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 1978, Robert Brustein observed that Ibsen's The Master Builder subtly undermined the tenets of naturalism for which both the play and its author are usually remembered. Here, William W. Demastes suggests that, though lacking precise paradigms when they wrote the play and the critique, Ibsen and Brustein both approach the understanding of human interaction in ways that are currently explained through the ‘new’ scientific paradigm of chaos theory. This essay presents a general summary of chaos theory, applies it to The Master Builder, suggests ways in which Ibsen anticipates the postmodernists, and how, in turn, chaos theory can help in comprehending several paths that the theatre has followed since the inception of postmodernism. William W. Demastes is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, and is author of Beyond Naturalism: a New Realism in American Theatre (1988). This essay is an extension of his book, and is designed in part as in introduction to his next book-length study, on the confluence of scientific and dramatic thought in the twentieth century.

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.

Nearly seventy-five years after his death, Konstantin Stanislavsky remains a toweringly influential figure, and many fundamental ideas about acting can be traced back to his practice. In this article, Marc Silberschatz examines the correspondences with, and divergences from, flow theory – the theory surrounding the psychological state associated with ‘being in the zone’ – in Stanislavsky's practice. Although separated by vast differences in social, cultural, and historical context, some significant and increasing correspondences between flow theory and Stanislavsky's practice are revealed and examined. Additionally, divergences from flow theory are identified and interrogated, suggesting that Stanislavsky's reliance on fixed, repeatable performance scores and divided consciousness are direct impediments to the achievement of flow. Marc Silberschatz is a PhD candidate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is also a professional theatre director whose work has been seen in both the United States and Scotland.

In the second and third volumes of the Russian edition of Stanislavsky's notebooks, Rezhisserskie Egzemplary (Moscow, 1981 and 1983), are to be found Stanislavsky's own notes on his productions of Chekhov's plays for the Moscow Art Theatre – The Seagull, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Questioning the received wisdom that in many ways his first director served Chekhov ill, with over-elaborate productions which failed to bring out the humour and ambiguity of the plays, Jovan Hristić here draws deeply upon the notebooks to contrast their instructions and descriptions with the directions and stated or presumed intentions of Chekhov himself. He illuminatingly reveals that, while some of Stanislavsky's solutions understandably appear over-the-top to more minimalist modern tastes, they are almost invariably complementary rather than contradictory to Chekhov, and designed to serve the plays rather than to subject them to directorial whim.

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.

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.

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.

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 recent criticism a perceived dichotomy has emerged between ‘new writing’ and ‘new work’ for the theatre. In this article Rosalind Haslett contends that this dichotomy is often reflected in the infrastructure of theatre organizations and theatre spaces themselves. Thus ‘new writing’ is seen to refer to a literary process which takes place in a conventional theatre building, while ‘new work’ tends to occur in non-traditional forms and spaces. The relationship between non-conventional spaces and the performance work that might take place in them has received some critical attention, but there has been less exploration of the ways in which theatre architecture can inform the processes which surround new writing for the theatre. Tracing the history of the National Theatre in London back to its origins, long before it occupied a building of its own, Rosalind Haslett explores the relationship between the policies and processes taking place within the organization and the physical and architectural development of actualizing its building. She suggests that, if the layout of a theatre building has the power to influence the kind of work and the modes of production which take place within it, the activities of the individuals and organizations residing within such structures can also drive architectural change. Rosalind Haslett is Lecturer in Dramatic Literature at Newcastle University. Her research interests include dramaturgy and literature management, theatre architecture, and theatre history.

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.

When Harley Granville Barker was invited to stage a theatre season in New York following the outbreak of the First World War, senior figures within British politics seized on it as an opportunity to promote the British war effort in the United States. It was, however, Barker's impromptu decision to extend his stay and tour Euripides’ The Trojan Women to major colleges on the East Coast that saw him come close to realizing this goal. Through an examination of the production, the discourse that surrounded it, and the changing diplomatic relations between Britain and the USA, Philippa Burt explores in this article the extent to which Barker used Euripides as a propaganda tool through which to engage and educate the largely isolationist North American public. At the same time, she argues that Barker challenged the propaganda machine by refusing to perpetuate the dominant nationalistic and xenophobic narratives and, instead, intended a condemnation of all war. Philippa Burt is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her previous publications include numerous articles and a chapter on Barker's work with choruses in the forthcoming The Great European Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Reinhardt, Jessner, Barker (Bloomsbury Methuen).

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 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.

Corporeal mime and the work of Etienne Decroux are well known in the world of physical theatre, remaining inspirational to those who have studied and explored this complex art form. In the following article Nicola Baylis examines the prevailing misunderstandings that surround corporeal mime, briefly addressing its historical context, and moving on to discuss contemporary applications of Decroux's training system. With the increasing advent of innovative theatre produced by a new wave of actors trained in corporeal mime, she focuses on the current work of artists in Naples, and concludes with reflections on corporeal mime's relevance to present-day experimental performance and on the potential future role of the form within modern theatre. Nicola Baylis is an actor, director, and teacher who has trained in corporeal mime and commedia dell'arte. Before moving to Naples, she worked as a Lecturer in Drama on degree programmes at Bournemouth and Poole College, in conjunction with Bournemouth University. She is currently working on an adaptation of Macbeth which will be performed in London in the autumn.

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.

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.

During the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ in Morocco (1956–1999), state-sponsored violence was embedded not only in assaults on the bodies of victims, but also in their affective and psychological well-being. This occurred to such an extent that many attempts at the narrativization of violence via testimonials and prison memoirs fail to convey the trauma experienced in Moroccan secret prisons. In the present article Khalid Amine is concerned with the fragility of testimony as a performative act, in which the obligation of voicing pain and trauma is in tension with the impossibility of its telling. After the hearing sessions organized by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) in 2004, another narrative turn has emerged in Moroccan theatre and in other artistic forms whereby reenactments of prison memoirs, testimonials, and other registers of repressed personal archives are employed onstage as a means of breaching the walls between the personal and political. Khalid Amine is Professor of Performance Studies, Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco. He is co-author with Marvin Carlson of The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (2012).