In today's diverse and evolving world of performance there is a place for the reinvestigation of the archaic realm of shamanism, and the extent to which it relates to modern theatre practice. To what extent do the calling, initiation, trance, and performance states of the shaman resemble the experience of today's actors? Is there really a dichotomy between a theatre of greed and a theatre of need? Inspired by her own personal sense of the evolution of the actor from the role of the shaman, Rachel Karafistan here considers the work of contemporary, so-called ‘third theatres’ such as Odin Teatret, Teatr Biuro Podrozy, and Derevo in the light of shamanic precedent. Having initially studied Psychology at university, Rachel Karafistan worked as a freelance director, teacher, and actor in England for seven years while researching her doctoral study: Shamanic Dimensions within Theatre Practice Today: a Theoretical and Experiential Investigation, which she completed in 2001. She is currently working as an actress and teacher in Poland with Teatr Biuro Podrozy and her own company, COSmino.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this article Dmitry Trubotchkin focuses on Homer's Iliad as directed by Stathis Livathinos and premiered in Athens on 4 July 2013 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Summer Festival – as far as is known, the first production of the complete Iliad in world theatre. It was performed by fifteen actors, each of whom played several roles and also acted the role of the ancient rhapsode, or narrator of epics. Livathinos's Iliad restored the original understanding of ‘epic theatre’, which differs from what is usually meant by this term in the light of Brechtian theory and practice with its didactic and distancing emphases. In the Greek performance, the transformation of an actor from one role to another and from acting to narration is constant, and the voice of Homer as a ‘collective author’ can be heard through all these transformations. Livathinos's Iliad may well be a landmark, indicating a new way of presenting epics on the stage. Dmitry Trubotchkin is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Russian University of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Moscow State University. He heads the Department of Ancient and Medieval Art at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow. His publications include ‘All is Well, the Old Man is Still Dancing’: Roman Palliata in Action (2005), Ancient Literature and Dramaturgy (2010), and Rimas Tuminas: the Moscow Productions (forthcoming).

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).

Charles Macklin, the celebrated eighteenth-century actor and playwright, is nowremembered as a comedian and a comedic writer; however, his first produced workas an author was the historical drama Henry VII, or the PopishImposter. This was immediately condemned as a flop and, although it waspublished, it was never again produced. In this article Michael M. Wagonerexamines the nature of the play’s failure by questioning the acceptednarratives of theatrical success. Specifically, he engages issues of audiencereception as well as the playwright’s persona to understand thecombined relationship between the two dynamics that can result in aplay’s failure. Ultimately, both Macklin’s persona and hislater work secured the flop narrative in order to temper the subsequentexpectations of his audiences. Michael M. Wagoner is a doctoral candidate atFlorida State University, and he holds an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance fromMary Baldwin College. His research examines the performance and dramaturgy ofearly modern drama, and his essay ‘Imaginative Bodies and BodiesImagined: Extreme Casting in Shakespeare’s TheTempest and Fletcher and Massinger’s The SeaVoyage’ will appear in The Bear Stage: ShapingShakespeare for Performance (Farleigh Dickinson University Press,2015).

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.

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.

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).

On 22 May 1938, Stanislavsky gathered his group of eleven assistant-pedagogues at the Opera-Dramatic Studio for a last collective class. The Studio was already free for the summer vacation after the tumultuous first show of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, opened only to a small number of guests a week before. Mikhail Kedrov had rehearsed the performance with the students for the preceding three years, and it was doomed to become the first public presentation of the so-called ‘method of physical actions’. Nevertheless, the presentation brought nothing more than doubts about the work done, and Stanislavsky felt compelled to call upon the pedagogues to understand what had happened. After briefly presenting his opinion of the work that had been shown, he started to elaborate on the technical and artistic achievements of the Studio. Stanislavsky began his talk in its stenographic transcript (File No. 21179 in the Stanislavsky Fund of the Moscow Art Theatre Museum Archives) with: ‘Everything now is lost. The technique and all the rest. I don’t see any foundation … any more. You should now start by the critique of the method I have been experimenting on.’ This article analyzes Stanislavsky’s documented talk, showing that he was not convinced that he had a new methodology, let alone one that synthesized his life-long theatre experiments. It seeks to present evidence that both the Physical Action and Active Analysis methodologies derived from Stanislavsky’s thought post mortem were developed only as two possible paths from his experiments, but were not the telos of his thought.

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.

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).

In a sequel to his essay ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’ in NTQ26, Peter Nicholls here explores a very different set of developments in the French avant-garde drama of the period. Arguing that Dada and Surrealist theatre have a strongly marked ‘anti-oedipal’ tendency, he suggests that their polemics against the family and paternal law contrast with the increasing prominence given to Freud's masterplot in Expressionism. Peter Nicholls teaches English and American Literature at the University of Sussex: his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan in 1992.

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.

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

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.