Pamela Howard designed Border Warfare and John Brown's Body at the Tramway, Glasgow, for John McGrath, and Wicked Old Man, which he wrote and directed for West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1992. Here, she recalls the highly distinctive visual language of the playwright, and the differences this made in seeing through a design from initial discussion to practical use in performance. Pamela Howard is a scenographer, director, writer, educator, exhibition curator, and international producer who has created theatre events in many countries and languages. She was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in 1999 to write What is Scenography? (published by Routledge in 2001), and as adaptor, director, and scenographer created La Celestina at the Hopkins Center, USA, in February 2002, of which the text is forthcoming from Oberon Books.

Whilst Stanislavsky spent much of his energy trying to simplify the processes of acting and avoiding a (pseudo-) scientific terminology for his acting system, he was nevertheless caught up in Stalin's appropriation of hard science after the Russian Revolution, to be paired with other ‘founding fathers’ of Soviet materialism, including Ivan Pavlov, in the creation of a powerful political orthodoxy. Here, Jonathan Pitches focuses on two of Stanislavsky's key contemporaries, Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, both of whom had worked with the founder of the System at different periods in their career, to pinpoint a significant shift, or turning point, in the development of twentieth-century Russian actor training. Drawing on Fritjof Capra's history of systemic thinking, the article argues that a radical shift of thinking took place in actor training in the 1920s and 1930s, which prefigures the global paradigm crisis Capra has identified at the turn of the last century. Jonathan Pitches is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge, 2003). This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the IFTR 2004 Conference in St Petersburg. Its argument derives from his forthcoming book Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition (Routledge, 2005).

In the course of her long career as a director with Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood staged some twenty foreign-language plays, of which three were Spanish: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, while there were also plans to perform Lorca's Blood Wedding. Gwynne Edwards argues in this article that Littlewood's attraction to the Spanish plays was sometimes political but always due to a similarity in performance style which, influenced by the methods of leading European theatre practitioners, sought to integrate the elements of speech, stage design, movement, music, and lighting into a harmonious whole. Indeed, even though Lorca and Littlewood worked independently of each other, their ideas on the nature and function of theatre were very similar, while Lorca's touring company, La Barraca, employed methods very close to those of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop. Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca have been published by Methuen Drama, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays. Many of these have also had professional productions.

For a four-month period in 2010 David Francis Taylor worked as a research consultant with the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds, the only working Regency playhouse in Britain. In this article Taylor reflects upon the experiences and insights he acquired over the course of this collaboration. In particular, he indicates how the theatre's restaging of the neglected repertory of the long eighteenth century within the Georgian space of performance can aid theatre historians in understanding the intricate dynamics of the period's theatre architecture and, crucially, the position and agency of its spectatorships. David Francis Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His book Theatres of Opposition, which concerns the theatricality of politics in the career of the playwright-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan, will be published next year by Oxford University Press. He has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, and the Keats-Shelley Review, and is currently co-editing, with Julia Swindells, the Oxford Handbook to the Georgian Playhouse.

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.

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.

It has generally been assumed that the Expressionist movement had little noticeable impact on British theatre. Claire Altree Warden here suggests that in the plays of Ewan MacColl (and in particular his The Other Animals of 1948) there is a discernible challenge to this assumption. In order to advocate a specific political position, MacColl took the conventions of Expressionism and developed a highly engaged, artistically innovative theatrical aesthetic that could tackle socio-political inequalities and the suppression of the dissident voice. Through linguistic experiment, episodic structure, representational characters, and a focus on the individual mind, the playwright challenges the audience to confront class injustice and hegemonic tyranny. Claire Altree Warden is based at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches English Literature. She also teaches Critical Theory and Theatre History at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and is currently preparing a new critical study of Ewan MacColl's plays.

An acknowledged feature of the late nineteenth-century reinvigoration of theatre is the frequency with which new styles of writing – and, more often, innovative themes – affronted the public, both in print and performance. Yet the turbulent initial audience reactions to taboo- and ground-breaking plays have often been represented as self-evident confrontations between progressive creative artists and philistine theatregoers. By closely examining one apparently typical case of resistance to the new drama – the uproar at the 1889 premiere in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise – Neil Blackadder demonstrates the complex relationship between production and reception in the early modern theatre. He considers the behaviour of one offended spectator in particular, along with the response of the independent theatre society which staged the production, and a court's verdict on the validity of his protests. Beyond marking an important turning-point in the history of German theatre, the premiere of Before Sunrise encapsulates several key facets of the modern theatre during a period when its practitioners were becoming more bold and experimental, while changing norms of conduct were, paradoxically, rendering audiences more restrained. Neil Blackadder is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Drama at Duke University, curently visiting at Knox College. He is writing a book on modern theatre scandals.

This article continues NTQ's recent exploration of the interaction between the study of theatrical performance and other disciplines – in this case, relating in particular to ‘Quantum Physics and the Language of Theatre’, published in NTQ 18 (1989). Schmitt argues that there is a correspondence between the contemporary interest in performance theory and the view of nature provided by modern physics. The analysis of nature in terms of events rather than objects, the perception of reality as a network of non-teleological, non-hierarchical relations, the interest in the interplay between nature and our perception of it: all correlate, she suggests, with an interest in theory of performance. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theater at the University of lllinois at Chicago. She published ‘Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious’ in NTQ 8 (1986), and has also published in Theatre Notebook, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, Comparative Drama, Theatre Survey, and elsewhere. Her full-length study. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature has just appeared, from Northwestern University Press.

In this article Aamir Aziz argues that Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a wilful and purposeful theatrical response to the operations of Joseph McCarthy and his henchmen. He highlights the theatricality of the McCarthy trials and examines them through the frame of spectacle, as outlined by Guy Debord, to show how Miller used his play theatrically to unhinge the machinations of McCarthyism and the seemingly unassailable frame of an American democracy defending itself against Communist subversion. Miller's play was thus a theatrical intervention into an ideological force field that served to puncture and expose the veil of this spectacle. Aamir Aziz received his doctorate from Universiteit Leiden in 2014, and is now an Assistant Professor in English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. He has recently published articles in International Policy Digest, New Authors' Journal, Sydney Globalist, and London Globalist.

In his seminal The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggested that Samuel Beckett, in denying his characters individualized facets of humanity, achieved an ‘alienation effect’ that was more profound and assured than Brecht's. Here, Michael David Fox, while agreeing that Beckett denies actors and audiences the kinds of identification achieved in naturalistic drama through Stanislavskian techniques, argues that he demands a different quality of empathy from his audiences – not through the artifice of a character's simulated pain but through the actuality of the performer's physical suffering. While analyzing the demands and constraints upon actors which Beckett imposes in his better-known plays, he also re-evaluates the more ‘occasional’ piece Catastrophe – written in 1982 ostensibly as a homage to the then-imprisoned Czech playwright Vaclav Havel – less as a critique of political terror than as an ironic and devastating self-critique of the terror of Beckett's own tragic representation. Michael David Fox is a doctoral student in drama and critical theory in the Joint Doctoral Program in Drama at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is on the production of empathy in Shakespeare's tragedies. He wishes to thank Robert Weimann, Wolfgang Iser, and Gabriele Schwab for their helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.

Does vague approval for the social objectives of much third-world theatre blind sympathetic western observers to its defects? And, where those objectives are specifically socialist, are the complex dialectics which generate revolution too readily supplanted in favour of simplistic affirmation? R. G. Davis takes examples from his own experience in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Algeria to propose a closer, more active, and inter active attention to the relationship between theatre and national needs, based in a lateral approach to what theatre can and cannot do well. R. G. Davis was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and is currently teaching at San Francisco New College, while working on two films and a book. He has been a regular contributor to Theatre Quarterly and NTQ – most recently, on ‘The Politics and Packaging of Performance Art’ in NTQ13 (1988).

In the interview above, Malcolm Blaylock referred to Sidetrack, a community theatre company in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, as ‘arguably the best company in Australia’. Here, Tom Burvill examines some of the company's recent work, and sets it in the context of an understanding of community theatre which he traces back to Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Tom Burvill, who has himself acted as a dramaturg for Sidetrack, lectures in English and linguistics at Macquarie University.

Walter Benjamin's concept of the flâneur has been widely used to conventionalize ‘the disinterested voyeur, the lonely figure haunting the streets of cities, the person who watches the spectacle of modern life’. Petra Kuppers argues that the flâneur is as central to the ‘nineties cityscape as to that of Baudelaire's Paris, of which Benjamin was writing, or to his own inter-war Berlin. She responds to feminist and other objections and, while recognizing the validity of later writings on the nature of the body such as Foucault's, argues that the flâneur remains valuable in counterbalancing ‘aspects of contemporary theory that use the human body as metaphor’ with the physicality of ‘a lived set of material practices and inscribed discourses’. To illustrate and develop her argument she uses moments from Kathryn Bigelow's film Strange Days (1996), performances by the Austrian group Bilderwerfer and by Francesca Vilalta-Ollé, and the camera-dance made for TV, Pace (1996). Petra Kuppers is Research Fellow in Performing Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.

In this article Bernard Ince surveys and critically examines for the first time the bizarre phenomenon known as the ‘Monkey Drama’ in the British theatre. A genre of early origin, pre-dating the age of Darwinism, it is to be found in all areas of entertainment, especially during the nineteenth century when the quintessential characteristics of simian mimicry were established. Commonly juxtaposed with the legitimate drama in afterpieces, ‘man-monkey’ spectacles not only blurred conventional man–beast boundaries, but also challenged prevailing conceptions of theatrical legitimacy. The genre attracted myriad performers of varied origins and specialisms, whose ability to mimic simian characteristics stemmed not only from agility and flexibility, but also from careful study of the ‘monkey tribe’ itself. While some familiar names figure among the roll-call of simian impersonators, many artists are little known. Although difficult to quantify precisely, the genre had reached its zenith before the middle of the nineteenth century, the 1820s through the 1840s being a significant formative period. After mid-century, popularity was maintained, but to a lesser degree, largely through pantomime, only to decline significantly after 1900. In a broader context, the study furnishes new material for current interdisciplinary debates regarding the relationship between performance, evolution and visual culture in the Victorian period. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.