Charles Marowitz, who died on 2 May this year, arrived in England from his native New York in 1956, on a scholarship earned for service in Korea. He immediately found in Unity Theatre a venue for his first London production, and in the following year opened his own theatre – an attic in the headquarters of the British Drama League known as In-Stage. In 1981, after the closure of his last and longest London base, the Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, he left, disillusioned with his adopted country, to settle in California, creating companies in Los Angeles and in his new home of Malibu. But during the momentous decade of the sixties it was British theatre that Marowitz helped to reshape – not least in developing London's still flourishing ‘fringe’. In this feature, NTQ co-editor Simon Trussler celebrates not only Marowitz's directing career, on which many obituarists have written, but also – through personal recollections of the man in those early years – the many other ‘hats’ he wore: as theatre critic, editor, playwright, and cultural entrepreneur. Marowitz's long-term professional partner, Thelma Holt, shares her own memories of the twelve years when together they formed and ran the Open Space. Marowitz contributed to the old TQ and to New Theatre Quarterly, but here we include some of the articles he wrote in later life for the online Swans Commentary, to which we are most grateful for permission to reprint. All are from 2012, when Parkinson's disease was tightening its hold, and so are among the very last pieces he wrote.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

Twenty-first-century Russian theatre artists have increasingly taken to using material from real-life events to explore the intricacies of injustice in the civic sphere and its connection to the country's past. In a fifteen-year time span documentary forms have come to the forefront of Russia's theatrical avant-garde. In this article Molly Flynn offers a close reading of one of the most politically charged productions to have emerged from Moscow's booming documentary theatre – One Hour Eighteen: the Trial that Wasn't but Should Have Been (2010). The play uses verbatim texts from the prison and medical staff directly involved in the final days before the murder of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitskii in 2009. Setting the piece in a theatrical courtroom, the creators of One Hour Eighteen place their work in the context of Russia's judicial history in the previous century, during which the resemblance of trials to theatre has often been uncomfortably close. Molly Flynn is a doctoral candidate in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the history and significance of documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia.

From his childhood in Swansea until his death in New York in 1953, Dylan Thomas was an instinctive actor. During his teenage years he acted in more than twenty-three stage productions, thirteen of them as a member of Swansea's Little Theatre Company. Although his roles were essentially English and his speaking style somewhat mannered, the latter was strongly influenced by the rhythms of the Welsh language spoken by family members and experienced in the chapels of his childhood. Subsequently, radio broadcasts of his poetry and short stories were very much those of an actor, the emphasis on the voice and, in the stories, on the presentation of many varied characters, of which his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is the supreme example. But Thomas also carried his love of performance into his everyday life, playing the fool and acting outrageously at parties and in pubs. The comment of one of his contemporaries that ‘Dylan was an actor; he acted practically every moment of every day’ could not be nearer the mark. Gwynne Edwards is Emeritus Professor in the Department of European Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is also a playwright, and two of his adaptations of short stories by Dylan Thomas – ‘The Peaches’ and ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ – have recently been performed by the Swansea Little Theatre Company as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations.

London's theatre industry and charity culture have been closely connected since the mid-nineteenth century. In this article Catherine Hindson explores the nature of this relationship in the later years of the century. Focusing on a charity bazaar held at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1899 to raise funds for the Charing Cross Hospital, she argues that extra-theatrical occasions staged for charity organizations were firmly located within the stage culture of the day. Rather than peripheral occasions, high-profile, public charity events functioned as significant forces in the reputation and success of the West End theatre industry and its personnel. They held cultural, social, and economic potential for theatrical performers and represent a key factor in the improvement in the moral and social status of the stage in this period. Catherine Hindson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on popular performance between 1820 and 1930 and is currently completing a monograph on the actress, the West End stage, and charity between 1880 and 1930.

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.

Council estates, otherwise known as British social housing estates, have been subject to media scrutiny since their inception, and widespread criticism of social housing remains a prominent feature of British Welfare State discourse. In recent media coverage, for example of the 2011 riots, these spaces remain central to discussions of class, economics, and crime in the UK. This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore contemporary representations of the council estate on the Royal Court stage – with a focus on narratives of ‘authenticity’. Here, two plays, Off the Endz (Agbaje, 2010) and The Westbridge (De-lahay, 2011), are studied to assess how narratives of authenticity work in theatrical representations both to reinforce and to resist popular impressions of council estate spaces. Charlotte Bell is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the urban social housing estate and the contemporary cultural economy. Katie Beswick is a Research Associate in Applied Theatre at the University of Leeds, where she has recently completed her PhD on the representation of the council estate in theatrical performance practices.

CHARLES MAROWITZ and I were introduced to each other in the early 1960s when the actor I was playing opposite in a William Saroyan double-bill at the Duke of York's announced he was about to revive his performance of Hamlet, which he had played for Charles in Peter Brook's Theatre of Cruelty season. Charles had seen me in a play at what was the Hampstead Theatre Club where I prophetically played a lion-tamer. Neither of these performances indicated what he saw in me to play Gertrude as a mother merely eight years older than her son, Hamlet.

In his flat, the first sight of Charles was forbidding: he was very tall, unhealthily pale with a lot of black hair, a dead ringer in my eyes for Rasputin. He offered me a cup of coffee and, when he went to fetch it from the kitchen, I hastily scanned his bookshelves, to see if they would tell me something about the man. The books were terrifying as he was so obviously very well read in terms theatrical from A to Z, and historically from the beginning of time to contemporary theatre. His smile obliterated the Rasputin impression: it was a wolfish grin. So I slipped into thinking I could play Little Red Riding Hood to his Big Bad Wolf.

In the spring of 2004, I was invited to Prague to direct Vaclav Havel's Temptation at the National Theatre in the Czech Republic. I had directed in a number of European cities but there was something of a frisson about going to Prague and working with the ex-president of the Czech Republic, whom I remembered most vividly as the Great Dissenter against Soviet rule in a city I had often visualized but never actually seen.

On the day Vaclav Havel was scheduled to attend the first-act run-through of his play there was a palpable sense of hysteria in the air. The actors, all highly experienced members of a robust and respected permanent company that performed regularly before the upper echelons of Prague society, had never played in a scrappy rehearsal room for an internationally lauded political icon and ex-president of the Czech Republic surrounded by secret service men. Lines were muffed, moves went awry, cues forgotten, and a sense of a ‘Royal Command Performance’ hung in the air. After an hour or so, the torture was over and the actors sat circled around an appreciative, avuncular, and soft-spoken playwright, being gently massaged with compliments and diverted by anecdotes about his numerous incarcerations, the play's inception, and the thrill of being back in the midst of working actors after an absence of some twenty-five years.

Stanislavsky's ‘life of the human spirit’ is at the heart of his understanding of how the actor could become an organic actor rather than a player of borrowed actions and lines. In this article Maria Shevtsova explores the links between Stanislavsky's aspirations for the actor and Grotowski's ‘holy’ actor, the latter providing the impetus for a theatre of presence rather than one of presentation – one that is concerned with the embodiment of fictional bodies and souls. The notion of actor ‘training’ is re-examined in the light of Stanislavsky's practice concerning the actor's mindful and probing work on himself/herself. Grotowski's work on presence-in-action, the basis first of the performer and then of of the doer, has been a catalyst for the singer-movers of Teatr ZAR and this group's goal of spiritual journeying, shared also by its spectators. Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book is the The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (co-authored, 2013). She is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Gay Sweatshop spent twenty-two years producing plays as Britain's first openly gay professional theatre company. Their alternative and political work primarily took the form of author-driven new writing, though experiments with performer-driven work intrigued the company from its earliest cabarets to its late phase of queer solo work under Lois Weaver. In this article, Sara Freeman pinpoints Sweatshop's tenth anniversary new play festival in 1985 as the moment when the company committed to new writing as a strategy for gaining greater legitimacy as a theatre group and as a central mode to encourage gay and lesbian voices and representation. She argues that while this had been the default mode of much 1970s political theatre including Sweatshop's, as it played out in the 1980s, a new writing strategy represented a move toward institutional stability as the locus of theatrical radicalism shifted aesthetics. In this analysis, the celebration of company anniversaries and the creation of festival events provided occasions for the company to experience the success or failure of its policies. Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound. She is the co-editor of Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012) and International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2008). Her recent publications appear in Modern British Playwriting: the 1980s. Readings in Performance and Ecology, and the forthcoming volume The British Theatre Company from Fringe to Mainstream: Volume II 1980–1994.

While much has been written about Bakhtin's later writings, most notably Rabelais and his World, little attention has been paid to his early manuscripts written in the mid-1920s. In this article Dick McCaw compares Bakhtin's early philosophical ideas about authorship and Stanislavsky's theory about how an actor creates a character. Bakhtin argues that actors can only be authors when they remain outside the character. He agrees that there is a need for empathy, but that this moment of co-experiencing with the character is followed by a return to oneself. Although this would seem to fly in the face of Stanislavsky's demand for the actor's empathetic identification with their role, McCaw concludes that both writers agreed that there was a necessary doubleness in the consciousness of the actor. This article develops ideas first considered in McCaw's PhD, ‘Bakhtin's Other Theatre’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004) and now being reworked as a book on Bakhtin and the theatre of his time. Dick McCaw is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, and has written With an Eye for Movement (2006) and edited the Laban Sourcebook (2011).

In contrast to most studies of cultural nationalism, which tend to focus on literary style, narrative devices, or the static visual arts, in this article Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes the ways that Japanese actors deploy physical and vocal techniques in portraying gender and ethnic ambiguity. Expanding on her recent work on actor-dancer Itō Michio (1893–1961), she uses the concept of J-centrism (Japancentrism) to demonstrate how modern Japanese performing bodies (in both traditional and contemporary genres) imply political meaning – her title being a riff on Susan Sontag's famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. While not suggesting that the artists under consideration promulgate fascism, Sorgenfrei maintains that the Japanese aesthetic preference for gender and ethnic ambiguity fuels the politics of Japanese cultural nationalism, even when the performers or directors adamantly disavow rightist, nationalistic ideologies. Through a focus on analysis of selected performances by Bando Tamasaburō and theoretical writings by Suzuki Tadashi, Sorgenfrei suggests that the performance of ambiguity by a single actor implies the ‘universality’ and cultural superiority of the Japanese body. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin, where she researched the work of Japanese dancer Itō Michio. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition 2015).

In 1923, all of New York was bowled over by the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to America. No one in this country had seen such synchronized ensemble playing or a troupe of individual actors of such power and persuasiveness. When the company returned to Russia after a triumphant national tour, actors such as Maria Ouspenskaya stayed behind and, along with Richard Boleslavsky, an earlier dropout, began instructing American actors in that strange doctrine known as the Stanislavsky System. One of Boleslavsky's most attentive students was Lee Strasberg. He and his close friend Harold Clurman were early converts to Stanislavsky as handed down by Boleslavsky.

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).

The author aims in this article is to highlight a significant moment in the history of the reception of Shakespeare in modern Greek theatre. The article outlines the main developments in the perception of Shakespeare's work in Greece from the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War, and examines Karolos Koun's early experiments in Shakespearean production. Koun's initiatives were diametrically opposed to local theatre traditions, which emphasized psychological or historical realism and pictorial or spectacular illusion. The use of non-realistic stage conventions such as masks and simple, abstract and allusive settings, flamboyant costumes, stylized acting, and the fact that all roles were played by young boys demonstrate the significance of Koun's contribution to a modernist Shakespeare in Greece, culminating in his Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1967. Antonis Glytzouris is Associate Professor in the School of Drama at the Aristotle University Thessaloniki, and is author of Stage Direction in Greece: the Rise and Consolidation of the Stage Director in Modern Greek Theatre (Herakleio: Crete University Press, 2011), among other publications.

Following the rules of self-sacrifice for a higher cause, the Palestinian female bomber performs the values of the struggle through and on her body in a farewell video statement. She leaves herself behind to create an image of a strong and victorious soldier. The female bomber's performance of the new self introduces her as a role model for younger generations. Her public appearance in hijab challenges notions of the body, physical beauty, and freedom in the secularist world at the same time as it deviates from the norms of a fundamentalist view of women. It is the dual impact on local and international viewers that politicizes the female bomber's public performance and makes it significant. Rana Salimi has received her PhD from the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She currently lectures at UCSD and at National University on a variety of subjects, including theatre history and language arts.

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.

The trajectory of most books is from the eye to the brain and then out of some imperceptible pee hole at the back of the head. Only occasionally does something that you read enter the bloodstream and become a permanent part of your metabolism. Those are books that become so permanently lodged in the mental archives that they remain on instant recall for the rest of your life. Jan Kott's Still Alive (Yale University Press, 1994) is that kind of book for me.

I read it, savouringly, over four or five days, and when I'd finished found scenes and situations recurring in my dreams. An analyst would be able to provide some astute reason why that was so. He would probably prove that it connected up with personal psychic preoccupations triggered by the depicted events, but a critic would have a simpler explanation. He would point out that being vivid, subtle, graphic, and profound, the book fleshed out what was already known in general terms, but here achieved a specificity that made it ineradicably memorable.

R.G. Davis founded the company that became the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an experimental project of the Actors' Workshop in 1959. He left the Troupe in 1970, formed the Epic West Center in Berkeley for the study of Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre, and became a pioneering director in the United States successively of the plays of Brecht and Dario Fo, on which he wrote in the original Theatre Quarterly 40 (Autumn–Winter 1981) and in New Theatre Quarterly 8 (November 1986). In this article he traces the course of his subsequent career in creating experimental storytelling events and, via an interlude garnering academic qualifications, into the field of ecological aesthetics, which he defines as ‘a Brechtian aesthetic and ecological socialism interrogating each other within a scientific ecological conception of nature’. The present article is based on a lecture he gave in June 2013 at Stanford University.