In 2001 Mathias Woo, a trained architect and co-artistic director of Hong Kong's foremost performing arts group, Zuni Icosahedron, proposed the concept of ‘multimedia architectural music theatre’ (MAMT), which he later investigated through a series of performances focusing on three masters of modern architecture – Louis I. Kahn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. This article traces the development of Woo's architectural theatre aesthetics by examining the most ambitious work in the series, Looking for Mies, premiered in 2002 and revived in 2009 and 2011. This links Hong Kong's twenty-first-century postmodernist theatre to early twentieth-century European modernism, particularly the Bauhaus, and international examples of architecture-centred performance. Looking for Mies unearths connections between theatre and architecture, and explores the relations between tradition and technology, man and machine, live performance and digitally mediated experience on the modern stage. Rossella Ferrari is a Lecturer in Modern Chinese Culture and Language at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has published articles in TDR: The Drama Review, Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and other journals. Her monograph Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is forthcoming from Seagull Books, and her current research focuses on inter-Asian collaboration and performance networks in the Chinese-speaking world.

While the dialogical relationship between the early twentieth-century British theatre and the rise of socialism is well documented, analysis has tended to focus on the role of the playwright in the dissemination of socialist ideas. As a contrast, in this article Philippa Burt examines the directorial work of Harley Granville Barker, arguing that his plans for a permanent ensemble company were rooted in his position as a member of the Fabian Society. With reference to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Maria Shevtsova's development of it in reference to the theatre, this article identifies a correlation between Barker's political and artistic approaches through extrapolating the central tenets of his theory on ensemble theatre and analyzing them alongside the central tenets of Fabianism. Philippa Burt is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. This article is developed from a paper presented at the conference on ‘Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the University of Lancaster in July 2011.

In this article Dominika Laster examines the embodied-memory work undertaken by the Polish theatre director and performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski. While Grotowski approached work with memory – which in his practice necessarily implied body-memory – in a variety of ways, it was often as a mode of inquiry. For Grotowski, there were at least two different types of memory work, which emerge in two distinct phases of his research. The first was the use of body-memory undertaken during the Theatre of Production phase. Here, the work with body-memory was used as a tool in the actor's process of self-penetration and opening, serving as an instrument in the rediscovery of impulses and intentions of a past moment. This process of rediscovery is integral to the freeing of creativity and tapping into the obstructed internal resources of the actor. Another use of memory work, which became articulated in the phase of Grotowski's research known as Art as Vehicle, is that which facilitates the rediscovery of essence. Grotowski's practice of ‘active remembering’ functioned as a tool in the search for one's essence, understood as the most intimate, pre-cultural aspect of the self, which precedes difference and is at once the most singular and universal aspect of being. Dominika Laster is a Lecturer in Theatre. Her book A Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing, and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and her edition of Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland, are forthcoming from Seagull Press (distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press).

In 1897 audiences welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson's new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage, and his sane, intelligent Prince was received as an exciting departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell's own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so warmly greeted, critics describing her playing as ‘curiously weak’ and ‘unconvincing and unimpressive’. Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblematic of the prettiness and pathos exemplified by Ellen Terry, and instead offered a vacant, depressive, ‘beaten’ Ophelia. In this article, Fiona Gregory examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress's own experience of mental illness and the notorious ‘rest cure’. The reception of the performance is read in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness, as well as of responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity in the visual arts. Ultimately, Campbell's performance of Ophelia can be read as a ‘witness account’ of neurasthenia and the ‘rest cure’, to stand alongside texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, and has published work on the career of actress Judith Anderson, Australian cultural history, and Victorian and Edwardian writers. She is currently undertaking a wide-ranging study of actresses and mental illness from the nineteenth century to the present day, drawing on historical examples and literary and cultural representations to consider the intersections of ‘hysteria’ and the ‘histrionic’.

That the Nazis tried to claim Shakespeare as a Germanic playwright has been well documented, but recently theatre historians have claimed that their ‘success’ was rather limited. Instead, commentators have asserted that plays such as Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice offended National Socialist precepts and were sidelined. This article attempts a re-evaluation and shows that the effect of the Nazi claims on Shakespeare was substantial, and the official efforts that went into realizing these in productions were considerable. It is also argued that the Nazis established a particular reading of Shakespeare, which lasted well into the 1960s and dominated the aesthetics of West German productions of his drama. Anselm Heinrich is Lecturer and Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Entertainment, Education, Propaganda: Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain Between 1918 and 1945 (2007), and has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009). His new monograph on theatre in Westphalia and Yorkshire for the German publishers Schoeningh is forthcoming.

The only collection of commedia dell'arte scenarios to have been published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of the actor-manager Flaminio Scala, in 1611. This can serve, among other things, as a primary source of information about the style of acting in commedia dell'arte performance in its golden age, from 1570 to 1630. While English drama of the same period provides us, in the main, with only the words the actors were to have spoken, the Scala collection rarely provides us with these, but rather, with a wealth of descriptions of actions and emotions. These descriptions enable us to make inferences about the style in which they were acted – that is, about the particular way in which the stories the actors presented were said, performed, or expressed. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theatre, Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published on commedia dell'arte in Viator, Renaissance Drama, and Text and Performance Quarterly, and previously in New Theatre Quarterly on Stanislavsky (NTQ 8), on theatre in its historic moment (NTQ 23), and on John Cage (NTQ 41).

’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).

Was the father of Bengali theatre a Russian? Or were the brief adventures in India of Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev (1749–1817) ‘a mere blip on the screen of Bengali performance history’? Already widely travelled in Europe, Lebedev, influenced by the then current belief that India was the cradle of civilization, arrived in Madras in 1785 during the virtual hegemony of the East India Company in the sub-continent. Inspired by his attempts to master the ancient Sanskrit tongue, he eventually set up a Bengali company in opposition to the New Playhouse in Calcutta, which staged English plays for audiences of colonists. Initial success was tempered when Lebedev's company found itself the target of attack from the Playhouse, and subject to continuous legal harassment. Forced to take flight from his supposed creditors, Lebedev found security only when, under the more tolerant regime which followed the accession of Tsar Alexander I in 1801, he returned to his native land, where he laid the foundations for the scientific study of India in Russia. Laurence Senelick here traces the many ups and downs of Lebedev's career, and argues that ‘his theatrical activities are a cynosure for the controlling urges of his age’.

One of the most unusual statistics in the study of performance and war is that aesthetic activity often increases in times of conflict. In this article Michael Balfour extends the consideration of performance and war to aesthetic projects that were located far removed from the centres of conflict, but that deeply connected with the affective impact of war. As an illustration of performative practice, the examples demonstrate the ways in which place making can play with documenting and representing war experiences in different ways. The two examples – This is Camp X-Ray in Manchester (a temporary installation) and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC – were designed in separate contexts for very different purposes; but contribute to understanding the kinds of choices that artists make in representing the affective ‘truths’ of war experience. In both cases, the artists were interested in creating spaces that would make the wars more visible for an audience, and provide a tangible place in which experiences of war could be re-conceived and an affective connection made. Michael Balfour is Professor of Applied Theatre, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. His research expertise is in the social applications of theatre, in particular theatre and war, prison theatre, and arts and health. Major Australian Research Council-funded projects include The Difficult Return, on approaches to artsbased work with returning military personnel, and Captive Audiences, on the impact of performing arts programmes in prisons. His books include Theatre and War 1933–1945 and, most recently, Performance in Place of War, co-authored with James Thompson and Jenny Hughes (Seagull Press, 2010).

In this article Holly Maples examines how the controversy surrounding the ragtime dance craze in the United States allowed women to renegotiate acceptable gendered behaviour in the public sphere. In the early 1910s many members of the public performed acts of resistance to convention by dancing in the workplace, on the street, and in public halls. Civic institutions and private organizations sought to censor and control both the public space of the dance hall and the bodies of its participants. The controlling of social dance was an attempt to restrain what those opposed to the dances saw as unrestrained and indecent physical behaviour by the nation's youth, primarily targeting ragtime dancing's ‘moral degradation’ of young women. It was not merely the public nature of the dancing that was seen as dangerous to women, however, but the dances themselves, many of which featured chaotic, off-centred choreography, with either highly sexualized behaviour, as seen in the tango and the apache dance, or clumsy, un-gendered movement, popular in the animal dances of the day. Through ragtime dancing, women performed acts of rupture on their bodies and the urban cityscape, transforming social dancing into public statements of gendered resistance. Holly Maples is a lecturer in Drama at the University of East Anglia. Both a theatre practitioner and a scholar, she trained as an actress at Central School of Speech and Drama in London and completed her PhD in Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her book, Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Contemporary Abbey Theatre, has recently been published in the ‘Reimagining Ireland’ series by Peter Lang.

For over half a century the Italian Nobel playwright and performer Dario Fo (b. 1926) developed a theatre that challenged the authority of hegemonic culture, while promoting the validity and dignity of folk and popular cultures. In his satire of the Catholic Church, Fo presents the paternalistic God the Father as an instrument of suppression, while showing Jesus as being closer to the hearts of the folk. His references to apocryphal gospels – the gospels of early Christianity that were rejected by the Roman Church – play into this schema. In two of his plays, First Miracle of the Christ Child (from Tale of a Tiger and Other Stories) and Johan Padan Discovers America, Fo borrows elements from various apocryphal texts as a basis to underscore his father/son dichotomy, and to contest hegemonic dominance. At the same time, he presents a human Jesus who is more akin to the Jesus of certain apocrypha than to official gospels. Antonio Scuderi is Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri, where he founded the Italian programme. His interdisciplinary articles on Italian performance traditions have been published in leading journals of theatre, folklore and literary studies, and in essays for books. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and co-editor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition (Southern Illinois UP, 2000). His latest book, Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination (Lexington Books, 2011), examines the influence of concepts derived from folk culture, anthropology, and Gramscian Marxism on the development of Fo's theatrical praxis.

In this article Mireia Aragay and Clara Escoda examine James Macdonald's Royal Court Theatre production of Martin Crimp's triptych Fewer Emergencies (2005) in the wake of recent critical assessments of Crimp's work in relation to Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic paradigm. By focusing on light design, the authors suggest that Macdonald's staging of the play productively enhanced the tension inherent in Crimp's text between dramatic and postdramatic elements. Light was conceived in postdramatic terms as a major component of the mise-en-scène, synaesthetically interacting with the linguistic material in a way that necessitated the spectators’ active processing of all onstage signs and, ultimately, their critical examination of their own ethical and political positioning with respect to the late-capitalist social and cultural order. Mireia Aragay is a Senior Lecturer in English drama and theatre at the University of Barcelona. She is co-editor of British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics, and Academics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Clara Escoda has recently completed a PhD thesis on Martin Crimp's theatre at the University of Barcelona, where she lectures in English literature.

The long neglect of the work and influence of the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia has begun to be remedied in recent decades; but as Richard Beacham points out in the following article, Appia's own character was in part responsible for his ‘anonymity’. Where his friend Edward Gordon Craig was a tireless self-promoter, whose work remained influential despite being little utilized by practitioners in his lifetime, Appia tended to withdraw from contact with the wider world, and indeed chose to spend the last years of his life in the seclusion of a sanatorium. Here Beacham traces the twin threads which for long kept Appia's life a sealed book – the problems and delays over the publication of his writings, and the misplaced ‘discretion’ of those controlling the rights concerning Appia's homosexuality, a ‘condition’ which, in the early twentieth century, caused him much distress, and contributed to the long periods of deep depression, lassitude, and debilitation in his life. With the dedicated Appia scholar Walther Volbach, Beacham himself was at last able to edit and publish Adolphe Appia: Essays, Scenarios, and Designs in 1989. He contributed earlier studies of Appia to this journal in the two-part ‘Adolphe Appia, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, and Hellerau’, in NTQ 2 and 3 (May and August 1985), and ‘“Brothers in Suffering and Joy”: the Appia-Craig Correspondence’, in NTQ 15 (August 1988). Richard Beacham was one of the founders of the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, and besides his work on Appia has published extensively on ancient theatre practice. He has implemented ways of visualizing the study of theatre history as founding director of the King's Visualization Lab in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, where he served as Professor of Digital Culture.

With a rich mix of theatrical material to bring to the table, the climate-change debate playing out in the public domain would seem well adapted to the stage, and has often been presented in docu-dramatic form, as in Al Gore's well-known film An Inconvenient Truth. But until relatively recently climate change and the science relating to it have been conspicuous by their absence from the stage. Early movers on the climate-change theatre scene included Caryl Churchill's 2006 climate-change libretto for the London Proms, We Turned on the Light, and John Godber's 2007 play Crown Prince. Since then, interest has steadily increased. In 2009 came Steve Waters's double bill The Contingency Plan (On the Beach and Resilience). This was quickly followed by Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett in 2010, and by three further plays in the spring of 2011: Greenland, the collaborative work of Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne; The Heretic by Richard Bean; and Wastwater by Simon Stephens. In this article Julie Hudson focuses on three of these works to explore how the plays engage with the debate through the medium of climate-change science. As her article suggests, these British climate-change plays make an important and occasionally subversive contribution to the long-running discourse on the relationship between science, the ecosystem, and human beings. In performance, they succeed in turning a subject that has been overplayed for effect in the public domain into compelling theatre. Julie Hudson is currently a visiting fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University.

This article explores the conflict between the constructions of childhood and their political/legal implications in the context of the entertainment business, as related to the demands imposed upon children by parents and theatre managers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once children could move freely both within and between countries, these conflicts and concerns assumed a global dimension. Through a number of case studies, the authors offer some fresh observations about how legal and social imperatives affected the transmission of values about children employed as entertainers between Britain and Australasia during the period from 1870 to the start of the First World War – from the Education Acts of the 1870s to the legislation of 1910–1913 restricting the export of child entertainers. Gillian Arrighi is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has recently published articles in Theatre Journal (Dec 2008), Australasian Drama Studies (April 2009 and Oct 2010), and in Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (Sydney, 2008). She is associate editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. Victor Emeljanow is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and General Editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the reception of Chekhov in Britain and the career of Theodore Kommisarjevsky, to Victorian popular dramatists. He co-wrote with Jim Davis the award-winning Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 in 2001, and his chapter on staging the pirate in the nineteenth century was included in Swashbucklers and Swindlers: Pirates and Mutineers in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Grace Moore (2011).

Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) was a filmmaker, theatre director, and performance artist. In his Hamlet at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich in 2001 – his only staging of a classic – Schlingensief deployed the strategies of intervention typical of his whole work. In this article Thomas Irmer focuses on the actors' troupe in the play, performed by former neo-Nazis. Schlingensief was asking whether an audience would accept the reintegration of people who were determined to leave this extremist group with the support of the German government. At the same time, Schlingensief referred to a historical performance of Hamlet by Gustaf Gründgens, whose career in Nazi and post-war Germany is played in counterpoint against the neo-Nazi outsiders potentially to be reintegrated. Schlingensief's ambivalence here challenged ready-made opinions about overlap between political and aesthetic experience. Thomas Irmer is a scholar, theatre critic, and co-director of four documentary films on theatre, including Die Bühnenrepublik: Theatre in the GDR (2003) and Heiner Müller: a Biographical Portrait (2009). He teaches American theatre at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is a regular contributor to Theater Heute, editor of the book Castorf's Volksbühne (2003), and author of the forthcoming Life and Times of Andrzej T. Wirth.

Andegna (The First) was developed and performed during the fall and winter of 2009–10 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This article examines the complex social, political, and cultural contexts that informed the training, workshops, and process of creating an ensemble and performance in a time of national transformation. Urbanization and the crossing currents of Africa, Islam, Christian Orthodoxy, capitalism, the West, and technology prompted the re-conceptualization of performance, its function, and expression. In this article Thomas Riccio highlights the methodologies of reinventing an indigenous performance that is respectful of local traditions yet contemporary and accessible. He discusses how performance provides a forum for revealing social, political, and cultural trauma, and itself becomes an act of affirmation – an assertion of protest and healing that makes visible, immediate, and tactile the histories and unresolved issues haunting modern Ethiopia. Thomas Riccio, is Professor of Performance and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, having previously been Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, Resident Director and Dramaturg, the Cleveland Play House, Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre, Visiting Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam and the Korean National University for the Arts, and Artistic Director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska Native performance group. He has worked extensively in the area of indigenous performance, ritual, and shamanism, conducting workshops, research, and devising numerous performances in Africa, Russia, Siberia, Korea, China, Vietnam, and Alaska. He was declared a ‘Cultural Hero’ of the Sakha Republic in central Siberia.

Chris Vervain is a mask maker who has for a number of years directed masked Greek drama. On the basis of the research she has undertaken using her own masks, in this article she considers some of the practical issues involved in a masked staging of the plays today, drawing specifically on her experience of directing the Bacchae and the Antigone. Here she extends the discussion started previously in ‘Performing Ancient Drama in Mask: the Case of Greek New Comedy’ in NTQ 79 (August 2004). Earlier, with David Wiles, she contributed ‘The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance’ to NTQ 67 (August 2001). In 2008 she completed a doctorate on masks in Greek tragedy at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Craiova International Shakespeare Festival has been a major touchstone in Europe for theatre artists, theatregoers, and scholars for nearly two decades. This overview briefly situates the Festival historically, indicating the ideals and perspectives developed for it by its founder Emil Boroghina, former director of the National Theatre of Craiova. It identifies as well a number of the Festival's many highlights over the years, Romanian as well as international, and focuses on examples from the 2012 programme, including Silviu Purcarte's The Tempest and Robert Wilson's Shakespeare's Sonnets performed by the Berliner Ensemble. Attention is drawn to the presence at the successive editions of the Festival of productions directed by Purcarete, who established his career at the National Theatre of Craiova, to which Boroghina had invited him, and who won international fame after performances of his Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival. Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In this article Dirk Gindt discusses Ingmar Bergman's 1951 production of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo in the small Swedish town of Norrköping, demonstrating how Bergman methodically ignored the tragicomic nature of the play in order to develop and exaggerate its comic and grotesque elements. After extensive cuts and alterations in the script, the character Serafina delle Rose became even more overpowering than in the original text and dominated the action from beginning to end. Karin Kavli, a leading lady in Swedish post-war theatre and a frequent collaborator with Bergman, played the character not as a mourning widow but as a possessed disciple of Dionysus in an unabashedly entertaining and sexualized production which, despite reservations from critics, became a success with audiences. Dirk Gindt now works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stockholm University. He is co-editor of Fashion: an Interdisciplinary Reflection (Stockholm: Raster, 2009), and has published numerous articles in journals such as Nordic Theatre Studies, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Theatre Survey, and Fashion Studies, as well as chapters in edited volumes. He is the editor-in-chief of Lambda Nordica: Journal for GLBT-Studies, for which he has edited a special issue on masculinities (2008) and a double issue on queer fashion (2009).