In this article, Michaela Antoniou offers a close analysis of Nikos Karathanos's 2016 production of Aristophanes’ The Birds, which was staged at the Epidaurus Festival with the support of the Onassis Cultural Centre. She argues that the context embodies Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the ‘invented tradition’, and examines its often problematic relation to the Centre, which, as a powerful and economically independent organization, occupies a dominant position in the field of theatre in Greece. The essential parameters and scope of Karathanos's performance aesthetics are analyzed through the lens of Michel Foucault and Kornelius Kastoriadis, while attention is also given to the media discourse surrounding the work. Finally, the article historicizes Karathanos's The Birds in relation to Koun's renowned 1959 production in order to examine Karathanos's intention to interpret the play as a production for his and our time. Michaela Antoniou is Teaching Fellow in Acting at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is also an actress, playwright, author, and translator, and has previously published articles on the work of Karolos Koun.

In this article So-Rim Lee closely investigates the Mahābhārata in relation to – but quite distinct from – The Mahabharata: a Play (1985) by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière. Since the ancient text of the Mahābhārata does not have a definitive author, version, or form, So-Rim Lee argues that Brook and Carrière's framing of their modern reading as an adaptation of the ancient text poses a series of questions regarding the politics of recontextualizing a South Asian text in Western terms, the methodological process involved in doing this, and the ethical stance espoused by the transcultural adapters. She then questions whether the audience actually finds Brook and Carrière's international, multi - racial production as cosmopolitan and multicultural as the authors claim it to be. If The Mahabharata: a Play is a matter of cultural appropriation rather than adaptation, what transgressions are involved in reframing the source text and how does it produce what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’? Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. She has previously reviewed for Theatre Survey and Performance Research.

In this article, George P. Pefanis discusses two major aspects of the ‘event’, as formed and developed in late Derridean philosophy – namely, the ‘possibility of the impossible’ and the ‘experience of perhaps’. These aspects are examined in order to reveal the potential for precariousness and uncertainty engendered by performance art, as in the case of the animal-event. With its increased degree of indeterminacy and its projected singular, here-and-now character, performance art could leave open the way to the ‘other’, the unpredictable, and the unexpected that is the ‘animal-event’, since an animal can never be fully controlled or have its behaviour predicted by the theatre mechanism. Two performances are taken as case studies to demonstrate this: the emblematic I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys (René Block Gallery, New York, 1974), and Dragon Heads by Marina Abramović (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990). It is argued that both cases pose certain moral issues around the presence of animals on the stage. George P. Pefanis is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistreian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013) and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (Athens, 2016). In 2006, he received the award for best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

By examining William Hatchett's The Chinese Orphan alongside The Fall of Mortimer, in this article Jina Moon aims to expand our critical awareness of Hatchett's oeuvre and to deepen our understanding of the shifting contours of misogyny as an integral component of eighteenth-century political discourse. The Fall of Mortimer differs from other sources of anti-Walpole propaganda, offering pointedly acrimonious treatment not only of Walpole, but of Queen Caroline. The Chinese Orphan was published in February 1741, two months before the election of that year dealt the final blow to Walpole's career. The play reflects shifting attitudes towards women in power and the contemporary tendency to contrast the ambitious and political Caroline with submissive and domestic Princess Augusta. To examine Hatchett's work is to gain new insight into the ways in which authors adapted both to the restrictions of the Licensing Act and to the shifting political climate of the 1740s. Jina Moon received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Tulsa (2015). Her study of Domestic Violence in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction appeared from Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2016.

In this article Eva Urban describes a historical tradition of Breton enlightenment theatre, and examines in detail two multilingual contemporary plays staged in Brittany: Merc’h an Eog / Merch yr Eog / La Fille du Saumon (2016), an international interceltic co-production by the Breton Teatr Piba and the Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh-language national theatre of Wales); and the Teatr Piba production Tiez Brav A Oa Ganeomp / On avait de jolies maisons (2017). She examines recurring themes about knowledge, enlightenment journeys, and refugees in Brittany in these plays and performances, and presents the argument that they stage cosmopolitan and intercultural philosophical ideas. Eva Urban is Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. She has held a Région de Bretagne Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Studies, University of Rennes 2, a research lectureship in the English Department, University of Rennes 2, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and has published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and chapters in book collections.

The story of Romeo and Juliet has been reinvented in a number of musical adaptations. One of the boldest and most sophisticated attempts is Giulietta e Romeo (2007), a two-act Italian production with the music of the French-Italian singer and composer Riccardo Cocciante and with a libretto by the poet Pasquale Panella. As Cristina Paravano argues in this article, the work offers a unique opportunity to rethink Shakespeare and Italy from a suggestive contemporary Italian perspective. What distinguished this production from other musical adaptations was its strong intertextuality on a musical and textual level. By embracing forms of re-creation and re -vision, it created a profoundly and intrinsically Italian version of the story, drawing on and combining Italian musical, literary, and cultural traditions. The result was a combination of Cocciante's pop-rock background, contemporary pop-electronic music, operatic conventions and techniques, and Italian musical tradition, all filtered through the memory of Nino Rota's tunes written for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, Panella's libretto taps into Shakespeare's Italian sources: while keeping to the Shakespearean plot line, the author adds interpolations from Luigi da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530) and Matteo Bandello's novella (1554, 2: IX). The present paper evaluates how this innovative rendition enacts a further exchange between England and Italy so that metaphorically Italy ‘reappropriates'’ its own story.