The 250th anniversary of the opening of the Bristol Old Vic, the country's longest-serving theatre, was celebrated on 30 May 2016. In this article David Roberts considers the repertory choices of the opening night, the way the occasion sought to address anxiety in the city about the presence of a professional theatre in its midst, and the precarious means by which the theatre itself came into being. Where previous historians have emphasized the legal context for objections to the theatre, it is argued here that discourses arising from the Jeremy Collier controversy informed local opposition and were specifically addressed both through programming and through writing for and about the event. David Roberts is Dean of the Arts, Design, and Media at Birmingham City University. His recent publications include Thomas Betterton and Restoration Plays and Players, both for Cambridge University Press. This article is based on a lecture given to celebrate the anniversary of the Bristol Old Vic.

Direct and bloody violence has a long history on stage. In recent years, a different mode of violence can be distinguished in the work of prominent American playwrights – less direct than indirect, more covert than overt, and likely to affect a group rather than individuals. In this article Russell Vandenbroucke applies concepts from Norwegian sociologist and Peace Studies scholar Johan Galtung to examine structural and cultural violence in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) and traces similar representations of violence in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, Ayad Aktar's Disgraced, The Laramie Project by Moisés Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Project, and Tim Robbins's adaptation of Dead Man Walking by Sr Helen Prejean. These writers have in common the status of traditional outsiders – black, female, gay, Muslim – and this informs their engagement in the social and political vitality of the stage. The shift in focus of these plays from direct violence echoes observations in Steven Pinker's recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice, and Conflict Transformation programme. He previously served as Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. His publications include Truths the Hand Can Touch: the Theatre of Athol Fugard and numerous articles on South African theatre.

By the early 1870s, the term ‘filth’ had become Wagner’s shorthand for Offenbach. He attacked his fellow composer both publicly and privately and sought to establish a polarity between the two, confining Offenbach to the realm of frivolous and materialistic popular folk culture while casting his own work as exemplary of the new German spirit. Laurence Senelick’s close analysis of Wagner’s writings, including his notorious 1869 essay ‘Jewishness in Music’, shows this critique to be fuelled by jealousy, cultural imperialism, and his growing anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is included here as a counterpoint, challenging his former mentor and celebrating Offenbach as the exemplar of Jewish genius. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent books include Soviet Theater: A Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky) and the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015). This article is taken from his forthcoming The Offenbach Century: His Influence on Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press).

Referring to several European productions of Hamlet between 2001 and 2014, Nicoleta Cinpoeş in this article examines the stage struggle to ‘recuperate’ an Ophelia that both discursive criticism and visual objectification bury prematurely, albeit by different means and for different aims, when they claim, in Laertes's words: ‘The woman will be out.’ She takes Laertes's words to mean both taking the woman out and putting the woman on view, and offers a preliminary survey of the customary textual cuts and their effect on Ophelia's part, exploring ‘the four unscripted scenes’ of three directors – Vlad Mugur, Radu Alexandru Nica, and Jan Klata – and their impact on Ophelia's role as found in Shakespeare's play. Nicoleta Cinpoeş is Principal Lecturer at the University of Worcester and author of Shakespeare's Hamlet in Romania 1778–2008 (Mellen, 2010) as well as editor of, and contributor to, Doing Kyd (Manchester University Press, 2016). She has published articles in Shakespeare Bulletin, SEDERI, Testi e linguaggi, Arrêts sur scène, Theatrical Blends, and Studia Dramatica.

In this article Natalia Yakubova explores the interactions between theatre and literature as between an actress on one side and a man of letters on the other. The interactions discussed here came at a particular historical moment, when the transition from an actor-centred to a director-centred hierarchy was taking place, and the article deals with the letters written by actresses to the men who were playwrights and/or theoreticians of the new theatre: Eleonora Duse writing to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Vera Komissarzhevskaya to Valery Bryusov, Irena Solska to Jerzy Żuławski, and Gertrud Eysoldt to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In each case study, attention is paid to the characteristics of the relationships between a given actress and a particular writer, their attitudes towards theatre reform, the way in which the actresses evaluated the literary status of their letter writing, and, significantly, the stylistic features of their writing. Natalia Yakubova is a senior researcher of the State Institute of Art Studies in Moscow, and was Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences between 2013 and 2015. She is author of O Witkacym (2010) and Teatr epokhi peremen v Polshe, Vengrii i Rossii 1990-ye–2010-ye (2014), and has published numerous articles in Russia, Poland, the USA, and Canada, among other countries.

Han Tae-Sook’s Lady Macbeth, a theatre adaptation by a leading woman director in Korea, has been interpreted largely from a feminist and intercultural perspective. In this article Yeeyon Im examines a body of criticism on Han’s production to raise awareness of the danger of totalization in current critical geography in Korea, which may marginalize non-ideological views. The humanist issues of evil, desire, and guilt, which are explicit themes of Lady Macbeth, have been neglected by critics in favour of discourses of difference. Yeeyon Im asks if ‘the subaltern can speak’ of universality, and calls for a new literary humanism that allows reflection on how to live through the help of literature. Yeeyon Im is Associate Professor of English at Yeungnam University in South Korea, where she teaches Shakespeare and drama. She has published widely on Shakespeare and modern drama. Her articles on intercultural Shakespeare productions of Lee Yountaek and Ninagawa Yukio have appeared in Theatre Journal, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare Bulletin. She has also translated into Korean plays by Ben Jonson (Volpone and The Alchemist) and Christopher Marlowe (Dido, Queen of Carthage).

During the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ in Morocco (1956–1999), state-sponsored violence was embedded not only in assaults on the bodies of victims, but also in their affective and psychological well-being. This occurred to such an extent that many attempts at the narrativization of violence via testimonials and prison memoirs fail to convey the trauma experienced in Moroccan secret prisons. In the present article Khalid Amine is concerned with the fragility of testimony as a performative act, in which the obligation of voicing pain and trauma is in tension with the impossibility of its telling. After the hearing sessions organized by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) in 2004, another narrative turn has emerged in Moroccan theatre and in other artistic forms whereby reenactments of prison memoirs, testimonials, and other registers of repressed personal archives are employed onstage as a means of breaching the walls between the personal and political. Khalid Amine is Professor of Performance Studies, Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco. He is co-author with Marvin Carlson of The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (2012).

Through a close examination of Eisenstein's writings on the Kabuki theatre, Min Tian demonstrates in this article that Eisenstein's interpretation of Kabuki from the perspective of his theory displaced the techniques and principles of Kabuki theatre from its historical and aesthetic contexts. Predicated upon his ‘montage thinking’, Eisenstein reconstituted the techniques and principles integral to Kabuki as an organic whole in the context of his evolving and synthesizing theory. Min Tian has a PhD in theatre history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a doctorate at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. Currently teaching at the University of Iowa, he is the author of Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage (2012) and The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese–Western Intercultural Theatre (2008), and editor of China's Greatest Operatic Male Actor of Female Roles: Documenting the Life and Art of Mei Lanfang, 1894–1961 (2010).

In this article Ziad Adwan examines the relationship between the Opera House in Damascus and the Al-Assad dynasty. Hafez Al-Assad ordered the building of the Opera House but it remained unfinished at his death. His son Bashar opened it after three decades of construction. Leaving the institution unfinished was, it is argued here, due to uncertainty regarding its identity, place in the bureaucratic hierarchy, and meaning in a totalitarian regime. Theatre institutions were driven to take oppositional positions against one another, and the Opera House intensified the enmity. No theatres were built during the reign of Hafez Al-Assad, and while the Opera House was a hope for many Syrians, it also played a role in dividing them. Adwan concludes that the exceptional design features and location of the Opera House have marked its activities and that in relation to the Al-Assad dynasty it has become a critical focus in the Syrian war. Ziad Adwan is a theatre practitioner, who completed his PhD in Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He taught at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus (2009–2013) and has acted in plays and films, as well as working as a director. He was the artistic director of Invisible Stories, a series of street theatre events in different places in Damascus. Adwan is currently affiliated with the Global Theatre Histories research project at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

Recently a number of young, ultra-talented, Māori and Pacific Island performers have emerged on local stages in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and beyond. Exemplifying this bright, youthful energy is Hone Kouka's multi-media production The Beautiful Ones, a joyful exploration of luminous rangatahi (youth) unleashed in a liminal realm. Adopting the Māori cosmological concept of Te Kore, in this article Nicola Hyland explores the depiction of rangatahi in this performance as transformational: liberated – culturally, sexually, and performatively – from historical tropes of youth and indigeneity. Nicola Hyland is a lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has ancestral ties to the Te Ati-Haunui-a-Paparangi and Ngati Hauiti iwi tribes of Aotearoa.

In this article Daphna Ben-Shaul explores politically engaged Israeli and Palestinian site-specific re-enactments that pursue what she terms a ‘performative return’. This includes performed aesthetic and political re-enactments of real-life events, which bring about a re-conceptualization of reality. Three contemporary cases of return are discussed with regard to the historical precedent of Evreinov’s 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace. The first is an activist, unauthorized return to the village of Iqrit in northern Israel by a group of young Palestinians, whose families were required to leave their homes temporarily in the 1948 war, and have since not been allowed to return. The second is Kibbutz, a project by the Empty House Group, which involved an unauthorized temporary settlement on an abandoned site in Jerusalem. The third is Civil Fast, a twenty-four-hour action by Public Movement, which was hosted mainly on a central public square in Jerusalem, integrated into the urban flow. The article draws attention to the fine line these actions straddle between political activism and aesthetic order, and explores their critical and performative effectiveness. Daphna Ben-Shaul is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. Her current research on site-specific performance in Israel is funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation. She is the editor of a book on the Israeli art and performance group Zik (Keter, 2005), and has published articles in major journals.

What political theatre may be in contemporary times and in what sense it is ‘political’ are the core issues of this article. Maria Shevtsova discusses examples from within a restricted period, 2007 to 2014, but from a wide area that begins in Eastern Europe – Russia, Romania, Hungary, Poland – and moves to Germany and France. Her examples are principally productions by established ensemble theatre companies and her analysis is framed by a brief discussion concerning independent theatres, ‘counter-cultural’ positions, and institutional and institutionalized theatres. This latter group is in focus to indicate how political theatre in the seven years specified has been far from alien to, or sidelined from, national theatres, state theatres, or other prestigious companies in receipt of state subsidy. Two main profiles of recent political theatre emerge from this research, one that acknowledges political history, while the other critiques neoliberal capitalism; there is some unpronounced overlap between the two. Productions of Shakespeare feature significantly in the delineated theatrescape. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book (co-authored) is The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

The distinction between fictionality and actuality takes on a special significance in the theatre, which contains two frames simultaneously: a fictional and an actual. Although the presence of these frames is integral to performance, the demarcation between them often becomes blurred. Both Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (1982) and Sam Holcroft's Edgar and Annabel (2011) problematize the relationship between an actor and the character that he or she portrays. While Stoppard's characters sometimes indulge in fictional portrayals, Holcroft's embody additional characters out of a sense of duty and commitment to a political cause. Although the stakes of keeping the illusion in place are seemingly much higher in Holcroft's play, both suggest that the blurring of the line between the actual and the fictional is not only inevitable, but also potentially dangerous. Lida Krüger is a senior lecturer in English Studies at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. Her current research interests include fictionality in theatre, the position of the audience in performance, and theatre archiving.

The inspiration for Dion Boucicault's first Irish subject, The Colleen Bawn, in a set of pictur esque views of Ireland after the artist W. H. Bartlett is well documented, and Bartlett's iconography of wild scenery, moonlight, round towers, and ruined abbeys features strongly throughout the Irish plays. Although Bartlett's compositions were widely known in the nineteenth century, there has been little consideration of how they may have informed the audience's understanding of the plays. Rather, they are regarded as a set of clichéd, stereotyped images, which the playwright subverted through a process of ironic distancing and repurposing. In this article Patricia Smyth argues that, on the contrary, Boucicault made use of the mythical and supernatural associations of picturesque Ireland in order to convey a particular narrative of Irish history. Patricia Smyth is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She has published articles and book chapters on French and British nineteenth-century art, visual culture and theatre. She is co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, co-edited with Jim Davis a special issue dedicated to theatrical iconography (2012), and is currently completing a book on Paul Delaroche and theatre.

The term ‘psychophysical’ in relation to acting and performer training is widely used by theatre scholars and practitioners. Konstantin Stanislavsky is considered to have been an innovator in developing an approach to Western acting focused on both psychology and physicality. The discourse encompasses questions of practice, of creativity and emotion, the philosophical problem of mind–body from Western and Eastern perspectives of spirituality. In this article, Rose Whyman attempts to uncover what Stanislavsky meant by his limited use of the term ‘psychophysical’ and suggests that much of the discourse remains prone to a dualist mind–body approach. Clarification of this is needed in order to further understanding of the practice of training performers. Rose Whyman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. She researches the science of actor training and is the author of The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge, 2008) and Stanislavsky: the Basics (Routledge, 2013).

In 1882, a critic of the journal Theatre noted that ‘the theatrical life of the present day might be described as a round of glorified strolling. The ‘circuits’ of Bristol, Norwich, and York of the last century are now replaced by those of the United States, South Africa, India, and Australia, and a modern actor thinks as little of a season in Melbourne or New York as his grandfather did of a week’s ‘starring’ in Edinburgh.’ Yet the story of how these Western theatre companies reached audiences in the faraway lands of the British Empire and Asia is still relatively untold. In this article Kaori Kobayashi explores in detail some itineraries around the turn of the twentieth century of these travelling companies, many of them relatively obscure, showing that the companies had a particular and significant impact on the development of Shakespearean performance and interpretation in the East. In essence, it is impossible to understand the rise of ‘Asian Shakespeare’ without also grasping how Western touring companies helped shape the East’s engagement with the West’s most canonical dramatist. Kaori Kobayashi is Professor of English at Nagoya City University, author of The Cultural History of The Taming of The Shrew (in Japanese, 2007), and editor of Shakespeare Performance Studies in Japan (in Japanese, 2010).

One of the most important theatre festivals in Russia, the Baltic House Theatre Festival has a well-defined focus, as its name suggests. During the twenty-five years of its existence, it has showcased and in other ways nurtured and encouraged some of the greatest talents – actors, directors, designers – of the Baltic region. It has invited such leading directors as Eimuntas Nekrosius to prepare and rehearse works in its theatre – in the case of Boris Godunov in 2015, performed by the National Theatre of Vilnius. The Festival has also financed co-productions, to extend the reach of its own theatre and develop young audiences, inviting, for example, Luk Perceval and Silviu Purcarete to mount Macbeth (2014) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2015), respectively, with the Baltic House company. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London

Sara Allgood was an integral member of the Abbey Theatre from its opening in December 1904, yet her presence in its histories or in the growing national theatre movement of the time tends to be rather peripheral. Drawing on archival research in the Berg Collection and the Abbey Theatre Archives, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine argues here for the centrality of Allgood in the experiments of William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory, and reveals the complicated class and religious fissures that surrounded the performance of Irish female identity in which Allgood was embroiled. By tracing her own trajectory, Redwine also challenges the dominant narratives of the Abbey Theatre that present it as distinct from earlier nationalist theatre movements, exploring the impact of the tableaux of the all-female street theatre group on the images of women presented on the Abbey stage. Further, she draws important connections between Allgood's work on the stage and her later work in Hollywood film, showing how she challenged stereotypes consistently to present a new kind of Irish female performance. Elizabeth Brewer Redwine lectures in the English Department at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, and is the co-editor with Amrita Ghosh of the forthcoming Tagore and Yeats: a Postcolonial Re-Envisioning. Her current research project, titled Written for Her to Act: Female Performance and Collaboration, examines Yeats's and Synge's collaborations with actresses at the Abbey Theatre.

In this article Aamir Aziz argues that Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a wilful and purposeful theatrical response to the operations of Joseph McCarthy and his henchmen. He highlights the theatricality of the McCarthy trials and examines them through the frame of spectacle, as outlined by Guy Debord, to show how Miller used his play theatrically to unhinge the machinations of McCarthyism and the seemingly unassailable frame of an American democracy defending itself against Communist subversion. Miller's play was thus a theatrical intervention into an ideological force field that served to puncture and expose the veil of this spectacle. Aamir Aziz received his doctorate from Universiteit Leiden in 2014, and is now an Assistant Professor in English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. He has recently published articles in International Policy Digest, New Authors' Journal, Sydney Globalist, and London Globalist.

Drawing on a close reading of Theodor Adorno's essay, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in this article Eva Urban develops the argument that an analysis of the reification that reduces human relationships to mere business interactions has been a central concern of modern drama. The article offers an analysis of some of the ways in which this theme continues to be represented, interrogated, and challenged internationally in contemporary political plays and theatre performances across a range of genres and grounded in a variety of dramaturgical principles. It asks how drama, theatre-making, theatre-spectating, and theatre-participating can create dynamics necessary to enable a move from reified consciousness towards the development of critical autonomy and solidarity. A negotiation of the principles of critical consciousness and solidarity is problematic within economic structures that cause social, ethnic, and religious atomization and divisions. Her argument concludes with an outline for a manifesto for political drama and theatre practice to work against reification. Eva Urban is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department and an Associate of the Irish Studies Research Centre, CEI/CRBC, at the University of Rennes 2, France. She recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011), she has also published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and edited book collections.