This article analyzes the role of pain and torture in the construction and destruction of subjectivity by way of a comparison of the depictions of torture in the theatre of Sarah Kane and Elaine’s Scarry’s highly influential The Body in Pain: On the Making and Unmaking of the World. The essay uses Kane in conjunction with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, as well as relevant work on the history and sociology of privacy and private speech. Its purpose is to develop an account of what is here called pain’s bi-directional character, or its capacity to represent both the presence and the absence of the victim’s subjectivity, possibly at the same time. Using Kane to expand upon Scarry’s account of the role of subjectivity in torture, we can see how the logic of torture structures numerous relationships in Kane’s work, including Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, and Crave. The essay establishes Kane as not only a major playwright, but also a subtle and perceptive theorist of suffering for whom the question of intersubjectivity is a major site of dramatic struggle. Jeremy Colangelo is the author of Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and the editor of Joyce Writing Disability (University Press of Florida, 2022). His work has appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Textual Practice, and Modern Drama. He currently teaches at King’s University College, University of Western Ontario.

Although lasting only two and a half years, Edward Gordon Craig’s engagement with the Purcell Operatic Society was his most consistent and productive period of work on the stage. This article re-examines this time during Craig’s life in order to ascertain why he saw it to be the zenith of his career. In particular, it analyzes his work with the amateur group to argue that it was foundational in the development of his approach to theatre-making and, further, helped him to introduce the entity of theatre director to Britain and what the role of such a person could be. By examining this material in relation to wider contextual factors, the article also shows how the group offered audiences an alternative to the dominant ‘star’ system of the early 1900s. The article thus indicates why Craig scholarship needs to place the Purcell Operatic Society at the centre of any of its discussions. Philippa Burt is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her recent publications include the chapter ‘American Invasions’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War (forthcoming, September 2022), as well as articles on Harley Granville Barker and Joan Littlewood in New Theatre Quarterly and Theatre, Dance, and Performer Training.

The relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Samuel Beckett has excited many scholars and continues to be of major interest today. This article explores the Deleuzian concept of multiplicity by considering quantitative and qualitative multiplicities in Beckett’s work. In differentiating between these two types, Deleuze and Félix Guattari indicate that extensive or quantitative multiplicities are essentially numerical and can be counted and represented in space. This form of multiplicity is seen in Beckett’s use of various lists of items such as Molloy counting his sucking stones or Watt considering how to dispose of Mr Knott’s food. Qualitative multiplicities, by contrast, cannot be counted because they differ in kind from one another. They are represented in duration and are here observed in the minorization of language in How It Is, among other examples. S. E. Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College in Dublin. His most recent publications include Performing Statelessness in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and (with co-editor Radek Przedpełski) Deleuze, Guattari, and the Art of Multiplicity (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). He is currently co-editing the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration.

From April to November 2019, eight members of the pandies’ theatre, a Delhi-based activist theatre group, toured Delhi and Rajasthan with a fifty-five-minute version of Euripides’ Medea, in Hindustani. The group gave fifteen performances in the round, in spaces ranging from a tin shed to a plush air-conditioned conference room, addressing diverse audiences. During post-performance discussions in four spaces – Ambedkar University of Delhi, the village of Mangliawas in Rajasthan, the India Habitat Centre, and Studio Safdar in New Delhi – spontaneous debates arose between women on the one side and men on the other in which the women expressed their understanding of Medea’s actions or their ‘identification’ with her character. Anuradha Marwah, the director of the play, discusses these debates with reference to the ‘agonistic’ character of Medea (431 BCE) while framing the tour as a feminist activist endeavour in India today, where the condition of abandoned women and those considered to be outsiders has become even more precarious due to increasing divisiveness and chauvinism. Anuradha Marwah is a theatre activist and a Professor in the Department of English at Zakir Husain Delhi College, Delhi University. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2017. Her publications include two plays, A Pipe Dream in Delhi and Ismat’s Love Stories, three novels, and several academic and popular articles.

UK crises of hospitality, feminism, and democracy are as acute as ever despite ostensible commitment to the values that foster them. This article examines David Greig’s 2016 Edinburgh version of Aeschylus’s Suppliants as it attempts to expand spaces of democracy into the theatre, and investigates the foundations of democratic institutions. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics and Elaine Scarry’s theorization of civilization, it highlights necrocivilizational elements in the production’s premise and reception. It argues that Greig’s presentation of Aeschylus’s play presents a more complex engagement with western democracy, asylum, theatre, and civilization than commentators have acknowledged. Rather than primarily opening up new spaces of negotiation among asylum-seekers and citizens in the community, The Suppliant Women foregrounds the exclusionary discursive tactics operating under the auspices of civilization that leave the logics underpinning the UK’s asylum policy largely untroubled. Sarah Stewart is an independent researcher whose work centres on the relationships forged between asylum-seekers, members of the theatre establishment, and citizen communities within and beyond the performance space. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh.

In the interwar period, amateur drama was actively promoted as a means to create or repair, sustain and develop community consciousness in English villages. In this article, Mick Wallis maps such promotion across various fields of practice at their intersection with the village drama ‘movement’ as a field itself. These include gentry patronage, post-war and rural reconstruction, adult education, and women’s self-advancement. He also charts the emergence of interwar village drama from its precursors since 1900, and the emergence from it of the system of local government Drama Advisers that persisted until the 1990s. Time and again, drama is presented as a vital tool in the improvement of the lives of individuals, the development of national citizens, and the restoration and celebration of local communities. Finally, he suggests the important insights that this work can offer future researchers. Mick Wallis is Professor Emeritus of Performance and Culture at the University of Leeds.

This article explores the role of the traditional Pang Lhabsol festival of Sikkim in India as a medium for political ascendancy and influence in the region – a phenomenon that has continued, albeit with different political inflections, from its founding days until the present. Since its emergence as an indigenous practice in the thirteenth century, it has consistently transformed according to each juncture of political realignment in the region. After 1642, the festival was redesigned to resonate with the religion and ideology of the ruling Namgyal dynasty, playing out negotiations between mainstream Buddhism and the animistic Bon religion. While the inclusion of the Pangtoed Chham dance performance in the ritualistic itinerary of Pang Lhabsol had very significantly reinforced the role of the king as the protector of the people and their faith, the festival has been considerably overshadowed by the inclusion of new elements that resonate with the secular narrative of India after 1975. The article identifies the significance of each of these new elements, drawing as well on audience research undertaken through in-depth interviews. Arkaprava Chattopadhyay is an Assistant Professor at the Shri Ramasamy Memorial University in Sikkim, as well as a doctoral candidate at the Central University of Sikkim.