TQ19, TQ35, and NTQ4, in which he documents the work of the 7:84 companies and discusses the defining characteristics, ideological perspective, and potential for socio-political intervention of political theatre. Here, Nadine Holdsworth looks specifically at the importance of the audience as it related to 7:84 (England) in the 1970s and 1980s, and identifies some of the strategies employed by the company to attract and maintain a radical working-class audience. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on McGrath and the 7:84 (England) Company, from which this research is derived. She has also catalogued an extensive archive on the company which is held at Cambridge University.

Michel Vinaver is a French playwright, born in 1927, who was exiled to the USA during the German occupation, and began to write in the 1950s – alongside a business career until 1982, when he became Professor of Drama Studies in the University of Paris. His complete plays have recently been published in two volumes by Actes Sud, and are widely-produced in France – but in the following article he claims that his few British productions, at the Orange Tree in Richmond and the Traverse in Edinburgh, have often been closer to his textual intentions. This is one of the problems he examines in the following wide-ranging article on the successes and limitations of the French post-war policy of theatrical Decentralization. Against the benefits of financial security and non-metropolitan bias, he weighs the failures to reflect regional cultures, and the cult of the director, with its continuous pressures to be ‘different’ in the interests of promotion and critical prestige. This paper was first presented at a conference at Birmingham University in April 1990. Readers with access to copies of the original Theatre Quarterly may also find it useful to refer to the special issue on People's Theatre in France, TQ23 (1976).

In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).

The longer I follow the activity of V. E. Meyerhold, the more I am astounded at the derivative nature of his talent. ‘Je prend mon bien, où je le trouve’, said the genial Molière, obviously without realizing what temptation such words plant in the souls of all those who are quick to spot anything lying around just waiting to be picked up while its owner isn't looking. And Moliere has finally discovered a truly ‘original’ imitator in the person of V. E. Meyerhold!

Thousands of amateur theatre groups performed regularly in Britain during the 1930s but their activities have generally been overlooked by historians. Important features of the amateur world were the regional and national festivals organized by the British Drama League and the Scottish Community Drama Association. In this article Don Watson examines how the festivals could provide opportunities for progressive drama by groups outside the organized Left, and considers the League in relation to the Left theatre movement of the time. It broadens our understanding of where politically engaged theatre took place in the 1930s and thus the appreciation of British amateur theatre as a whole. Don Watson is an independent historian and holds a PhD from Hull University. His theatre research has been published in Labour History Review, Media, Culture and Society, and North East Labour History.

The actor, as a reminder of personal mutability, has always provoked the condemnation of absolutist philosophers and churchmen. Historically, this anti-theatrical prejudice has pressed even harder on the actress, for in her case ‘personal’ connotes sexual mutability. In Victorian times, when purity was enjoined on Woman for Man's sake as well as her own, the actress's situation was further complicated. In the following article, Julie Hankey examines the treatment of actress-characters in certain novels of the nineteenth century – Wilkie Collin's No Name, Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Henry James's The Tragic Muse, among others – exploring in particular their peculiarly physical system of representation, a system which reproduced the social and moral attitudes of the day on a more visceral level of irrational prejudice. Irrespective of their artistry or sympathies, authors were remarkably consistent in their use of the same relatively narrow but at the same time powerful range of signals – dress, pose, interiors, gardens, flowers, and so on – clearly confident that by this means the actress could be adequately expressed. Julie Hankey is presently co-editor of the ‘Plays and Performance’ series, now published by Cambridge University Press, and has herself prepared the individual volumes on Richard III and Othello.

With Grotowski and Szajna, Tadeusz Kantor has become one of a trio of contemporary exponents of experimental theatre whose influence has spread far beyond the boundaries of their native Poland: and Kantor himself has toured widely with his three major works. The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? Both in his published manifestoes and in forthright interviews about his approach, as also through his personal participation as on-stage ‘conductor’ of his productions. Kantor has proclaimed a theatre philosophy rooted in his own past as surrealist painter and creator of happenings, and now exponent of what he has called ‘in-formal’ theatre, in which ‘the director must die with the actors’. While acknowledging the innovative significance of Kantor's work, Andrzej Zurowski – a leading Polish critic who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics – here questions some of the premises behind the creator's presence on his own stage.

Due to the lingering aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe being mostly out of sight, the peripheral victims of the Fukushima disaster were no longer able to discern the boundary between the here of the safety zone and the there of the afflicted area. What ensued after this geographical unification was psychological unity in which the harmony-conscious ethics of the Japanese were excessively fortified, formulating what is often called the code of wa (harmonious integration), which implicitly coerced all to speak from hisaisha no tachiba (the standpoint of the afflicted people). Kyoko Iwaki, a doctoral student at Goldsmiths, University of London, after fourteen years as a theatre journalist in Japan, provides in this article a socio-psychological analysis on how the code of wa materialized as the unwritten law after the catastrophe, and argues how in Current Location (Genzaichi), playwright-director Okada Toshiki grapples with this code by developing a post-Fukushima aesthetic. By pertinently using the apparatus of ‘fiction’ as a guise for relieving the audience of the code, Okada develops a theatre language that voices discord in content, yet accord in form, permitting the characters to speak both from the here and the there.

This article – a chapter from The Paper Canoe: a Treatise on Theatre Anthropology, forthcoming from Routledge – was dedicated to NTQ's co-editor, Clive Barker, on his recent sixtieth birthday. In some senses, therefore, a reflection on the rite of passage into old age, it is more importantly a recognition of the quality and nature of experience understood – as applied to life and, in this case, to the profession of theatre. Eugenio Barba is the founder both of Odin Teatret and of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, and here he links the impulses behind the two in highly personal experiences with universal implications – childhood epiphanies of feeling with the perception of theatrical genius, even the fending-off of boredom triggering an understanding of an actor's body movement shared across cultures and continents. Theatre, he concludes, ‘allows me to belong to no place, not to be anchored only to one perspective, to remain in transition’.

Direct and bloody violence has a long history on stage. In recent years, a different mode of violence can be distinguished in the work of prominent American playwrights – less direct than indirect, more covert than overt, and likely to affect a group rather than individuals. In this article Russell Vandenbroucke applies concepts from Norwegian sociologist and Peace Studies scholar Johan Galtung to examine structural and cultural violence in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) and traces similar representations of violence in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, Ayad Aktar's Disgraced, The Laramie Project by Moisés Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Project, and Tim Robbins's adaptation of Dead Man Walking by Sr Helen Prejean. These writers have in common the status of traditional outsiders – black, female, gay, Muslim – and this informs their engagement in the social and political vitality of the stage. The shift in focus of these plays from direct violence echoes observations in Steven Pinker's recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice, and Conflict Transformation programme. He previously served as Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. His publications include Truths the Hand Can Touch: the Theatre of Athol Fugard and numerous articles on South African theatre.

John Barrymore's Hamlet, first seen in New York during the season of 1922–23, stands as a high-water mark of Shakespearean interpretation during the inter-war period. But although biographical studies of the actor and his family have appeared steadily over the years, little effort has been made to situate Barrymore's distinctive contribution to the acting of the character within the broader context of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Shakespearean production. Here Michael A. Morrison examines the circumstances surrounding Barrymore's visit to London with his Hamlet in 1925, and the far-reaching influence of his achievement on future generations of actors and directors. Michael A. Morrison is a New York-based writer and teacher, who is presently a doctoral candidate in theatre at the City University of New York, where he is preparing a study of Barrymore's work on Shakespeare.

Especially during the later decades of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for production in many of the major Asian traditional theatrical forms – prompting some western critics to suggest that such forms, with their long but largely non-logocentric traditions, can come closer to the recovery or recreation of the theatrical conditions and performance styles of Shakespeare's times than can academically derived experiments based on scantily documented research. Whether in full conformity with traditional Asian styles, or by stirring ingredients into a synthetic mix, Min Tian denies that a ‘true’ recreation is possible – but suggests that such productions can, paradoxically, help us to ‘reinvent’ Shakespeare in fuller accord with our own times, notably by exploiting the potential of stylized gesture and movement, and the integration of music and dance, called for by proponents of a modernistic ‘total’ theatre after Artaud. In considering a wide range of Shakespearean productions and adaptations from varying Asian traditions, Min Tian suggests that the fashionably derided ‘universality’ of Shakespeare may still tell an intercultural truth that transcends stylistic and chronological distinctions. Min Tian holds a doctorate from the China Central Academy of Drama, where he has been an associate professor since 1992. The author of many articles on Shakespeare, modern drama, and intercultural theatre, he is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Pierrot tradition, invented towards the end of the nineteenth century, established a prevalent but now largely forgotten mode of performance around the coastal resorts of Britain. In this article, Dave Calvert considers the relevance of this form in its historical context. Arguing that it observes the preservation of anachronism consistent with notions of invented traditions, he situates the Pierrot tradition within a symbolic network concerned with national identity and experience. This includes its declared links to the construction of royalty as the head of the imperial family, and both its schism and continuity with the tradition of blackface minstrelsy whose conventions it maintains. Its location at the seaside accentuates this network of relations and elevates it to a transcendental plane of the imaginary untroubled by the complexities of modern life. Dave Calvert is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Huddersfield. His research encompasses popular theatre, applied theatre and learning-disabled performance. He is also a member of The Pierrotters, the last remaining professional seaside Pierrot troupe.

While the dialogical relationship between the early twentieth-century British theatre and the rise of socialism is well documented, analysis has tended to focus on the role of the playwright in the dissemination of socialist ideas. As a contrast, in this article Philippa Burt examines the directorial work of Harley Granville Barker, arguing that his plans for a permanent ensemble company were rooted in his position as a member of the Fabian Society. With reference to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Maria Shevtsova's development of it in reference to the theatre, this article identifies a correlation between Barker's political and artistic approaches through extrapolating the central tenets of his theory on ensemble theatre and analyzing them alongside the central tenets of Fabianism. Philippa Burt is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. This article is developed from a paper presented at the conference on ‘Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the University of Lancaster in July 2011.

In the many discussions of the different shapes and capacities of the playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean London, insufficient attention has been paid to the impact of differing theatre forms upon the spectators. In this article, Andrew Gurr points out that the first Globe on Bankside, built from the timbers of the Theatre in Shoreditch, and the Fortune, erected for Henslowe's company on the other side of the river, just to the north of the City, were both the work of the same builder, Peter Street. He discusses the differences the shapes of the two playhouses – the Globe polygonal, the Fortune square – had on their construction and the spectators’ reception. Because the audience capacity had to be similar, this meant that spectators at the Fortune, especially latecomers, would need to squeeze into corners of the building, with their ability to see and hear what was happening on stage much restricted. In addition to his many books, among them the now classic study, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (1992), Andrew Gurr was chief academic advisor in the ‘rebuilding’ of Shakespeare's Globe on the South Bank. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading.