This article is based on discussions with artistic directors and administrators of British Theatre in Education companies about past and current practice and changing funding resources. Persephone Sextou reviews developments in TiE practice since its beginnings in the 1960s, focusing upon the situation in the 1990s following the enforcement of National Curriculum requirements, the redirection of government funding to partnerships in education, and the availability of funds from the National Lottery. She describes how the remaining TiE companies are struggling not to compromise their artistic autonomy, and considers the relevance of the British TiE experience in relation to the potential for the development of the medium in other countries. Persephone Sextou is an instructor in Drama and Theatre in Education at the University of Thessaly in Greece, and is researching the transference of British TiE to a Greek context for her doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her book on School Dramatization has been published in Greece.

At the 2021 Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM), Southeast Asian dramatists presented new works that combined personal histories with the overarching political struggles in the region. One presentation, Deleted Scenes in SEA: Ownership Under Censorship, not only took up the issues of censorship and self-censorship but also entangled the distinct cultural identities of three countries – Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand – by reprising scenes formerly banned in them. The new versions were directed and performed in a language of one of the other countries. Adapting each other’s censored scenes, and re-enacting their similar experiences in countering political repression, required empathetic imagination, and could be a new theatrical platform for creating a sense of regional solidarity. Catherine Diamond is a Professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is the author of Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) and the playwright/director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project (KETEP) in Southeast Asia.

In this article, Jung-Soon Shim indicates how Han Tae-Sook transforms Lady Macbeth's subconscious into an interculturally emotional space in which the Christian concept of guilt and the Korean ethos of Han intersect. In this way, the director conducts an intercultural dialogue, negotiating the Western world view in Shakespeare's Macbeth together with the traditional Confucian-shamanistic world view to be found in Korea. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, currently President of the Korean Theatre Studies Association (KTSA), and a founding member and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT). Her numerous books include Twenty-First Century Korean Women Theatre Directors (2004).

Among the infinite variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare, relatively little attention has been paid, even by scholars professedly concerned with Shakespeare's language, to the quality and nature of the sound of his words – despite the commonplace assumption that the young Shakespeare, in particular, was in love with language. One consequence is that such a major element of Richard II as its high proportion of rhyming couplets is either briefly (and negatively) dismissed, or ignored. Here, Kenneth C. Bennett, who teaches in the Department of English at Lake Forest College, lllinois, considers in detail the distinctive qualities and ‘sonances’ of language in the play, looking in particular at the couplets, whose use and significance he analyzes and defends.

In the fall of 1997, Robert Lyons assisted at the Berliner Ensemble on the production of Leben des Galilei directed by B. K. Tragelehn, who himself had assisted on Brecht's 1955 production of the play, his last before his death. The following article comprises a series of notes, thoughts, and insights gathered and written by the author during the course of rehearsals, research into the theatre's archives, and following discussions spurred by the centenary celebrations of Brecht's birth. Issues arising include the autobiographical elements within Galilei, the nature of ‘alienated’ acting and the relevance of gestus, the treatment of time in the epic theatre, the parable and the need for context in the epic theatre, the necessity of coming to terms with Brecht for our own times, the potential for using ‘Brecht’ in the American theatre, and the future of the Berliner Ensemble. Robert Lyons, who studied at Wabash College, UCLA, and Humboldt University, is an independent director currently living and working in Berlin.

Sustaining his reputation for production work that is both original and challenging, Edward Bond worked closely with the directors of Jackets during its productions at Lancaster and in Leicester and London in 1989–90. After a mixed experience with the RSC directing his War Plays, Bond continued to develop his concept of ‘theatre events’, and to work towards the particular style of acting that is necessary for his work in performance. Ian Stuart, a doctoral candidate in dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzes here how the resulting twin concepts of ‘theatre events’ and ‘theatre acting’ translated into practice, exploring both the workin-progress and its realization through setting, lighting, and critical response. Earlier reconstructions and analyses of Bond's plays in production in TQ and NTQ have included features on Lear in TQ5 (1972) and The Fool in TQ21 (1976), both at the Royal Court, and on his own production at the Cottesloe of Summer in NTQ6 (1986).

The theoretical writings of Eugenio Barba on the nature and disciplines of acting have been a feature of NTQ since its first issue. These writings emerge, of course, from Barba's work with Odin Teatret, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary from its base in Holstebro, Denmark – and also from his formative association with ISTA. the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Accordingly, when a leading authority recently described Barba, along with Brecht and Grotowski, as one of the three major European influences on contemporary Latin American theatre, he was paying tribute to active participation and cross-fertilization, rather than to textbook discipleship. In the following article, Ian Watson, whose study of ‘Catharsis and the Actor’ appeared in NTQ 16 (1988), looks in detail at the nature and the consequences of Barba's ‘Latin American connection’.

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.

Exactly one hundred years separate two notorious dramatic aristocrats: Alfred Jarry's wild Ubu and Sarah Kane's apathetic Hippolytus. Ubu is iconic of Jarry's surreal reaction to nineteenth-century positivism and, at the same time, a criticism of modernism's abstract poetics and will-less aesthetic experience. Kane's Hippolytus is a witty and macabre response to the late twentieth-century ‘logic’ of capitalism. Nevertheless, these seemingly diametrically opposed characters share one trait that binds them – spending desire. In this article Dror Harari considers these figures as conspicuous waypoints along a broader spectrum of indispensable relations between body and desire in modern theatre. He tracks certain dramaturgies of desire, as theorized and/or realized by theatre practitioners and philosophers. Starting with modernist attempts to overcome desire by likening the performer's body to a machine, he closes with the indifferent Hippolytus becoming a desiring machine. Dror Harari is senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. His recent articles have appeared in The Drama Review, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Annual. His study Self-Performance: Performance Art and the Representation of Self is forthcoming in Hebrew from Resling Publications, an Israeli academic publishing house.

In this article, Linda Mackenney explores the four epic plays John McGrath wrote between 1989 and 1996 in the aftermath of his forced resignation from 7:84 Scotland in 1988. These were produced in association with David MacLennan of Wildcat Stage Productions and televised by McGrath's Freeway Films for Channel Four in the 1990s. McGrath died of leukaemia in 2002, and MacLennan died earlier this year after a battle with motor neurone disease; but the work they did together in the 1990s forms a significant part of their legacy. Linda Mackenney was introduced to McGrath's work as a student, when she attended the lectures at the University of Cambridge which were later published as his seminal critical work, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form. She carried out the research for 7:84 Scotland's Clydebuilt Season in 1982, was the creator of the Scottish Theatre Archive at Glasgow University Library, and is the author of The Activities of Popular Dramatists and Drama Groups in Scotland, 1900–1952 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). She was a member of the 7:84 Scotland Board of Directors between 1983 and 1988 and is currently completing a study of John McGrath's theatre writings.

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

As a complementary piece to her preceding article on the formative significance of The Seagull to Stanislavsky's early thinking, Bella Merlin here looks at the play in the context of Stanislavsky's later work, when he was developing the Method of Physical Actions – an approach to a text which placed improvisation and the physical exploration of a scene at the centre of the actor's rehearsal process. This was in some ways a contravention of what was becoming codified in the West (through limited material being available in translation) as the psychological basis of the system. In 1995, Bella Merlin undertook a ten-month course of actor-training at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where she worked with acting ‘master’, Albert Filozov, who had trained with Mikhail Kedrov, one of the first developers of Stanislavsky's work following his death in 1938. Here, she examines the roots of Filozov's training and the nature of the Method of Physical Actions in theory and in practice. Bella Merlin trained as an actress in Britain and Russia, and has worked extensively in theatre and television. She is currently a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, where her area of research is acting processes and the psycho-physical nature of performance. This article is based on a paper delivered at the ‘Flight of the Seagull’ conference at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in November 1996, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the premiere of The Seagull.

The critical attention paid to radio drama has dwindled in almost inverse proportion to a steady increase not only in quantity but, less expectedly, in quality – though Britain has become one of the very few countries where this entirely distinctive dramatic medium is still seriously practised. As Head of BBC Radio Drama from 1963 to 1976. Martin Esslin was instrumental in developing the form, and his article in TQ 3 in 1971. ‘The Mind as a Stage’, in which he summed up his own ‘aesthetic of radio’, provides the starting point for the present article: but its authors believe that the very strength of Esslin's own artistic beliefs and authority limited his understanding of the less ‘artistic’ output of radio drama, and that it is in this area that some of the most notable of recent advances have been made. Their article thus examines not only the development of radio drama since 1971, but the way in which its changing ‘codes’ have altered the relationship between play and listener: and it analyzes two distinctive uses of the medium – to create what they call ‘alternative histories’, and a sense of ‘fragmented space’. Frances Gray, herself a radio playwright, has recently published a study of John Arden in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series, and presently teaches at the University of Sheffield, from which Janet Bray has just received her M.Phil. degree for a study of radio drama in the 'seventies.

This article examines the relationship between medieval Islamic philosophy and contemporary Tunisian Sufi ritual. Focusing on the metaphysics of time and space in the writings of the twelfth-century Andalusian saint Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, the author explores the dhikr ritual within the framework of Sufi ontology in order to highlight the relevance of Islamic intellectual history to the religious practices of the ‘Issawiya Sufi community. The dhikr is one example of many indigenous performance traditions that are part of the rich cultural life of Tunisia. These are spaces where adepts engage with complex philosophical ideas through embodied performances. Thus, Sufi rituals raise important questions about the relationship between theory and embodied practice, which, although grounded in a particular cultural context, could be of relevance to the broader range of theatre. Dia Barghouti is a playwright and PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her plays have been performed at the Ashtar Theatre, the SIN festival of video and performance art, and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, all in Ramallah, Palestine.

The genre commonly referred to as the ‘concert party’ remains largely neglected by scholars of popular entertainment. In this article Bernard Ince presents a new reading of this most distinctive and underrated branch of theatrical activity. The period before the First World War saw the growth of an ‘industry’ which provided seaside amusement during the summer months. During the inter-war years, however, a more sophisticated form developed whose performative characteristics drew increasingly on revue and cabaret. The period after the Second World War saw further adaptations that gave rise to the summer show, an altogether more lavish spectacle that nonetheless inherited much of the concert party ethos of earlier times. Changes in audience expectations and public holiday preferences, the catastrophe of the two world wars, and the emergence of radio and film were challenges all successfully negotiated, further underscoring the resilience and adaptability of the genre. In the wider context, the concert party not only offered a critical path to the variety stage but in the simplicity of basic form also provided a template for experimentation and innovation. The author is an independent theatre historian.

Much theatrical work that calls itself ‘immersive’ uses tropes of the erotic to achieve its intended effects. In this article Rose Biggin identifies structural and performative strategies in the use of the erotic in this genre. What does it mean to identify the process of performed seduction as central to much immersive dramaturgy? Through readings of contemporary productions that draw upon (or appropriate) pre-existing erotically charged environments, the inevitable responsibilities for makers working in this context of immersion are considered, as is the importance of considering the consequences for those working in immersive spaces. Stress is laid on the crucial role that this form of performative labour often plays in immersive performance, and a continued recognition of its influence is emphasized. Rose Biggin is an independent scholar and theatre artist based in London. She received her PhD from the University of Exeter, researching audience immersion and the work of Punchdrunk, and both writes and makes work on gender, history, and language. She is author of Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience (2017).

This paper examines two plays by Trevor Griffiths, ten years apart in the writing, which responded in different ways to burning contemporary issues. The first, Oi for England, though originally seen on television in 1982, was conceived as a theatre text, and was eventually toured to audiences closer to the age (and perhaps to some of the beliefs) of its racist rock-band central characters. The Gulf between Us, written in the aftermath of the Gulf War, was staged in Leeds in 1992 as a local theatrical ‘event’ at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, under Griffiths's own direction. Jonathan Bignell looks at the ways in which the different nature of these occasions and audiences, and the different ways in which the plays can be viewed as ‘political theatre’ – in particular, the new demands made by The Gulf upon critics who arrived with a type-cast view of its author – in both cases militated against a successful political statement being conveyed. Jonathan Bignell completed a PhD on narrative in film and television fictions in 1989, and since then has lectured in English and Media Studies in the English Department of the University of Reading. His research interests are in literary theory, and film and television analysis.

A few of the plays written in support of the movement for women's suffrage in Britain before the First World War have recently been recovered and published, but most of these were intended for some kind of professional or at least conventional production. Susan Carlson is here concerned to look also at some of the pieces which saw print only in the ephemeral suffrage press, and production (if at all) only as part of meetings or demonstrations. Breaking down traditional distinctions between social, political, and theatrical spaces, she argues that all were part both of the dramatization of the struggle, and also of a broader reclamation of public spaces for women, whether of a public venue such as the Albert Hall, outdoor spaces such as Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square – or the humbler and lonelier space of the street corners on which women sold the suffrage newspapers that contained the plays – some of them about women on street corners selling suffrage newspapers.…Susan Carlson is Professor of English and Associate Provost at Iowa State University. Her books include Women and Comedy (University of Michigan Press), and she has recently published essays on Aphra Behn, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Shakespeare, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women playwrights. This essay is part of a longer study of British suffrage theatre and its connections to Edwardian productions of Shakespeare's works.

This is the text – appropriately, a ‘performance text’ – of the inaugural lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College, University of London, on 9 March 1993, by Jacky Bratton, following her appointment as Professor of Theatre and Cultural History. Although she holds her chair at a former women's college, Jacky Bratton reflects that the introduction of co-education in such institutions has in practice left them as male-dominated as the rest. Ironically, this continued marginalizing of women in academic life reflects the common view of theatre studies as itself a marginal discipline – almost as suspect as Jacky Bratton's own specialist concern with its more popular aspects. Looking at the ways in which women have been marginalized within theatre history, she challenges in particular the received wisdom that the alleged ‘decline of the drama’ in the nineteenth century was reversed by a striving for respectability usually traced to the rattle of cups-and-saucers on box sets, and apotheosized in Irving's knighthood: instead, she reflects upon the radical impulses of earlier nineteenth-century theatre, and at the ways in which the gender of three women who worked within it influenced their theatrical careers, their social standing, and their own attitudes towards both.