Eugenio Barba has honoured NTQ by entrusting to its pages his very personal introduction to his most recent book, Le Mie vite nel terzo teatro: Diffrenza, mestiere, rivolta (My Lives in the Third Theatre: Difference, Craft, Revolt), which has here been specially translated into English by Judy Barba, the co-dedicatee, along with Julia Varley and Vera Gaeta, of his book: the ‘origins and accomplices of my journey to the archipelago of floating islands’. NTQ received this translation, here prepared by the journal’s editor, Maria Shevtsova, ahead of the book’s launch on 5 October 2023 at the Biblioteca Bernardini in Lecce in Puglia. On a grander scale, a few days later, the occasion also saw the opening in Barba’s honour of his and the Odin Teatret archives under the banner of LAFLIS (Living Archive Floating Islands), located in a wing of the three-dimensional immersive museum of the Bernardini. LAFLIS’s rich collection includes written material, film and video documentaries, recordings of performances, and such artefacts and equipment as instruments, masks, and costumes gathered during Third Theatre work. The latter is neither established-classical nor avant-garde theatre but ‘other’ – small-group, sometimes unofficial, and often self-taught theatre. LAFLIS is not exclusively intended for researchers and scholars, but is open as well to interested members of the general public. Barba’s introduction to My Lives in the Third Theatre is here published in full, clearly signposting, together with the author’s succinct commentary, the itinerary of his life’s multifarious work, which involved, and still involves, a wide range of participants and collaborators in different times, places, and languages, and in differing forms and patterns of creativity.

Barba’s account begins with his departure from Italy to Norway (1954), and his apprenticeship as a welder, and then a mariner, before tracing his move to study in Poland (1961), where he meets and works with Grotowski, his return to Oslo, where he founds Odin Teatret (1964), and then his emigration to Denmark (1966), where Odin Teatret establishes its niche within the larger framework that Barba named the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. Barba’s journey continued, encompassing numerous theatre endeavours, including the development of the idea of a Third Theatre (the ‘floating islands’ alluded to above); the seminal ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology, 1979); and, although quite clearly not at journey’s end, the Fondazione Barba Varley established in 2020.

Eugenio Barba first defined ‘theatre anthropology’ as the study of the human being in an organized performance situation in a lecture in Warsaw in May 1980. The first session of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) was held in October 1980 and the last to date in 2023. This article gives a personal account of ISTA’s history from its origins, rooted in Eugenio Barba’s interest in Asian classical theatre techniques and the founding of Odin Teatret in Denmark, to the most recent experiences, which include the intercultural production of Anastasis/Resurrection at the 2023 Theatre Olympics in Budapest. It identifies masters of given ISTA sessions and their invaluable contribution to the School’s emphasis on, and understanding of, craft, as well as the distinguishing characteristics and points of change and development of selected ISTAs.

This article investigates two recent modern kunqu productions, Dang Nian Mei Lang [The Young Mei Lanfang] and Qu Qiubai (its title is the name of its protagonist), both produced by Jiangsu Kunqu Theatre House. Despite the obstacles faced by kunqu during its process of modernization, these two productions have accomplished a number of aesthetic breakthroughs: a unique form of fictional realism on the stage; its implicit use of conventionalization (that is, conventional, classical kunqu modes and their attendant aesthetic outlook); and the incorporation of recognizably up-to-date modern elements (‘fashion’) in the stage work. Meanwhile, these impressive aesthetic innovations signal, as well as facilitate, kunqu’s re-entry into the landscape of contemporary Chinese theatre as a forceful agent of cultural intervention.

The neoliberal enterprise of NGOs has transformed the left-leaning politics of the political theatre movement in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Commencing in the 1980s, this theatre acted as a vibrant movement of the Left, challenging the brutal military dictatorship of General Zia. At a later stage, its politics changed to the neoliberal politics of NGOs, giving way to economics and the agenda of international donor organizations of the Global North. This article demonstrates the turn-around of theatre company Ajoka’s recent production Saira aur Miara (2019) and focuses on the production’s politics, together with its text, design, and performance modes in aesthetic terms. A materialist and context-specific political approach examines to what extent class struggle and leftist ideas inform this company’s ideological imaginings and how much it has moved away from its original political position. It indicates the tensions and contradictions that have been created during this change and because of it.

In the 1920s, Ichikawa Sadanji and Morita Kanya conducted two rounds of kabuki tours in China, which clearly revealed the mechanism of misinterpretation and misplacement in the (re)construction of the cultural identities of Chinese and Japanese theatre. Both had been modelled upon each other in the context of intercultural communications in the early twentieth century. Some Chinese theatre critics indicated that Chinese xiqu should absorb the values of modernity identified by them in the Morita troupe’s kabuki performances. In contrast, Ichikawa Sadanji’s tours in Northeast China and his subsequent visit to Beijing inspired kabuki to imbibe a new spirit of the times from Chinese xiqu, an impure ‘Eastern Spirit’ paradoxically manifested in a ‘purified’ theatrical Chineseness. The positive aspect of ‘misplaced misinterpretations’ by kabuki and xiqu of each other’s cultural images and values lies in the fact that it afforded the two theatre traditions a huge momentum for assimilating each other’s ‘Otherness’ to break their own tradition’s exclusiveness.

This article examines Shabih’khani, a traditional ritual performance in Iran also known as Ta’ziyeh, in the context of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. It includes the historical challenges faced by Iranian women in a patriarchal society dominated by politics and religion, augmenting existing research on women’s Shabih’khani through recently discovered documents that show the erasure of feminine symbols within the tradition. The article also explores the theatrical conventions, dramaturgical elements, and historical reasons for the emergence and decline of women’s Shabih’khani, together with factors that contribute to the endurance of men’s Shabih’khani. By drawing connections and comparisons between Shabih’khani and the contemporary ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, it illuminates the factors shaping the movement and offers insights into its potential for success and progress.

This article discusses the continuity of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s pedagogy directly to his disciple Vasily Toporkov, and from him to his students Oleg Yefremov and Oleg Tabakov. Toporkov joined the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) as an actor eleven years before Stanislavsky’s death, which allowed him to participate in the final phase of Stanislavsky’s life’s work and his development of the method of psychophysical actions. Struck by Stanislavsky’s authority, scrutiny, and caring attitude towards all actors, as well as other co-workers of the theatre, Toporkov transmitted this legacy, together with the practical knowledge that he had gained, to Yefremov and Tabakov, recounting vivid stories and anecdotes about Stanislavsky. The article traces the professional development of both men: each founded his own theatre, Yefremov the Sovremennik, and Tabakov the Tabakerka. Thus, whether or not they set out to do so, both Yefremov and Tabakov followed Stanislavsky’s life example, when he founded the MAT. Their decision to follow Stanislavsky’s example was a logical consequence of this great teacher’s life-affirmative, spiritual, material, and intellectual legacy, which is on a par with the most significant humanistic writings. The key spiritual-physical aspects of Stanislavsky’s legacy have been passed down in a straight line from Stanislavsky to his students, from them to their students, and so on, from one generation of the Moscow Art Theatre to the next, until the present day.

Mundo Quinta is a documentary theatre creation programme for adolescents in Madrid, launched by Espacio Abierto Quinta de los Molinos and directed by the theatre company Cross Border Project. This publicly funded programme started in 2018 and is currently celebrating its sixth season. Each season takes place during the academic year and culminates in the premiere of a new play. This article combines empirical and ethnographical methods with theatre analysis to examine the foundations, artistic vision, and creative process of Mundo Quinta, and to analyze how artistic quality is ensured in the final productions. The research undertaken focuses on the fourth season, and identifies the techniques used to create the verbatim theatre play ¿Me quieres alfileres? (Multiformas de quereres) [Do You Love Me? (Multiforms of Love)] in 2022 with designated young participants.

The training that the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) perfected during its thirty years of existence is its most relevant heritage. SITI believed that training was a crucial part of a performer’s education and ethos. Its constitutive elements – Viewpoints and the Suzuki Method for actor training – are here put in a dialectical opposition that nurtures hybridization. This article investigates how, in fact, these two trainings intersect and also form new ‘languages’ (that is, systems of representation) whenever they are performed. A contextual analysis of SITI’s training as a foundation for making work and as a means for educating actors provides a clearer understanding of why and how SITI training is an instrument that facilitates and fosters cross-cultural collaboration.

In theatre criticism, the lines between professional and amateur have softened considerably since the turn of the twenty-first century, with much attention – academic and journalistic – given to the impact of amateur theatre criticism on theatre-making and marketing, on newspapers, and on theatre scholarship. So far, however, the voices and perspectives of amateur critics themselves have largely been absent from research. To rectify this absence, this study applies sociological concepts from Pierre Bourdieu and Sarah Thornton to thirty-five interviews undertaken with practising theatre bloggers in the United Kingdom in order to understand their relative positions within three intersecting fields: the field of professional theatre reviewing; the field of online ‘influencing’; and the smaller and more specific field of ‘amateur’ theatre criticism. Here, the study undertaken finds a significant proportion of practitioners using the counterpoint of the ‘fangirl’ – whose practices of appreciation and etiquette are widely disparaged – to advocate for their own purportedly more intellectual and professional approaches to critique.

Abject breath, running over with its own refuse and yet refusing to stop breathing, forms a gasping undertone to Beckett’s oeuvre. To give a sense of the longevity and development of Beckettian respiration, this article examines passages across the range of his career, paying attention to several prose works – the short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (1934) and the novels Murphy (1938) and Molloy (1951/55) – and two brief plays: Breath (1969) and Not I (1972). While there is no simple development of Beckett’s writing on the breath, an ambiguous movement can be traced from an initial rejection of a conception of the breath as immaculate and easeful to a deeper exploration of breath as polluted and broken, and to a final, insistent association of respiration with rubbish, and life with death. If there is hope to be found in the Beckettian breath, it lies not on the page but in the breath-carried conversations of the rehearsal room, exemplified above all by his collaboration with Billie Whitelaw on Not I.

Valery Galendeyev seemed immortal, so steady was his demeanour, so light his ample frame. We knew that he had had serious Covid early in the pandemic but his habitual warmth and gentle irony belied his health’s decline as he continued to work as if it would never stop. He understood, though, that, sooner rather than later, his growing ill heath, which he discreetly set aside, would stop him.

This article demonstrates how the Enlightenment model of sentiment and sympathy is performed in embodied gestures of affective empathy-building, cross-cultural fraternity, and concern for human rights in three Romantic Regency tragedies: Pizarro (1799) by the Romantic dramatist August von Kotzebue, adapted from the German by the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Remorse (1813) by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and The Apostate (1817) by the Irish dramatist Richard Lalor Sheil. In these plays, protagonists are moved towards sympathy and solidarity with others across cultural divisions and conflict. The discussion also examines how human rights issues are addressed in two plays by Scottish dramatists: Archibald MacLaren’s The Negro Slaves (1799) and Joanna Baillie’s Rayner (1804). Here the protagonists express remorse for engaging in conflict, colonialism, slavery, violence, and human rights abuses against others. All these texts share a common internationalist desire to unite humanity against oppression, injustice, and inequality, advocating human rights, equality, religious tolerance, and cosmopolitan citizenship.

During the past five years the cultural world in Germany has been shaken and divided by a series of controversies involving contemporary works of art charged with being anti-Semitic. Obviously, with the Holocaust continuing to occupy a major position in modern German consciousness and history, sensitivity to anti-Semitic expressions is particularly keen here. This sensitivity has been increased by a number of recent developments, including the growing visibility of far-right political groups, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) protesting Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and the official politicization of these tensions by a parliamentary ruling in 2015 restricting the activities of the BDS. The conflict between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli state and legitimate censorship of ethnically offensive material has recently become increasingly bitter in Germany. This article discusses the dynamics of three of the most significant recent examples: the conflict involving Germany’s most prestigious arts festival, the Kassell documenta in 2020; the withdrawal in 2022 of the European Drama Award, the continent’s largest award, from British dramatist Caryl Churchill; and the withdrawal from the Munich stage of the most recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, who has been widely heralded in Germany as the most significant contemporary dramatist.

This comparative study of Tristan Bernays’ Old Fools (2018) and Nick Payne’s Elegy (2016) concerns two contemporary plays in which love manifested in middle-age and older adulthood is a determinant factor in the reconceptualization of the ageing self, particularly when afflicted by memory loss or cognitive failure. Positioned within the framework of theatre and ageing studies, and drawing from their intersection with gender studies and disability theories, the study demonstrates that the narrative arc that both texts recreate is not free of overtones of decline. However, the manipulation of chronological time in both plays through different techniques, as well as the importance of their love story, one between a man and a woman in Old Fools, and the other between two women in Elegy, help disrupt the binary of young/old perpetuated by ageist cultures, and, ultimately, undermine rigid constructions of identity in old age. The article concludes that new theatrical representations of ageing that develop narratives of love not only enable richer debates on the construction of the self, but ultimately contribute to an all-inclusive stage and, with it, to an age-friendly society.

In this interview, which took place in Birmingham on 16 February 2023, Hakan Gültekin talks to playwright David Edgar about his theatre universe and the current state of British theatre. Edgar has long championed the social and economic rights of playwrights, and here suggests that the lack of long-term and sustained support from British theatres has created what he calls ‘Primark playwrights’. His plays are characterized by a careful examination of historical events and the impact of these events on society, as evident in his epic two-part play Destiny (1976), which examines the roots of the British Labour movement. Other notable plays include Excuses Excuses (1972), Saigon Rose (1976), Wreckers (1977), and Entertaining Strangers (1986), commissioned by the Colway Theatre. He has also written plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1978), Maydays (1983, revived in 2018), and Pentecost (1994). More recently, he adapted A Christmas Carol for the RSC (2017) and staged the one-man show Trying It On (2018). He founded the first playwriting degree in Britain at the University of Birmingham in 1989, and served as President of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain from 2007 to 2013.

MITEM (Mádach International Theatre Meeting) celebrated its tenth anniversary in October 2023, somewhat out of sync and out of time because of the festival’s cancellation due to Covid in 2020. It was absorbed into the Theatre Olympics (as discussed in New Theatre Quarterly, XXXIX, No. 4 (November 2023) [NTQ 156], p. 377–86), but its most recent edition was something of a replacement for the cancelled event, presented in the round figure of ten that has made everybody happy. It has also allowed this editor to follow through with a ‘PS’ to that article, acknowledging the importance of MITEM for both the National Theatre in Budapest and the theatregoing public. By contrast with the three and a half months of the Theatre Olympiad, MITEM lasted a modest twenty-four days.

This article re-reads Beckett’s play Not I (1972) in the light of the ‘Mother and Baby Homes Report’, published in January 2021. Beckett interrogates what James Smith, Clair Wills, and others have referred to as Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’. Mouth, ‘brought up … with the other waifs’ in a mother and baby home, absorbed religious notions of sin and punishment. Through a close reading of selected passages, the article considers to what extent Not I can be read as a ‘survivor’s testimony’ such as those given to the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes.

As a prominent figure in the contemporary Iranian theatre scene, Chista Yasrebi uses her plays to call for female liberation in the country while navigating the existing political constraints, including censorship. Her 1996 play Rahil, for example, acts as a political allegory through its narrative of the titular woman’s desire for transcendence within the patriarchal realm of Persian mysticism. In its close analysis of the play, this article identifies the historical significance of mystic women in Iran and examines Yasrebi’s use of mysticism to comment on the complexities of gender politics, the oppression faced by Iranian women, and the need for social resistance. Further, it draws on key concepts from Alain Badiou’s political philosophy to demonstrate how Rahil’s journey into mysticism can be seen as an act of transgression. It argues that Yasrebi’s work enriches the ongoing discourse on the role of women in Iranian society and the broader struggle for political transformation.

This article argues that Hebrew theatre is defined by a hegemonic Ashkenaziness that has been present from its beginning and which continues today. It identifies four main components of this hegemony, each of which is examined in turn. The first two components, Hebrew culture and Eurocentrism, are analyzed in relation to the repertoire of plays presented at such theatres as Habima, Ohel, and Cameri. This repertoire combines Yiddish plays and translations of European plays, while also reproducing Orientalist attitudes towards Mizrahi culture. The third component, privileged citizenship, centres on the privileges afforded to Ashkenazi artists and actors in the theatre when compared to Mizrahi actors, especially in terms of casting decisions. Finally, hegemonic Ashkenaziness is defined by membership of the middle class, which, in the theatre, leads to productions being targeted at an Ashkenazi audience and its cultural capital.