The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltès's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltès asserted in 1986 that ‘I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life’; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltès translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer. Maria Delgado is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and David Fancy is a freelance director based in Canada who is currently completing a PhD on Koltès's work.

Robert Armin, one of the ‘principal actors’ of Shakespeare’s plays named in the First Folio, probably joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 to take the place of Will Kempe as the company’s clown; and it was for him that Shakespeare wrote the parts of Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool in King Lear. Received wisdom, in part extrapolated from the nature of Armin’s roles, sees him as a more serious, even morose character than his predecessor, and he took his clowning seriously enough to write a book on ‘natural’ fools, Foole Upon Foole (1600), in addition to some minor verse, and a play, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, whence the only known illustration of him in performance derives. Although virtually disregarded by critics as little more than a jest book, Foole Upon Foole was also, argues Peter Cockett, a serious attempt to survey the variety of qualities and conditions of natural folly. It not only reveals much about Armin’s likely approach to his roles, but questions the conventional distinctions between the natural and the artificial fool. With close reference to Armin’s description of one of his subjects, Lean Leanard, Peter Cockett compares what this tells us about Armin’s possible approach to the role of Touchstone with the problems faced by the actor, David Tennant, in the RSC As You Like It of 1996. The author is a professional actor who emigrated to Canada in 1994. He now teaches acting and directing at McMaster University, Ontario, and is working with the University of Toronto’s medieval and renaissance players on a two-year project on the work and repertoire of the Queen’s Men.

The actor-manager system remained pivotal to West End production throughout the later nineteenth century. Focusing on one actor-manager, George Alexander, and using records of his expenditure on productions during the early 1890s, Lucie Sutherland demonstrates how financial data can be used to examine evolving relationships between industry leaders and dramatic authors in this era. She argues that this kind of evidence demonstrates not only the fiscal dimension to such relationships – level of investment per production, percentage of royalties paid – but also that the data may be analyzed to ascertain the responsiveness of an actor-manager to income generated. Here, significant attention is paid to box-office revenue and expenditure for the first productions of Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, exploring the income Alexander achieved by staging Wilde's drama prior to the arrest and trials of 1895. The use of quantitative data allows for close scrutiny of the work undertaken by prominent figures in the professional theatre; familiar narratives can be contested and endorsed through engagement with this type of material. Lucie Sutherland is a Teaching Associate in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She has written on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British theatre, including regional performance cultures and the impact of increasing professional regulation (for example the emergence of an actors' union) upon commercial theatre. She is currently completing a critical biography of Alexander.

Young Romanian theatre artists are very concerned to address issues from the recent past and in using collaborative art to educational and therapeutic ends. The implications of the increased ethical consciousness in their work is addressed here by Cristina Modreanu, who focuses on the productions of directors Gianina Cӑrbunariu and David Schwartz. She analyzes the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary work against the backdrop of post-Communist Romanian society and in a global context, as well as the dynamics connecting the new wave of Romanian theatre to internationall tendencies in contemporary art, as observed by authors such as Jaques Rancière and Claire Bishop. Cristina Modreanu's doctorate on Romanian theatre after 1989 is from Bucharest University of Theatre and Film, and she has also developed the subject in lectures at Tel Aviv University and Plymouth University. A Fulbright alumna and former Visiting Scholar at New York University, Performance Studies Department, Modreanu currently lectures in Contemporary Performance at Bucharest University. Her publications include articles on Romanian and Eastern European theatre for journals such as Theater, Theater der Zeit, and Alternatives Théâtrales, and for the anthology Romania after 2000: Five New Plays, edited by Martin E. Segal.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is remembered today as a great character actor, as a personality, and as a wit: but as a producer he is seldom considered an important or even a positive influence on the course of Shakespearean interpretation in the twentieth century. Focusing on Tree's 1904 production of The Tempest, Brian Pearce argues that Tree was in fact an original and inventive director. Contrasting the faint praise or contempt of theatre historians with the adoption of many of Tree's ideas in later literary criticism of The Tempest, Pearce also suggests that the acceptance of the right of contemporary experimental directors to act in effect as ‘scenic artists’ sits oddly with attitudes to Tree's work, in which he fulfilled precisely such a role. Brian Pearce completed his PhD at the University of London in 1992, and since returning to South Africa has worked as a theatre director. He is a member of the board of directors of the Durban Theatre Workshop Company, and also teaches drama at Technikon Natal.

New Theatre Quarterly has provided extensive coverage of the work of Odin Teatret, based since 1966 at Holstebro in Denmark, as also of the approach and ideas of its director, Eugenio Barba, who first wrote for us on ‘The Nature of Dramaturgy’ in NTQ1 (1985). Most recently, we documented Odin's twelfth production, Talabot, through David Shoemaker's analysis in NTQ24 (1990). Here, we offer an actor's experience of the creation of a one-person production – uniting personal circumstances, experiences in training, and exploratory research in the process which led towards the creation of Judith, based on the apocryphal story of the woman who seduced an enemy general in order to murder him. Its performer, Roberta Carreri, joined Odin Teatret in 1974, since when she has also performed in The Book of Dance (1974–80), Come! and the Day Will Be Ours (1976–80), Anabasis (1977–84), The Million (1978–84), Brecht's Ashes (1980–84), and The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus (1985–87). Her evocation here of the process which led to the creation of Judith is based on an interview with Exe Christoffersen, who also provides a detailed scenario of the production in performance. This feature forms part of Exe Christoffersen's Skuespillerens Vandring, published in Denmark by Klim in 1989. It has been excerpted and translated for NTQ by Gordi Roberts.

One of the distinguishing qualities of live theatre is its built-in ephemerality: yet all too often this involves the loss not only of the fruits of theatrical experience but of ‘experience’ itself, understood as the learning of craft – and this puts experimental companies and practitioners alike in danger of constantly reinventing the wheel. Connecting this to the needs of serious performers to acquire a wide range of expressive movements, and to explore the process of relating these movements to thoughts and feelings, Lea Logie discusses both common elements and contrasting approaches in the work of some of the great European practitioners, whose insights are too valuable to be forgotten or consigned to scholarly archives. Lea Logie is a tutor in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia, where she specializes in cross-cultural studies of Asian and western theatre.

Variously raising hackles and acclaim, the work of Peter Sellars is wider-ranging than the occasional observer might suppose – rooted in an apprenticeship as a puppeteer, followed by some sixty productions in a variety of media during the decade of the ‘eighties. But it is for his eclectic approach to opera that Sellars has become best known on the international festival circuit – which, suggests Maria M. Delgado, he is forced to travel by default, since his socially critical stance combined with an anti-realist aesthetic deters the sponsorship on which so much American theatre depends. Maria M. Delgado here offers an overview and an assessment of a career and a philosophy dedicated to an awareness ‘both of theatre’ s role as a force of political and social responsibility and understanding and of the need to rise above the literal’. The author teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary College in the University of London.

When Gordon Craig settled in Florence before the First World War, he found himself amidst a flourishing avant-garde artistic community. which he regarded with some caution. Between the staging of Rosmersholm with Duse in 1906 and the closing of his short-lived theatre school at the Goldoni Arena in 1914, he also conducted a correspondence with the eclectic cosmopolitan Carlo Placci – a previously unpublished source on which Alessandro Sardelli has drawn to illuminate Craig's Florentine years, during which his influential journal The Mask made its earliest appearance, and Craig also developed the idea of his adjustable screens, first employed during his Moscow collaboration with Stanislavski on Hamlet.

The folllowing article is a revised and edited version of a keynote address given by Faye Chunfang Fei at the Michael Chekhov Symposium, ‘Theatre of the Future?’, in November 2005 – held at Dartington Hall, where the actor and director Huang Zuolin worked under Chekhov’s guidance in 1936, an experience which helped to shape his lifelong work in uniting the best in western theatrical traditions with those of his native China. Faye Chunfang Fei traces this formative influence, along with those of Stanislavsky, of Brechtian Epic Theatre, and of traditional and modern Chinese forms, in shaping some of the major productions of probably the most influential figure in the Chinese theatre of the later twentieth century. Faye Chunfang Fei received her doctorate in Theatre Studies from the Graduate Center of City University of New York in 1991, and taught theatre in the United States for nine years before taking her present position of Professor of English and Drama at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Her publications include Chinese Theories of Theatre and Performance from Confucius to the Present (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and she is also an internationally produced playwright.

Yvonne Brewster is best known in Britain as artistic director of Talawa Theatre, but she has also been active in the theatres of Jamaica, Africa, and America, having worked as a drama teacher, television production assistant and presenter, and film director in Jamaica before beginning her international theatre directing career. Talawa was founded in 1985 by four women, with Yvonne Brewster as director, and with the aim of using ‘the ancient African ritual and black political experience of our forebears to inform, enrich, and enlighten British theatre’. Although Talawa has as yet been unable to give the work of black women writers the attention it deserves, the company is itself primarily female: the artistic director and the majority of employees are women, all the designers to date have been women, and so predominantly are the technical and stage management staff. A medium- to large-scale touring company, Talawa worked without a building base until 1991, when the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre became its home. Yvonne Brewster has directed all Talawa's work to date, focusing primarily on productions of the classics with black performers and on introducing the work of black playwrights to British audiences. Her productions have included The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James (1985–86), An Echo in the Bone by Dennis Scott (1986–87), O Babylon! by Derek Walcott (1987–88), Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1988–89), The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi (1989–90), The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1990–91), and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1991–92). Yvonne Brewster is also the editor of Methuen's two volumes of Black Plays (1987 and 1989). Here she is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, who has just completed her doctoral dissertation on women's theatre in Britain at Cambridge, and is currently working with the Open University.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has spawned several unauthorized sequel plays, which see Godot arrive on stage in 1960s Yugoslavia, 1980s Ireland, 1990s North America, and early 2000s Japan. The sequel play is a largely ignored phenomenon in literary scholarship, with the sequel form itself routinely dismissed as a derivative and inevitably disappointing text. Yet the sequel also re-situates and re-evaluates the original text, and its reiterative nature aptly parallels the paradox of non-ending in Beckett’s original Waiting for Godot. Focusing on four unauthorized stage sequels to Beckett’s play – Miodrag Bulatović’s Godo je došao (Godot Has Arrived, 1966), Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives, 1987), Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (1999), and Minoru Betsuyaku’s Yattekita Godot (Godot Has Come, 2007) – this article examines how these sequels rework the cultural logic of Godot’s arrival to their own critical and political ends. These playwrights draw on the very recursive, even frustrating, nature of the sequel form itself as an exegetic framework, reproducing the trope of non-ending that characterizes Beckett’s own work. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently working on two forthcoming Beckett-related monographs: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Post-War Francophone Theatre and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance.

In this article, Katie Normington outlines the increasing interest in Meyerhold's work and assesses previous applications of his methods to contemporary production work. She goes on to consider how working as movement director for Red Shift Theatre Company's adaptation of Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, enabled research into the application of Meyerhold's system of Biomechanics. Rehearsals for Bartleby combined actor-training and text rehearsals so that the Stanislavskian-trained actors gained ownership of biomechanical principles and could apply aspects to their independent exploration. This article analyzes the results of the work, and concludes that Meyerholdian techniques developed a physical architecture for the performance which, even during an arduous tour, maintained the clear shape and rhythm of the production. The use of principles such as rakurs, often neglected within present-day experimentation, proved to be essential in providing actors with a sense of composition and an awareness of their bodies in space. However, aspects such as facial expression and emotional excitability require further investigation. Katie Normington is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In 2006 Odin Teatret performed its multicultural version of Ur-Hamlet, derived from its early thirteenth-century origins in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, in the castle courtyard of Kronborg – the Elsinore setting for Shakespeare's version four centuries later. But the performance here followed years of preparation, and involved a multiplicity of theatre styles and performing traditions. The production had its beginnings at sessions of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Seville in 2004 and Wroclaw in 2005, and preparations continued in Holstebro, Copenhagen, and Bali from 2004 to 2006. Erik Exe Christoffersen followed the final rehearsals in Ravenna, and here gives an account of the Kronborg performance. Erik Exe Christoffersen is Associate Professor at the Institut for Æstetiske Fag, Department for Dramaturgy, Aarhus University, Denmark. His most recent publications include The Actor's Way (Routledge, 1993) and Teaterhandlinger (Theatre Actions, 2007). He is Editor of the Danish theatre journal Peripeti:Tidskrift for Dramaturgiske Studier.

In NTQ62, Joanna Ostrowska reported on Grotowski's last visit to his native Poland before his death in 1999. Here, Paul Allain assesses the Grotowksi inheritance in Pontedera, Italy, which had been the base for Grotowski's research since 1986 – specifically, on the second Generazioni International Theatre Festival, held there in June 2001. Paul Allain's doctoral research on the Gardzienice company took him to Poland during the years of ferment around the fall of Communism. He is presently Senior Lecturer in Drama in the University of Kent, and was co-editor of the recent Cambridge Companion to Chekhov.