In this article Liliane Campos links Complicite's Master and Margarita (2011) to the company's previous productions, from The Street of Crocodiles (1992) to Shun-Kin (2008). She develops a close analysis of The Master and Margarita as it was staged at the Avignon Festival in July 2012, arguing that the company's aesthetic is characterized by a tension between narrative fragmentation and visual connections. While Complicite's shows overflow with postmodernist multiplicity and division, the urge to connect these ‘shards of stories’ is a driving force in Simon McBurney's artistic direction. This dynamic is explored here both on a semantic level, as a consequence of Complicite's physical language, and on a narrative level, through the use of framing and frame-breaking devices. The article highlights the company's recurrent themes and the defining traits of its performance style. Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She has published various articles on British drama and performance, and two books about the role of science in contemporary writing and devising for the theatre.

In this article Kris Darby examines the significance of walking on the theatre stage, responding to the growth of pedestrian performance as an area of research. He seeks to provide a point of expansion for a field that is still largely concerned with site-specific works where audiences walk during the performance. Beginning with a discussion of the possible reasons for the neglect of walking on stage, the author addresses the prominence of walking and the journey as a rehearsal tool employed by a wealth of practitioners. As further justification for the inclusion of the stage in pedestrian performance research, a series of historical case studies is presented which spans over a century of theatrical history, and includes an examination of the audience's pilgrimage to Richard Wagner's Parsifal (1882) and the ‘epic flow“ of Erwin Piscator's treadmill in Good Soldier Schwejk (1927). The significance of walking in Samuel Beckett's life is also explored through the ‘inward walking’ of Footfalls (1976), and the proscenium staging of Matthew Earnest's Wanderlust (2010) is made significant through its critique of supermodernity. The author concludes by arguing that an immobile audience can kinaesthetically empathize with the performers, embarking on their own internalized journey within the theatre. Kris Darby is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Drama at Liverpool Hope, whose research interests concern the relationship between walking and performance.

On 13 October 2012, Lenny Bruce, had he not accidentally overdosed on narcotics (or committed suicide – the jury is still out on that one), would be eighty-seven years old. It is, of course, a thoroughly incredible notion – like an octogenarian Mozart, a super annuated Janis Joplin, or James Dean signing up for a senior citizen pension. Poètes maudits, doomed rock icons, and self-destructive superstars are supposed to die young. Their myth demands it, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Bruce at forty-one, perched on a toilet bowl with a spike in his right arm and his last typed words (‘conspiracy to interfere with the Fourth Amendment const—’) in the barrel of his still humming electric typewriter, died characteristically. He was always associated with toilet humour and throughout the last decade of his life ex hausted himself trying to demonstrate that the United States Constitution protected the free speech for which one court after another mercilessly prosecuted him. (The Fourth Amendment, incidentally, protects citizens from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ and, along with the state's First Amendment violations, was as much responsible for his downfall as the cocaine and morphine.)

In an interview given during a lecture tour in Scandinavia organized by the universities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Aarhus in October and November, 2012, Stanley Wells talks about his own career in Shakespeare studies and discusses past and present major changes and issues within the field, including his own Oxford Complete Works of 1986, co-edited with Gary Taylor et al., revision and collaboration theories, global Shakespeare, and new challenges for Shakespearean scholars. He shares thoughts on his own current and future research projects, which include a new monograph on Shakespearean actors through time, and he also comments on the relationship between academic scholars and theatre practitioners, and ways in which to understand the ever-shifting concept of a Shakespearean play in relation to performance, reading, and personal and critical responses. Following a long career of many publications and editions, Stanley Wells is now Professor Emeritus of the University of Birmingham, and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Anne Sophie Haahr Refskou is a Doctoral Fellow in English and Dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark. She works with Shakespearean acting and dramaturgy, focusing on the relationship between text and performance, particularly in relation to the actor's body and physical expressions.

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).

With its emphasis on the socially constructed and mobile nature of ‘space’, Henri Lefebvre's theory of spatial production presents rich possibilities for a sociocultural analysis of choreography. In this article Arabella Stanger uses an examination of social space and spatial aesthetics as a basis upon which to develop a socio-aesthetics of dance – an approach in which the societal contexts and the aesthetic forms of choreography are understood to be fundamentally interrelated. Borrowing from Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974) and Maria Shevtsova's sociology of the theatre and performance, Stanger establishes the theoretical parameters and methodological steps of such an approach, and locates a short illustrative example in the socio-spatial formations of Aurora's Act III variation from Marius Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Ultimately extending a bridge between formalist and contextualist strands of dance studies, the article argues for the use of a particular concept of space in understanding choreographic practice as social practice. Arabella Stanger is Lecturer in Dance at the University of Roehampton. Having trained in classical ballet, she completed her MA and PhD studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has published on the work of Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, and William Forsythe.

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.

In this article Jim Davis considers gender representation in Victorian pantomime alongside variance in Victorian life, examining male and female impersonation in pantomime within the context of cross-dressing (often a manifestation of gender variance) in everyday life. While accepting that male heterosexual, gay, and lesbian gazes may have informed the reception of Victorian pantomime, he argues for the existence of a transgendered gaze and a contextual awareness of gender variant behaviour, with a more nuanced view of cross-dressed performance. The principal boy role and its relationship to variant ways of seeing suggests its appeal goes beyond what Jacky Bratton calls the ‘boy’, a notion she applies to the dynamic androgyny of male impersonators in burlesque, music hall, and occasionally melodrama. For the principal ‘boy’ is clearly transmuting back into a girl, at least physically. Equally, while the dame role is usually unambiguously male, Dan Leno's late-Victorian dames seem based on observation of real women. There has been enormous scholarly interest in theatrical cross-dressing, but also a partial tendency to associate it with what Marjorie Garber calls ‘an emerging gay and lesbian identity’. This is appropriate, but should not obscure the relevance of cross-dressed performances to an emerging transgender identity, even if such an identity has partially been hidden from history. Any discussion of cross-dressing in Victorian pantomime should heed the multifaceted functions of cross dressing in its society and the multiplicity of gendered perspectives and gazes that this elicited.

In this article, Ken Rea examines the factors that make for success in an overcrowded acting profession. He asks what actors can do to influence their chances of having a successful career and doing outstanding work, and suggests what drama schools could do to increase the number of their students who achieve this. He examines research on peak performance in other domains, such as sport and music, then formulates a profile of the outstanding actor, based on his own empirical research and more than thirty years' teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Drawing on interviews with world-class professionals, he proposes seven key qualities that most outstanding actors manifest, and he suggests how these can be nurtured in a training context. This article explores ideas now being reworked as a book on success in acting. Ken Rea is senior acting tutor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and author of A Better Direction (1989).

In this article Richard Hornby argues that Ibsen's plays are badly performed today, or not performed at all, because of directors' refusal to take them with appropriate seriousness. The tendency is to stage the plays' reputation as simplistic social problem plays rather than as the complex, challenging, bizarre dramas that Ibsen actually wrote. In particular, directors avoid the grotesque elements that are the true ‘quintessence of Ibsenism’, and that are often remarkably similar in style to that of avant-garde playwrights today. Richard Hornby is Emeritus Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside. For the past twenty-eight years he has been theatre critic for The Hudson Review, and is author of six books and over two hundred published articles on various aspects of theatre. This essay was delivered as the keynote address at the fourteenth annual Ibsen Festival of the Commonweal Theatre Company, Lanesboro, Minnesota, in April 2011.

Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.