Using rarely seen minutes, manuscripts and photographs preserved in the Shanghai Jingju Theatre archive, an analysis of Interrogating the Chair, a revolutionary Chinese opera embodying Mao's instruction ‘We should never forget the class struggle’, reveals how the ideological demands of the mid-1960s interfered with Chinese theatre. Further, the many revisions of the opera show how the traditional jingju repertoire was transformed into model opera. Interviews with those involved at the time are used to present a direct account of how practitioners dealt with the dilemma of presenting a revolutionary and contemporary theme while keeping faith with their indigenous theatrical form.

In October, 1774, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, passed a resolution designed to ‘discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation’, including the ‘exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments’. The Revolution would begin within six months, and Congress was clearly attempting to prepare Americans for a period of austerity. But if Congress intended to eliminate all theatrical activities for the duration of the hostilities, it could not have failed more completely. Indeed, the American Revolution saw more theatrical activity on American soil than had ever taken place there before. British military officers – who brought with them a strong theatre-going tradition – sponsored lavish performances of plays in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere between 1775 and 1783. In turn, the remarkable number of British theatrical productions stimulated certain American military officials to countenance performances given by American officers for audiences of soldiers and civilians. This may have been illegal, but it boosted morale and it was intended to demonstrate that Americans could compete with the British on any level, including the theatrical.

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carter's A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of women's lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.

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.

Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden's six part cycle, The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), is probably the most ambitious attempt in English to dramatize working-class and socialist history. However, productions have been remarkably few even in the ‘alternative’ theatre, so that the work has seldom been seen, even by its critics. Arguably, it is as important as anything in the Arden canon and is certainly the major achievement of the D'Arcy/Arden one. But to say so is to challenge a widely-held view that the D'Arcy/Arden collaborations of the 1970s are significant only in so far as they illustrate a decline in Arden's career. Even when admired, the Connolly plays are usually discussed primarily as an aspect of Arden's development. When not, they are perceived as the clearest indication of his supposed demise as a major playwright, a fall from favour which is often attributed to D'Arcy's influence. Perversely, such discussions may simultaneously fail to acknowledge D'Arcy's role as senior partner in The Non-Stop Connolly Show.

There have been few systematic studies in English of the signs of the theatre. I hope in this essay to indicate something of the range and interest of the topic. The focus of attention, clearly, will be the theatrical act of representation or performance rather than the dramatic text or script. The dramatic text has a life of its own, independent of all performances of it: on the one hand, as Gordon Craig, one of the great champions of the theatre over the text, recognized, it overflows all performances and is exhausted by none; on the other, any performance overflows the literary text that it purports to be a performance of, and is not reducible to it. A clear distinction must therefore be made between theatrical representation and literary text. As most theatrical performances are based on dramatic texts, however, some consideration of the nature of the relation between the two is desirable. Before broaching the subject of signs in the theatre directly, therefore, I propose to say a word or two about this question.

Drawing on an idea of the theatrical event, this article sets out to analyse the interactions between the housed (audiences) and the homeless (performers), in order to understand the theatrical conventions, performance contexts and sociocultural conditions that make it possible to narrow the gap between the housed and homeless. Focusing on three performances of zAmya Theater Project's Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), I analyse theatre's capacity and its limits to build community and examine why different interpretive communities respond differently to the same staged moments.

It is my intention to derive the concept of ‘theatrical irony’ from the general theory of theatrical communication.

The basic meaning of the term ‘irony’, from the Greek word ‘ειρωνεια’, was ‘dissimulation’. Over the centuries, this term has been extended to additional semantic fields and consequently acquired new meanings as in ‘Socratic irony’, ‘philosophical irony’, ‘romantic irony’, ‘dramatic irony’, ‘tragic irony’, and so on. At the same time, a number of more colloquial expressions were introduced as well, as in ‘ironic smile’, ‘irony of events’, ‘irony of fate’, and so on. I am of the opinion, however, that despite the diversity of such phrases and regardless of their partial overlap, it is still possible to unveil a common semantic core. Furthermore, it is my belief that our understanding of theatrical irony benefits from all these additional usages.

Jingju (‘Beijing opera’) is China's most iconic traditional theatre, marketed as a global signifier of Chinese theatre and national identity. Although troupes from mainland China regularly tour Europe, audiences in the UK have also had access to Jingju via two indigenous organizations: the UK Beijing Opera Society (now defunct) and the London Jing Kun Opera Association (now in its ninth year). These organizations consist of Chinese, overseas Chinese and Western performers performing both Jingju and Kunju (‘Kun opera’). Where there is a mix of ethnicity, can ‘traditional Chinese theatre’ still be conceived of as ‘traditional’? How is Jingju mapped onto non-Chinese bodies? Can Jingju performances by ethnically white performers reflect diasporic identities? Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, this article argues that by highlighting the performativity of identity, the performance of Jingju by non-Chinese performers challenges the notion of Jingju as a global signifier of ‘authentic traditional Chinese theatre’.

The Swedish Theatre Biennale is a peculiar festival in the sense that it lacks a public audience. More than a thousand theatre professionals gather for four days to present and watch the most exciting productions of the last two years in between lectures, debates, master classes and coffee breaks. There is hardly any room for local visitors to see a performance. Nevertheless, the hosting city sponsors the festival, newspapers report on it and the citizens look amazed at the crowd of known and unknown artists. What are the values of such a festival? Why is it held every two years and who benefits from it? These questions are pursued in this article according to a model of the theatrical event as presented in the introduction of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) book publication Theatrical Events –; Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). Politics, management, environment and experiences are juxtaposed as equally important elements of the festival as a theatrical event. The article is concluded by an expanded model pointing out some of the values at stake.

This article discusses the dynamic relationship between ritualistic behaviours, traditional materials and performativity as it examines how work with traditional chants may affect the practitioner's mode of presence. It specifically draws from observations on the performances of Singaporean actor Ang Gey Pin in the Workcenter's One Breath Left and Polish theatre company Teatr ZAR's Gospels of Childhood. Each brings chants from very distinct cultural cradles – the Chinese diaspora and isolated Eastern European regions around the Black Sea, respectively. The study also traces a parallel between this vein of research and older artistic forms intended for the oral transmission of knowledge and traditions, such as Islamic philosopher Avicenna's recitals.

The alternative culture in Poland formed between the late 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. In this period many artists were moving from cities into the countryside in order to find space for independent and experimental art. Among these new settlers were Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, who made their home in a small rural settlement of Węgajty in the 1980s. The Sobaszeks converted an abandoned farm into a stage and soon their undertaking became one of the most prominent alternative theatres in Poland. This article explores intersections of the Sobaszeks's art and rural landscape through the lens of humanistic geography, anthropology and philosophy. The purpose of the article is to reveal a deep attachment of the artists to local, rural space and to examine how it shapes their performances and community building. In the article, the Węgajty Theatre is recognized as ‘landscape theatre’, a term which attempts to emphasize a bond between the theatre and the natural environment.

In South Korea, workers’ theatre is often considered outdated and unsuited for the postmodern era of hybridity and diversity because of its crude, ideology-oriented slogans. Thus the success of Hamlet for Only Nine Days (2013), featuring workers laid off from the CortCortec factory in South Korea as actors, is highly exceptional. This article presents an analysis of the characteristics of Hamlet for Only Nine Days as documentary theatre where various experiences and representations of reality mix with fiction, and reviews its political significance.

John Moore, the Glasgow physician and friend of Tobias Smollett, after attending a few performances at the Théâtre-Fran¸ais during a visit to the French capital in 1779, commented as follows on the surprisingly subversive behaviour of the Parisian parterre at that date: ‘By the emphatic applause they bestow on particular passages of the pieces represented at the theatre, they convey to the monarch the sentiments of the nation respecting the measures of his government.’ Moore gives no precise instances, but it is clear what he is referring to, and there were plenty of other contemporary observers to testify to the growing habit of making applications, and using this method to express opposition to certain government policies which, in the prevalent atmosphere of political repression, it might have been dangerous to contest too openly anywhere else. The theatre auditorium was the ideal place for voicing anonymous criticism with impunity. The guard in the theatre, entrusted with the task of preserving law and order, was powerless to prevent the parterre applying a maxim or simple phrase spoken from the stage to some matter of burning political import, and showing, by their vociferous applause, where exactly their sympathies lay.

Although the Dutch theatre system appears balanced and functioning, contemporary forms of the theatrical imagination extend to only a very small part of the Dutch population. In the long term, this can threaten the role of theatre in maintaining and developing the creative power of the community. Moreover, a lack of cohesion among several elements of the system causes its limited functioning. An analysis of production, distribution and reception within the Dutch theatre system determines the main developments and problems.

Civil wars and internal armed conflicts are commonly followed by transitional justice processes known as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration programmes. Focusing on the social reintegration of ex-combatants in Colombia, this article examines the role of embodiment and secondary care in conflict transformation, and outlines the process of incorporating creative and embodied practice as core elements of transitional justice mechanisms. It discusses the relational qualities of applied theatre, policy development and implementation to demonstrate how embodied practice enables peace-building practitioners and ex-combatants to develop a better understanding of how affective transactions and emotional states shape transitional societies. In so doing, this article discusses some of the challenges of devising sustainable arts-based interventions when working with communities that have been significantly affected by war.

Since the early 2010s, the arts and culture in Sweden have taken a stand against the prevailing epistemic ignorance of the country's Indigenous Sámi people by confronting majoritarian society with the realities of settler colonialism. This article suggests that theatre and performance form part of this Sámi cultural activism and highlights the decolonial labour of Giron Sámi Teáhter, the oldest professionally driven touring company in the Swedish part of Sápmi. Taking one specific production as a springboard, the article demonstrates the larger, structural issues at stake. Giron Sámi Teáhter deploys the stage as a vibrant, decolonial forum where the history of settler colonialism and the Sámi people's struggle toward self-determination is performed, celebrated and encouraged. The company has long striven to gain official status as the national theatre for Sámi performing arts in Sweden and the article therefore also outlines the financial and political impediments encountered by Giron Sámi Teáhter.