Celebrity status at the fin de siècle depended largely on the creation and sustenation of a high profile, easily recogniZable image and the entertainment lithograph offered the most powerful and culturally pervasive means to achieve this. Thanks to the poster collectors of the period, and the acceptance of this ephemeral form into the world of ‘high art’, many examples of advertising imagery exist, offering a visual record of the themes and the performers that dominated the popular stage. This article focuses on poster works created by Jules Chéret (1836–1933) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's (1864–1901) images of the dancer and actress Jane Avril, to explore whether the entertainment lithograph can be employed to aid an understanding and contextualization of fin-de-siècle popular performance.

The work of Robert Lepage is examined in the context of the avant-garde, from Robert Wilson and Peter Brook, through the French Surrealists, back to Edward Gordon Craig. As well as being an icon of post-modernism, analysis of productions such as Needles and Opium, Elsinore and Zulu Time show the degree to which Lepage has realized Craig's ideals of the Übermarionette, and his screens, as well as ‘Scene’, his concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space. What this demonstrates is the unity of the modernist movement throughout the twentieth century.

Michael Frayn's play about quantum mechanics, memory and history, Copenhagen, has taken a lot of criticism for ‘misrepresenting’ its historical characters, primarily Werner Heisenberg. This essay analyses the dramaturgy of the play and argues for a postdramatic reading in which questions of representation are dissolved by formal strategies that ally themselves with the thematics of the work. The text is viewed as a hybrid, somewhere between the dramatic and the postdramatic, set, as it is, in a fictional afterlife where conventional human categories no longer function. The postdramatic theatre, in refusing to interpret text, becomes a viable mode for performance in that the indeterminacy of meaning on stage equates with the uncertainty principle that lies at the scientific and moral heart of Copenhagen.

Lewis Mumford, writing in the 1930s, understood the city as a ‘theater of social action’. Mumford's ideas remain important in the context of the contemporary post-industrial city, in which theatricality and performativity are key drivers of so-called ‘experience economies’. Increasingly, urban planners are attuned to such theatrical notions as the ‘urban scene’ and ‘urban drama’ in framing policy. Adopting interpretive strategies enabled by Performance Studies, this paper gives an account of some of the ways in which theatre and performance are made manifest in cities. It considers some of the implications of urban performativity, arguing that good city planning demands an ethics of performance, whereby citizens become spectators and co-performers in the urban drama.

This essay examines the theoretical and practical implications of performance as a utopian gesture, particularly with regard to postcolonial drama. Analyzing Manjula Padmanabhan's futuristic play, Harvest, as a case study, I argue that ‘utopia’ is a crucial critical concept for postcolonial dramatic practice because it stands for the collision and convergence of aesthetic and political interests, using the body itself as a site for representation and resistance. The play explores the extreme outcome of the international trade in human organs as a metaphor for neocolonialism and the constraints of postcolonial societies rent apart by economic inequalities. In this, it presents a moment of personal moral reckoning as a paradigmatic marker for an entire culture's confrontation with its utopian desires and their consequences. Harvest reflects the utopian impulse of modern drama masked by dystopic expression: it demands a differently imagined and shaped future, even as it chronicles the collapse of utopian visions in absolutist excess.

The English dramatist/director Howard Barker has, through a unique combination of style, content, theoretical argument and mise-en-scène, persistently countered conventional presumptions and propositions of the supposedly ‘natural’ diminutions or ‘inevitable’ restrictions whereby one might think, feel, speak, act, love and exist. His work offers a purposefully anti-naturalistic expansion of vocabulary: of language, terms of experience, scenic and physical expression, and being. This article presents an actor's account of preparing and playing a role, under Barker's direction, in a two-hander play, and offers a reading of the play's strategic dynamics based on these experiences, and of the characters' uses of self-conscious performances in order to sustain and subvert artifice, with references to Greenblatt's theories of theatrical charisma and eroticism, and Baudrillard's theories of seduction.