One could say that all plays, even those with an international reputation, are best understood within their national, ethnic and cultural contexts. But very few plays can be as intimately attached to their author, his city, his family, his friends and enemies, and fellow citizens in general, as the Jeu de la feuillée, written by the trouvére Adam de la Halle, and staged by him in 1276, in the Petite Place of the town of Arras. For the protagonist of the play is Adam himself, and some of the other characters are real people connected with him. This is a play of unrivalled audacity, in which Adam exposes himself for public scrutiny. He deals openly with his own ambitions and frustrations, with his intimate relations with his wife and his troubled relationship with his father, and with the lives of his friends and neighbours. All this is unfolded in front of an audience holding his acquaintances, some of whom are equally satirized in the play.

In October 1672, a highly select audience in Moscow witnessed the court's first theatrical production, a setting of Artakserksovo deistvo (The Play of Ahasuerus) based on the biblical story of Esther. A month later, in contrast, Parisians would witness the escalating rivalry between Molière and Lully—as the former continued to capitalize on their tragédie-ballet, Psyché (with Lully's music), while the latter prepared to launch his first French opera, Les Fêtes de l'Amour et de Bacchus (with Molière's lyrics).1 At first glance there would seem to be little connection between the fledgling Muscovite theatre at Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's court, which in the event was to be closed down at his death only four years later, and the public theatres of Paris with their lyrical offerings of comédies-ballets, tragédies-ballets and, most recently, pastoral opera. Yet the two are linked in many ways, some subtle and some obvious, and the influences are both mutual and unexpected.

One of the surest ways of registering disapproval of a play or a performance is to dismiss it as ‘melodramatic’, thus invoking a whole network of mistaken dramatic values and improper practice. In arts reviews, classrooms and text books, ‘melodrama’ recurs as the ‘other’ of ‘proper’ realist drama. In English Drama: A Cultural History, we describe the critical history of melodrama as ‘The Unacceptable Face of Theatre's importance and seriousness. One of the most influential interventions came from Peter Brooks, whose Melodramatic Imagination propounds two arguments in favour of melodrama'scultural centrality: first, Brooks shows how Diderot and Rousseau anticipated the French form of melodrama, then he makes connections between melodramatic gesture or sign and the work of Saussure or Barthes. My aim here is to develop the case further by suggesting that, in the case of English melodrama, the practice of the form as it emerged was very far from being non-intellectual, out of control or stupid. Indeed the dramatists themselves were well conscious of what they were doing formally: not only intelligence but also self-reflection were there from the start.

In December 1891, an adaptation by Paul-Napoléon Roinard of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon was performed at the recently created Théâtre d'Art, expressly to present a new idea of theatre as total art by engaging the visual, aural, and olfactory senses of the audience. One of the few theatre historians who has mentioned this remarkable endeavour notes that in it,‘music, words, colour, even perfume, were to be harmonized; all the senses were to be involved, simultaneously, in the one overwhelming experience’. Roinard's synaesthetic experiment drew on a range of sources including Baudelaire, Wagner and Rimbaud, and, most strikingly, featured scents pumped into the auditorium on cue by young symbolist poets stationed in the far edges of the proscenium and in the balcony and using hand-held vaporizers. According to the outline Roinard provided in the programme, nine scents were used: frankincense, white violets, hyacinth, lilies, acacia, lily of the valley, syringa, orange blossom, and jasmine. Each of these odours had corresponding orchestrations of speech (specific vowel sounds), tones (original music composed by Mme Flamen de Labrély), and colours.

In 1895, Aby Warburg drew attention to ways in which information of theatre historical significance can be gained from visual images, in an article which outlines a clear methodology for their evaluation as historical documents, based on a comparative approach in the context of the surviving documentation concerning the event under investigation as a whole, the Florentine intermedi of 1589. ‘Probably the most described theatrical production in history’, these intermedi were especially devised to embellish dramatic performances by professional commedia dell'arte actors (La Zingana and Pazzia of Isabella) and amateur players (La Pellegrina) which were intended by the Medici as the greatest attraction of the celebrations in honour of the wedding of Ferdinande I de'Medici to Christine de Lorraine, and recognized by both contemporaries and historians as a highpoint of European court festival.

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.

In 1986, an international symposium on Chinese theatre was held in Beijing, and for the first time the process of aesthetics in the theatrical form was debated among scholars, critics and practitioners on an international scale. Among the discussion, the three dialectic concepts of ‘false but true, empty but full and few but many’ were often referred to and applied. What are they and why are they so important that they are regarded as the guiding principles that make Chinese theatre different from its western counterparts? Mu Gong, a theatre historian from Jiangxi province, offers the following explanation:

[On the Chinese stage] a horse whip, or an oar, is merely a piece of property if it is seen on its own. But when it is seen through the performers' acting combined with the story, it not only represents the form of ‘a horse’ or ‘a boat’ on the stage, but also transforms the flat stage into a three-dimensional mountain, battlefield or river. In addition, the character's action, feelings and desires are therefore underscored. … If a real horse or a boat is used on the stage, the object itself is true, but the character and its circumstances will become false.

In her landmark book, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, the great historian Margarete Bieber stated simply and elegantly, ‘The development of the theater building always follows the development of dramatic literature.’ While historians, of course, have always attempted to explain the drama in terms of known architectural, scenographic, and technological practices, the effect of one upon the other has been less fully or successfully explored. Why, for instance, is the reverse of Bieber's statement not true? And in the rapidly changing technology of the contemporary world, is it possible that technology has become a causal factor in the development of drama?

In recent years, it has been widely suggested that the bodily presence of the actor (and actress) on stage marks the limits and limitations of the semiotic approach to theatre and determines the need for a more complex methodology of research.