The production during 1987 of no less than three plays by the usually-neglected Spanish dramatist Lorca – Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba – provided a rare opportunity for a reconsideration of the plays as works for the live theatre, and of the particular problems involved in ‘translating’ them (in every sense of the word) for the English-speaking stage. In the following article. Gwynne Edwards considers the difficulties which confront the translator of Lorca's plays, the production-style which is implicit in Lorca's theatre, and the varying extents to which the three recent productions approximated to it. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published full-length studies of Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, and numerous translations of Spanish plays, including two in the volume of Three Plays published by Methuen in 1987, and the version of Blood Wedding used in the Contact Theatre production here considered.

In this article Gretchen E. Minton describes her adaptation of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play Timon of Athens. This adaptation, called Timon of Anaconda, focuses on the environmental legacy of Butte, Montana, a mining city that grew quickly, flourished, fell into recession, and then found itself labelled the largest Superfund clean-up site in the United States. Timon of Anaconda envisions Timon as a wealthy mining mogul whose loss of fortunes and friends echoes the boom-and-bust economy of Butte. The original play’s language about the poisoning of nature and the troubled relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds is amplified and adjusted in Timon of Anaconda in order to reflect upon ongoing environmental concerns in Montana. Minton explains the ecodramaturgical aims, site-specific locations, and directorial decisions of this adaptation’s performances, which took place in September 2019. Gretchen E. Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University, Bozeman. She has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and Bozeman Actors Theatre, and her directorial projects include A Doll’s House (2019), Timon of Anaconda (2019–20), and Shakespeare’s Walking Story (2020).

Hanns Johst's play Schlageter is generally regarded as the most successful piece of Nazi theatre. Following its first performance in the early months of the Third Reich, it dominated German theatrical life throughout 1933 and 1934. This has traditionally been regarded as evidence of the essential conformity of the Third Reich's stage; yet since no other play achieved a similar prominence in the period, Gerwin Strobl finds that line of argument unconvincing, arguing that the success of Schlageter was due to its clever manipulation of its audience's emotions. The play was perfectly suited to the mood of many German theatregoers in 1933, betraying in its plot and characterization considerable psychological insight and a ruthless determination to exploit that insight for Nazi purposes. As such, Schlageter was the prime example of the Third Reich's ‘theatre of inner experience’, the ultimate aim of whose practitioners was to get German audiences to abandon reason and accept the irrational vision of history underlying the Nazis' ideological project. Gerwin Strobl is Lecturer in Modern German History at Cardiff University, specializing in popular perceptions and propaganda. He is the author of Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2000), has published on Shakespeare in the Third Reich in History Today (May 1997) and the Journal of Contemporary History (July 1999), and is currently writing a study of Nazi theatre.

In this article Stephen Wilmer applies Deleuze and Guattari's concept of nomadology to the Fluxus art movement that spread across the world, breaking down barriers between art and life, privileging concrete and conceptual art, and staging unusual events. He traces Rosi Braidotti's development of Deleuze and Guattari's concept into her notion of the nomadic subject in which she favours factors such as geographic movement, transnational identities, common space (in accord with the Deleuzian differentiation between the divisible earth or private property, and nomadic space which belongs to everyone), polylingualism, desubjectivation, becoming minoritarian, and thinking and acting differently. With this as a philosophical and political context, the author investigates some of the artistic practices of specific Fluxus practitioners, especially the shamanistic performances and fat and felt installations of Joseph Beuys that supposedly owed their inspiration to his experience with nomadic Tatars. Stephen Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He co-edited (with Audronė Žukauskaitė) Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016) and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He edited ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’ for Nordic Theatre Studies (2015), and co-edited (with Azadeh Sharifi) ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016).

In this article, Christian M. Billing considers the relationship between representations of mythic narratives found on ancient pottery (primarily found at sites relating to the Greek colonies of south Italy in the fourth century BC, but also to certain vases found in Attica) and the tragic theatre of the fifth century BC. The author argues against the current resurgence in critical accounts that seek to connect such ceramics directly to performance of tragedies by the major tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Using five significant examples of what he considers to be errors of method in recent philologically inspired accounts of ancient pottery, Billing argues for a more nuanced approach to the interpretation of such artefacts – one that moves beyond an understanding of literary texts and art history towards a more performance-conscious approach, while also acknowledging that a multiplicity of spheres of artistic influence, drawn from a variety of artistic media, operated in the production and reception of such artefacts. Christian M. Billing is an academic and theatre practitioner working in the fields of ancient Athenian and early modern English and European drama. He has extensive experience as a director, designer, and actor, and has taught at a number of universities in the UK and the USA. He is currently Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull.

Jauría (2019) was the first tribunal verbatim play in Spain and it had a great impact on audiences in the context of heated debate about how national legislation had a long-standing legacy of sexism. Based on the transcripts of the legal proceedings of the La Manada gang-rape case, Jauría not only clarifies this controversial case for different types of audiences, but it also poses very important questions concerning the nature of rape and how the judicial system treats the victims of rape. This article studies the performative force of tribunal verbatim in shaping the audience’s understanding of an actual gang-rape case and indicates how a feedback loop is created in the performance itself, transforming the spectators’ attitudes. Svetlana Antropova is a lecturer at Villanueva University in Madrid. Her recent publications include ‘Filming Trauma: Bodiless Voice and Voiceless Bodies in Beckett’s Eh Joe’, in Elspeth McInnes and Danielle Schaub, eds., What Happened? Re-presenting Traumas, Uncovering Recoveries (Brill/Rodopi 2019), and ‘De/Construction of Visual Stage Image in Samuel Beckett’s Play’ (Anagnórisis: Revista de Investigación Teatral, XXII, 2020). Elisa García Mingo is an associate professor in Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and is an associate member of the Centre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender at the University of Brighton.

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.

In today's technologically complex and racially hybrid society, what is the meaning of ‘cultural memory’? Like performance, Ian Watson argues, culture ‘exists only in the doing’ – yet if our formative experiences are in that sense ‘rehearsals’ for life, the subsequent ‘performance’ is in a constant state of flux and renewal. Here, Ian Watson looks at the interface between theatrical and cultural training in American society, from the old apprenticeship system of the stock companies, through the Delsarte-based approach of the earliest conservatoires and the pervasiveness of Americanized Stanislavsky in the post-war period, towards a renewed concern with the techniques of voice and movement to meet the demands of both the classical and the contemporary experimental repertoires. In contrast to the deep cultural roots of much eastern theatrical training, perceptions of actor training in America are, he argues, as eclectic and diffuse as American society itself, and so (using Eugenio Barba's distinction) lean strongly towards creating a ‘professional’ rather than a ‘personal’ identity for the performer – one which ‘bears the signature of the hybrid narrative it springs from’. Ian Watson, who is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University–Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has also published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Western consciousness of Sri Lanka tends to be limited to bracketing the secessionist ‘Tamil Tigers’ among the ‘terrorist threats’ facing the world community. In truth, tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of Sri Lanka go back two millennia, and Syed Jamil Ahmed argues here that the conflict is reflected in the myths of origin of both communities and the rituals through which they are still re-enacted. He believes that one of these, the ritual of Devol Māduā, offers a possible resolution to the problematic relationship between religious and moral law, or dharma, and the pragmatics of statecraft in Sri Lanka. After examining the historical context of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the myths of origin associated with the three key deities in the ritual, he offers an episode-by-episode description of the event, and goes on to suggest that the function of the ritual in Sinhalese–Buddhist society is revealing in terms of the dialectics of pacifism and violence that Buddhism faces in Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jātrā’ in NTQ 74, and his full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

It is now twenty-one years since Joe Orton's death, though his relatively slender theatrical output has retained its freshness and power. After the modest West End success achieved by his first play to reach the stage. Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the New York production proved a failure, and the interview given by Orton to Glenn Loney in New York in October 1965, a few days before the Broadway opening, therefore went unpublished at the time. We print it now, as an intriguing sidelight on the attitudes and opinions of the playwright. It is placed in context by the widely-published theatre critic and teacher Glenn Loney, who also describes the brief, mainly epistolatory friendship with Orton that sprang from this first meeting.

Among the products of the theatre workshop run by Max Stafford-Clark at the Traverse Theatre – whose twenty-fifth anniversary is celebrated elsewhere in this issue – was Howard Brenton's Hitler Dances, on which the playwright worked with the director and actors late in 1971. Richard Boon sees both the play and the workshop experience as pivotal to Brenton's later development: here, he reconstructs the processes which led towards its eventual performance structure, and places the play with in the context of Brenton's earlier and subsequent work. Richard Boon, who also contributed an introduction to the Methuen Modern Plays edition of Hitler Dances, has recently completed his doctoral dissertation on Brenton's plays, and is working on a full-length study for publication by Methuen in 1990. He is currently Lecturer in Drama in the University of Leeds.

Joan Lipkin, playwright, poet, and theatre director, has won considerable critical acclaim – and some calculated abuse – for the political work of her company, That Uppity Theatre, in St Louis, Missouri. Her role-reversing pro-choice musical, He's Having Her Baby, provided the focal point for the preceding article, and one of her earliest pieces, Half-Time, about football in American life, performed in front of a bank vault, launched the city's alternative space movement. Her other better-known pieces include Some of My Best Friends Are …, Love and Work and Other Four-Letter Words, Will the Real Foster Parents Please Stand Up? and Small Domestic Acts. To support her theatre work over the years, Lipkin has worked in roles as various as waitress, art critic, journalist, and television producer: initially trained as a historian, she has also taught at university level for ten years. She is, in her own words, ‘always a rabble-rouser, that's been in the family history for a while’. Lizbeth Goodman interviewed Lipkin in Canada, during the ‘Breaking the Surface’ festival and conference at the University of Calgary in November 1991.

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.

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.

Charles Marowitz worked extensively as a director in Britain from the late 'fifties through the 'seventies, and was one of the editors of the influential Encore magazine in the formative years of the ‘new wave’. His free-lance work included the co-direction with Peter Brook of the seminal ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season, and the premiere production of Joe Orton's Loot. Later, in partnership with Jim Haynes, a season at the London Traverse Theatre led to the creation of his own, more enduring Open Space Theatre in a basement in Tottenham Court Road – one of the identifying events of 1968 and its theatrical aftermath. Since returning to his native United States, Marowitz has worked out of Malibu, and continued his parallel role as writer – in which he has become best known for his sequence of ‘collage’ Shakespeares ranging from Hamlet to The Shrew, and also as a self-professed ‘counterfeit critic’ and theoretician of acting and directing. The following article also forms the final chapter of his latest book, The Other Way: an Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing, to be published by Applause Books later this year. It represents, also, a concise charting of his own voyage of discovery – of the role of the director, and of the recognition of the autonomy and ‘higher calling’ of the actor that this has involved.