The twelfth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) held in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2000, set out to explore, under the title ‘Action, Structure, Coherence’, the relationship between the actor and text – and specifically between actors trained in the Odin and other physically-rooted traditions and texts of the supposedly ‘classical’, text-based theatre of western Europe. David Korish here reports on three encounters between different pairs of actors and their texts, and their several means of developing a dynamic physical score appropriate to the text concerned. The co-founder and director of Teatro Abya Yala, an independent theatre company based in San José, Costa Rica, David Korish is also a member of the faculty of the School of Dramatic Arts of the National University of Costa Rica.

During the period of confusion and divided loyalties that followed the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the resources of the Moscow Art Theatre were severely depleted, and its artists and staff found themselves giving barebones performances for the enlightenment of often mystified working-class audiences. By 1919 the decision was taken to split the company, with a contingent sent out on tour with the intention of rejoining the parent group for the new season. In the event, with civil war raging between the forces of the Red Army and the White Guard, this did not happen, and groups of former members of the Art Theatre worked independently in the provinces and eventually abroad. While some returned to Moscow in 1922, the ‘Prague Group of the Moscow Art Theatre’ continued to lead an independent existence, and in this article Laurence Senelick traces the events leading up to and following its creation – which caused much annoyance to Stanislavsky and confusion in the West. A frequent contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the St George medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for services to Russian art and scholarship. His latest books are Stanislavsky: a Life in Letters (Routledge) and the forthcoming Soviet Theatre: a Documentary History (Yale University Press).

Report of the conference on ‘The Greek Theatre Mask in Ancient and Modern Performance’, held at the Noh Studio at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 20–21 April 2002.

This paper explores the differing levels of control over representations of Ada Reeve's mediated and ‘ghosted’ afterlife. Confessional memoirs that strategically frame the star persona for posterity provide her with the most immediate control. However, the star can become recruited to new assertions of cultural nationalism, which desire to claim coherent genealogies, public celebration, and commemoration of a star's afterlife. This, paired with nostalgic desires for past ‘golden ages’, also mediates strategic interests in her imbricated identity. Similarly, the star's mediated afterlife inevitably becomes susceptible to repositioning by theatre managements, the media, family, fans, and the public when their revisionist agendas make new assertions for the star's image after death in various immediate political and social contexts, and as communal encoded memory. Martina Lipton is Research Fellow (Australia) at the University of Warwick and Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She has published several articles in Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies on pantomime and popular theatre performers, and her paper ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ is in A World of Popular Entertainments: an Edited Volume of Critical Essays (2012).

Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.

The ten-minute play is burgeoning in the United States, yet it is a phenomenon which has received virtually no critical attention. Here, a contributing playwright places the ten-minute play – and its cousin, the ‘overnight’ play – within an historical and theoretical context in order to examine the aesthetic and political implications of the genre. Rick Mitchell's discussion thus ranges between the history of the one-act play, Walter Benjamin's essay on storytelling, Bertolt Brecht's notions of ‘complex’ (as opposed to ‘simple’) pleasures and epic acting, Filippo Marinetti's writings on the variety theatre, and Chekhov's ideas about the strengths of the short, nonsensical, vaudeville farce. Rick Mitchell also relates his own recent experience in creating a ten-minute comedy, Acadiana Sludge – written, rehearsed, and performed (off-book) in less than twenty-four hours – and the text of this play augments the article. Rick Mitchell's other plays include Brecht in L.A., Ventriloquist Sex, Urban Renewal, Potlatch, and The Composition of Herman Melville, recently published by Intellect Books. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he directs the Northridge Playwrights Workshop, and he has published numerous articles about performance, theory, and playwriting.

In this article Patricia Lufkin examines the work of Margaret Macnamara, a remarkable feminist playwright whose work has fallen into obscurity but who deserves attention as an important female participant in the Independent Theatre Movement and the Fabian Society. Macnamara’s associations and collaborations with key figures of the time, including George Bernard Shaw, are explored, and her progressive thought and participation in key organizations demonstrated. Importantly, Lufkin analyzes Macnamara’s play The Gates of the Morning (1908), highlighting its feminist critique of religion and its patriarchal influence. The critical response to her work was mixed, yet both positive and hostile reviews acknowledged that the play was a competent and stirring example of the new drama of progressive ideas, and helped to bring the ‘woman question’ to the forefront of people’s minds. Patricia Lufkin received her PhD from Louisiana State University, and is now teaching at Arkansas State University Mid-South. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century British theatre, most significantly on the life and work of Macnamara and Samuel Beckett.

In the last three decades the English-speaking stage has witnessed an explosion of plays and performances that deal with scientific topics and issues. Along with the increasing popularity of this ‘science play’ phenomenon, theatre and literary scholars have begun to define, contextualize, and categorize these plays, based on the topics, means, and aims that they cover, via analysis of specific works. The result of these attempts are a number of taxonomies provided by Judith Kupferman, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Carl Djerassi, and Eva-Sabine Zehelein. In this essay Seyedeh Anahit Kazzazi provides a critical examination of these categorizations in order to demonstrate their assets and difficulties, and suggests a new taxonomy and analytical framework based on text-based drama, perform ance, and the specific function of science in the plays. The essay includes full listings of science plays written after 1990 in the United Kingdom and the USA, categorized according to the taxonomy suggested. Seyedeh Anahit Kazzazi received her doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2017, and is currently examining the intersection between science, literature, philosophy, and theatre.

This article provides an illustrated description and analysis of Speaking Stones – a collaborative performance commissioned by Theatre Asou of Graz, Austria, with UK playwright Kaite O'Reilly and director Phillip Zarrilli as a response to the increasingly xenophobic and reactionary realities of the politics of central Europe. The account interrogates the question, the dramaturgical possibilities, and the performative premise which guided the creation of Speaking Stones. Phillip Zarrilli is internationally known for training actors through Asian martial arts and yoga, and as a director. In 2008 he is directing the premiere of Kaite O'Reilly's The Almond and the Seahorse for Sherman-Cymru Theatre and the Korean premiere of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis. He is also Professor of Performance Practice at the University of Exeter.

On 9 August 2020, Belarus erupted in protest over the falsified election results promoted and endorsed by existing president Aliaksandar Lukashenka. Playwright, director, and member of the Coordination Council for the peaceful transfer of power in Belarus, Andrei Kureichyk was one of the thousands on the streets that month. In early September he finished a new play depicting the events leading up to and surrounding the largest anti-government demonstrations in Belarus’s history. Before going into hiding, Kureichyk sent the play, Insulted. Belarus, to former Russian theatre critic John Freedman for translation. Together, the two men hoped to have a few theatres in various European and North American countries give a reading of the play in solidarity with the people of Belarus. Neither of them expected that, within two months, the play would be translated into eighteen languages and receive over seventy-seven readings on digital platforms. While many companies were eager to add their name to the global ledger of solidarity, the rise of authoritarianism, as well as the renewed reckoning with systemic racism and sexism in many cultures and countries around the world, additionally meant that many theatres found in the play a vehicle to reflect and comment on their own situations. This article, written by one of the initial participants of the project, attempts to chart how the Worldwide Readings of Insulted. Belarus navigated the translation of protest from Belarus to the world. Bryan Brown is Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter and co-director of visual theatre company ARTEL (American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory) and author of A History of the Theatre Laboratory (Routledge, 2019). He is a member of the editorial board of Theatre Dance and Performance Training, co-editing the special issue ‘Training Places: Dartington College of Arts’ (2018).

Born from its usage in the Natyasastra, rasa, as both concept and experience, is notoriously difficult to define. As an experience, rasa is generated within performance but cannot be contrived. However, the conditions for its coming into being can be prepared for by both practitioner and spectator, who generate rasa together within the performance. Rooted in a deeply specific cultural context, rasa is the Indian classical contribution to the particular area of performance studies research that seeks to explore and discuss the ineffable experience of the spectator in performance. However, the concept gains traction in the understanding of and engagement with its cultural specificity, and therefore serves as a poignant example of how cultural specificity is a way through cultural barriers in performance. Scheherazaad Cooper has recently completed her PhD in practice-as-research at Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing on the contemporary Odissi Indian classical dance practitioner's cultivation of access points in performance. This article is developed from the research undertaken for her doctoral thesis, inspired and informed by Maria Shevtsova's work in the sociology of theatre and performance.

Theodore Komisarjevsky was a prominent figure in the inter-war British theatre until his migration to North America in 1936. While recent studies have foregrounded the various artistic factors that influenced his work and his eventual departure, little attention has been placed on the sociopolitical issues. Most notably, there has been no serious consideration of the impact that his nationality had on the opportunities that were available to him. In this article Philippa Burt examines Komisarjevsky's work in relation to the growing nationalistic and Russophobic attitudes in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses particularly on his series of productions at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and shows the subsequent critical outrage to be rooted in a desire to protect Shakespeare and, by extension, Britain as a whole from the ‘interference’ of a Russian director. Dr Philippa Burt is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has previously published articles on Harley Granville Barker and Joan Littlewood, and is the recent recipient of a Harry Ransom Research Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.

In a keynote address delivered at the Michael Chekhov symposium ‘Theatre of the Future?’, held at Dartington Hall in November 2005, Andrei Kirillov argued that Chekhov’s ideas have not yet been fully assimilated, pointing out that merely to follow his exercises without understanding their connection to the actor’s imagination and meditative as well as spiritual dimensions is to fail fully to understand him. Andrei Kirillov is a researcher and Assistant Chair at the Theatre Department of the Russian Institute of the History of the Arts. His numerous publications on the history and theory of Russian theatre include Michael Chekhov: the Path of the Actor, co-edited with Bella Merlin (2005), and Teatr Mikhaila Chekhova: Russkoye Akterskoye Iskusstvo XX veca (The Theatre of Michael Chekhov: the Art of Russian Acting in the Twentieth Century, 1993). Bella Merlin originally enhanced the English-language version of this lecture, and with the author’s approval it has been further edited by NTQ for publication.

Traditionally, the term ‘soubrette’ referred to secondary light-sounding soprano maidservant roles in opera; however, the term now encompasses a broader spectrum of operatic character types. In this article Valerie Lynn Schrader examines the archetype of the ‘soubrette’ in classic and contemporary musical theatre. Because the soubrette is not clearly defined in these forms, in doing so she seeks to establish the varying characteristics of the type, and to analyze musical theatre characters who are representative examples. Using a list of the longest-running Broadway shows from the popular Broadway fan website playbill.com, Valerie Lynn Schrader has conducted a thematic analysis of fifty-eight ‘soubrette’ characters in thirty musicals. By defining and studying the soubrette, she seeks to provide both theatre scholars and practitioners with a tool for character analysis and performance study. Valerie Lynn Schrader is Assistant Professor of Communications at the Schuylkill campus of Pennsylvania State University. As a rhetorical critic, her research focuses on rhetorical messages in musical theatre texts and how these messages are conveyed to audiences through performance. She is a classically trained soubrette soprano and often performs in local theatre productions.

Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), exemplary for its enlightenment and humanist ideals, assembles Jews, Christians, and Muslims in dialogue during the medieval crusades in Jerusalem. Their encounters allow them to transcend conflict, to recognize their common humanity, and to resolve their differences through dialectical discourse and group arguments. In this article Eva Urban looks closely at the representation of enlightenment in this play and examines the potential role of plays and theatre practice in developing autonomous citizenship and intercultural understanding. Particular reference is made to the 2013 Berliner Ensemble production of Nathan the Wise in relation to aesthetic debates about modern political drama. Eva Urban is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2010) and has published a number of articles on political drama and Irish studies.

On 7 May 1988 a meeting was held at Goldsmiths' College, London, involving a number of theatre practitioners and academics on the left, to discuss the current state of British theatre under Thatcherism and suggest some possible responses. The meeting was organized by Vera Gottlieb, and NTQ Editor Simon Trussler, who both teach in the Drama Department at Goldsmiths' College. Also present were Clive Barker, Pam Brighton, Colin Chambers, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Holland, Kate Harwood, Albert Hunt, Nesta Jones, John McGrath, Paul Moriarty, Rob Ritchie, and Juliet Stevenson. Apologies for absence were received from Caryl Churchill, Tilda Swinton, and Clare Venables. This abbreviated transcript was edited by Andy Lavender.

Although a good deal of his work was seen in London and New York, the name of Max Reinhardt remains for most English-speaking theatre students all-too-vaguely associated with those innovations which helped to give a new importance to the ‘totality’ of the relationship between actors, audience, stage lighting and design, movement and music, in the earlier part of this century. Even less is known here about one of Reinhardt's leading collaborators. Ernst Stern – the longest-serving, most versatile, and most professional of his designers. Yet Stern settled in England in 1933, and left his papers to the Victoria and Albert Museum, upon whose resources Hugh Rorrison has drawn in assembling this view of Stern's contribution to Reinhardt's theatre in particular, and to twentieth-Century scenography in general. Hugh Rorrison, who was a regular contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, teaches in the Department of German of the University of Leeds.

After his experimental work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which bore fruit in the production of Marat/Sade in 1964 and culminated in the controversial Vietnam play US in 1966, Peter Brook returned to the classical repertoire in which he had made his name as ‘enfant terrible’ of British theatre, with Seneca's Oedipus for the National Theatre in 1968, and, two years later, A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC. But the very success of ‘Brook's Dream’ – the way in which its transformation into an ‘event’ required actors ‘to do their duty rather than what came from life’ – heightened Brook's sense that he could no longer work creatively under such conditions, and in 1970 he formed his Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale, which developed its early work for the Persepolis festivals and in the treks across Africa chronicled by John Heilpern in Conference of the Birds. Eventually the company settled in Paris at the Théâtre aux Bouffes du Nord in 1974: but while their work there has been widely acclaimed, it has been subjected to little detailed analysis in English. In the original series of TQ, Kenneth Tynan offered a highly critical view in TQ25. Here, David Williams – a graduate of the Drama Department of the University of Kent, currently working in community theatre at Hoxton Hall in London's East End – corrects the balance with a full descriptive analysis of Brook's major productions at the Bouffes – Timon of Athens. The Ik, a conflation of Jarry's Ubu plays, and a re-creation of the Conference of the Birds