In his discussion-piece for NTQ 28 (1991), Graham Ley raised questions about the self-determination of the avant-garde, drawing on analogies from dance and design to explore the problem of the post-modern in the theatre. He also outlined a critique of what he called an ‘alternative establishment in theatrical endeavour’: here, he extends that critique into an analysis of the techniques of persuasion to be found in one of the most influential texts in post-war theatrical theory, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, arguing for an enhanced attention to be given to the language and textuality of theory. Graham Ley is a writer and researcher who has taught in the Universities of London and Auckland. As Australian Studies Fellow in Theatre at the University of New South Wales in 1984, he compiled jointly with Peter Fitzpatrick of Monash University the survey of new developments in Australian theatre published in NTQ5 (1986). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991. He is currently working on a book on theatrical theory.

AN ALTERNATIVE theatre movement emerged in Poland in the mid 1950s, following the post-Stalinist thaw. Its creators invented and applied new means of communication between actor and spectator thanks to their radical opposition to the mainstream state repertory theatres. This resulted not only in the internationally known achievements of Grotowski and Kantor, but also in the creation of thousands of independent student and amateur groups of great artistic and social importance. The new political and economic order in Poland has liberated these alternative theatres from their political duties and charged them with the even more difficult task of helping and supporting the search for new means of social communication.

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 large part due to the relative lack of productions in Europe, the plays of Wole Soyinka have mostly been approached from a literary point of view rather than analyzed as theatrical events. Because the plays rely heavily on non-verbal conventions, this neglect of visual and acoustic patterns promotes an incomplete understanding of Soyinka's idea of theatre. Here, for the first time, a play by Soyinka is analyzed from the point of view of performance – specifically, the production of Death and the King's Horseman staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1990. Martin Rohmer examines the transformation of playscript into mise-en-scène, focusing in particular on the use of music and dance, but looking also at the production as an intercultural event – asking not only how far a European company has to rely on African performing skills, but how far a European cast and audience is capable of a proper understanding of the play. This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held in Bayreuth in June 1992. Martin Rohmer studied Drama, German Literature, Anthropology, and Philosophy in Munich, and Theatre, Film and TV Studies at the University of Glasgow, before completing his MA in Munich in 1992. Presently he is a Research Assistant at the University of Bayreuth, where he is working on a PhD on the performing arts in Zimbabwe.

The Café-Concert as an object of study has tended to attract the interest of art rather than theatre historians, despite the fact that it was the major form of popular entertainment in France during the nineteenth century. Similar but not identical to the English music hall of the same period, the Café-Concert produced a number of stars of national importance, a large majority of whom were women. Through the writings of journalists and commentators of the period, this article explores how these female performers were perceived and constructed as objects of the public gaze. The author, Geraldine Harris, is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, with interests in both popular and feminist theatre.

This article is the latest contribution to a continuing debate on the editing of Shakespeare in relation to new conceptions of authorship and authority and to the developing contribution of performance studies. Introduced by Brian Parker in NTQ24 (1990), it has subsequently drawn submissions from Stanley Wells in NTQ26 (1991), Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey in NTQ 34 (1992) and, most recently, Alan Posener in NTQ39 (1994). Here, Andrew Spong challenges criticisms which Holderness and Loughrey's ‘Shakespearean Originals’ project has received, and suggests that the sort of methodological and theoretical fallacies which its editors have been accused of displaying can be no less readily evidenced from the positions adopted by their critics. Andrew Spong is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Textual and Contextual Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include the challenge of historical materialism to postmodernism and the sociology of the Elizabethan theatre.

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.

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.

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.

Recent researchers into the documentary evidence of Shakespeare's professional life as a writer–performer have understandably restricted themselves to his human fellows and rivals. But on Bankside in the 1590s bear-baiting vied for popularity with theatre, and in this article, Nick de Somogyi seeks to correct a long-standing error of naming among the celebrity fighting bears of Paris Garden – stabled some hundred yards west of the Globe. Scholars are agreed that the careers of George Stone, Harry Hunks, and the great Sackerson competed for attention with the dramatist's own. But while Sackerson's is the only contemporary name Shakespeare ever dropped in his plays, and while George Stone probably expired in the same season as witnessed the premiere of Macbeth, it is argued here that the only scholarly basis for the existence of ‘the famous Harry Hunks’ lies in the erratic contemporary punctuation of a single poem. A Contributing Editor to NTQ, Nick de Somogyi gained his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and is now an independent scholar and textual consultant. He was the founder editor of the Globe Quartos series for Nick Hern Books, and The Winter's Tale, the eighteenth play in his Shakespeare Folios series (with Simon Trussler) appeared in early 2011. He curated three successive exhibitions at Shakespeare's Globe (2003–5), contributed to the National Portrait Gallery's Searching for Shakespeare exhibition (2006), and is the author of Shakespeare's Theatre of War (1998) and Shakespeare on Theatre (2011). This is the first in a series of pieces on the relationship between playhouse and beargarden he is currently researching.

The Holstebro Festuge (festival week), which marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014, is a huge undertaking organized by Odin Teatret every three years that involves the participation of many local people and a significant number of town and regional organizations as well as numerous international artists in a cultural extravaganza of performances, screenings, art exhibits, and barters that takes place over nine days in the city and surrounding region. In this article, Ian Watson examines the implications of the Festuge for Odin’s connection to and relationship with the city it has called home for a little under fifty years. As Watson points out, the tacitly accepted narrative, embedded in much of Eugenio Barba’s considerable body of writings, Odin’s performances and workshops as well as much of the material written about Barba and/or his company by scholars, is that the pursuit of an aesthetic is Barba’s primary if not sole preoccupation. Watson challenges this limited reading as he draws upon the sociologist Marcel Mauss’s study of ‘gifting’ in particular traditional societies, and the political scientist Robert Putnam’s parsing of social capital in Bowling Alone to examine the Festuge. Ian Watson is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. Among other publications, he is author of Towards a Third Theatre and Negotiating Culture: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate.

This article describes and analyzes Barry Kyle's production of The Dillen, a community project staged by the RSC in 1983, in which The Other Place became no more than a base from which the play, its actors, and its audiences set out into the streets, fields and river in Stratford, to re-enact the life of a working-class Stratford man, George Hewins, born around a century earlier. In addition to placing the play in its social, political, and local context, the authors raise questions about the implications of the production for the RSC and the people of Stratford today. The kernel of this article was part of an English M.A. dissertation by Catherine Prentice at the University of Warwick in Summer 1998, supervised by Tony Howard. Catherine Prentice and Helena Leongamornlert, a University of Warwick graduate in English and American Literature, have collaborated in further research and interviews to present the version which follows, and both plan further work on community drama. The authors extend their grateful thanks to Tony Howard for his support and advice.

Comparisons between King Lear and the biblical Book of Job have become commonplace in scholarship. This paper traces the impact of the Lear–Job connection on the staging and reception of Shakespeare’s play in Hebrew theatre. Due to this connection, King Lear was put within the orbit of a central cultural endeavour for Zionism: the re-appropriation of the Hebrew Bible for the formation of a new national identity. In the mid-twentieth century, the play appealed to directors who searched for Hebrew ‘biblical’ theatre, and a web of intertextual allusions in the press tied Shakespeare’s tragedy to the Book of Job and to rabbinic interpretations of it. However, the equivocal position held by Job within the Zionist imagination undermined the place of King Lear as well. Ultimately, the two were intertwined in the politics of their reception in Hebrew theatre. Yair Lipshitz is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts in Tel Aviv University. In his research, he explores the various intersections between theatre, performance, and Jewish religious traditions. He is the author of two books in Hebrew: The Holy Tongue, Comedy’s Version (Bar Ilan University Press, 2010) and Embodied Tradition: Theatrical Performances of Jewish Texts (forthcoming).

Eugenio Barba here discusses the desires and ideas driving his early years as a practitioner, some of the creative, social, and ethical principles underlying the work of the Odin Teatret, which he founded in 1964, and the group's most recent, new-style ‘barter’ events with and within local communities. His public dialogue with NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova and members of the audience provides fresh insight into the workings of one of the most influential figures, and one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives, of the late twentieth century. The conversation took place on 31 October 2005 at Goldsmiths College, University of London, during the Odin's UK tour (as documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ 86), and included questions from the audience and concluding words from Odin performer Iben Nagel Rasmussen, who had performed White as Jasmin earlier in the evening. The transcript of this conversation, inaugurating a series of such public conversations at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, was edited for publication with the full and warm collaboration of Eugenio Barba.

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.

Traditionally, class has been an important category of identity in discussions of political theatre. However, in recent years the concept has fallen out of favour, partly because of changes in the forces and relations of capitalist production. The conventional Marxist use of the term, which defined an individual's class position in relation to the position they occupied in the capitalist production process, seemed anachronistic in an era of globalization. Moreover, the rise of identity politics, queer theory, feminism, and post-colonialism have proffered alternative categories of identity that have displaced class as the primary marker of self. Glenn D'Cruz reconsiders the role of class in the cultural life of Australia by examining the recent work of Melbourne Workers Theatre, a theatre company devoted to promoting class-consciousness, in relation to John Frow's more recent re-conceptualization of class. He looks specifically at two of the company's plays, the award-winning Who's Afraid of the Working Class? and The Waiting Room, with reference to Frow's work on class, arguing that these productions articulate a more complex and sophisticated understanding of class and its relation to politics of race and gender today. Glenn D'Cruz teaches drama and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia.

Simianification is the practice of humans inhabiting the simian body on stage. Because Asians have lived with monkeys and apes, several Asian theatre traditions have long legacies of representing monkeys on stage. In Europe and North America, where non-human primates did not exist, they are not a familiar feature in performance until nineteenth-century music hall and circus and twentieth-century film and television. In some recent performances in Asia dancers and actors have expanded their understanding of monkey roles by incorporating scientific discoveries, modern movement techniques, and global pop culture. On the British and American stage, actors experiment to ‘impersonate’ the humanized ape bodily and mentally, without the aid of the disguises and prosthetics usual in film. These performers ‘embody’ the philosophical inquiry of what it means to ‘be monkey’ by inhabiting a monkey’s body while still performing ‘art’ for a human audience. Catherine Diamond, a Contributing Editor to NTQ, is a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is also the director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia.

For its size, Singapore hosts an exceptional amount of theatrical activity, emanating both from within the city state and from its role as sponsor of regional international workshops and productions. Its English-speaking dramatists are in the forefront of staging original plays about the foibles of Singaporean society and serving as mediators among South-east Asian theatre practitioners. While troupes depend on government funding and must obtain government permits to perform, most have opted to take an alternative position to the government's narrative of the Singapore success story. This has created an uneasy relationship that undermines the strength of the theatre's social-political critique and encourages self-censorship. In the following essay, Catherine Diamond examines the psychologically cramped conditions within which current Singaporean dramatists operate through a comparison of monodramas. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre at Soochow University in Taiwan, and a frequent contributor to NTQ. She is currently directing a flamenco dance-drama adaptation of The House of Bernarda Alba.