The commedia dell'arte is a type of improvised acting based around the masked stock characters of the merchant, lawyer and servant, whose earliest names were Magnifico, il Dottore and Zanni (Plate I). From 1571 onwards, it was spread throughout Europe by visiting troupes of professional Italian actors, whose members, activities and travels are, for the most part, well-documented. The way in which it reached Bavaria is less clear. Records, including three festival books, suggest that already as early as February 1568, when crown Prince Wilhelm married Princess Renée of Lorraine in Munich, the commedia dell'arte was an established and popular feature of Bavarian court festivities, to which it contributed in three contexts. Some of its costumes were used in masquerades; the Venetian Magnifico, or merchant, and his servant Zanni (the servant-master pair who became the central comic focus of the commedia dell'arte) appeared as masked clowns on several occasions, and on 8 March 1568 there was a full-length play whose description in Massimo Troiano's festival book is generally acknowledged as the earliest known comprehensive description of a complete commedia dell'arte performance.

The ‘notice préliminaire’ to L.-H. Lecomte's unfinished Histoire des théâtres de Paris includes a list of eighteen major fires occurring between 1789 and 1900, each of which resulted in the total destruction of a theatre. The date of each disaster is given, as also the date at which the theatre was rebuilt, either on the same site or in a new location. But beyond these brief particulars, Lecomte gives little information on the circumstances and none at all on the probable causes of each catastrophe and the precautions taken subsequently to avert a recurrence. It is the purpose of this paper to flesh out the bare bones of Lecomte's statistics, and to extend the picture to embrace similar disasters befalling provincial playhouses in France over the same period. There had of course been spectacular fires before the Revolution at Paris theatres, notably that which destroyed the opera house located in the Palais-Royal on 6 April 1763 (incidentally severely damaging the palace itself), although, since it occurred during the Easter break, the theatre was fortunately empty at the time. The Opera was eventually rehoused on the same site, but on 8 June 1781 the building once more went up in flames and was reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble. Again there were no victims among the spectators, since it was only when they had left after the evening's performance that the fire broke out; but many of the dancers were still changing into their outdoor clothes at the time and two of them failed to follow the example of the others and make their escape across the roof and down to the street. A total of a dozen or fifteen people perished as a result of this fire, including one elderly woman living in the Cour des Fontaines who died of shock at witnessing the fearsome spectacle.

Armand Gatti is a recognized writer of politically committed plays. Jean-Paul Sartre speaking from the stage of the Théâtre National Populaire (T.N.P.) in Paris after the banning there of Gatti's La Passion du Général Franco saluted him as a leading exponent, along with Brecht, Gorki and Dürrenmatt of the popular theatre of the sixties.

C'est toujours cela que j'ai voulu donner sur scene: faire voir la force violente des idees, comment elles ploient et tourmentent les corps.

Antoine Vitez

Two years ago, a philosophy professor friend remarked that he would never forget Jules and Jim and the sense of walking with Jeanne Moreau through the beautiful French countryside in spring with its colours in full bloom. When reminded that the film was shot in black and white, he replied that it must have impressed him so much that his imagination had added colour to it. To remember a walk through the landscape of another country and time, to insert one's own colours into a scene: does this occur in theatre as in film? And if the landscape can be transformed, what becomes of Jeanne Moreau? More specifically, what happens when such a star is imported onto the stage as a legend of woman incarnate? What happens semiotically when the ‘incarnate’ legendary woman confronts the material presence of the actress? These questions had already begun to emerge a year earlier, when I saw Moreau in person at Avignon, first on a performance on the open-air stage of the Com d'honneui in the fourteenth-century Palais des Papes, and then at a public discussion just outside the palace wall.

In Antoine Vitez's 1989 production of La Célestine, Jeanne Moreau played the mercurial, irascible procuress Célestine, the first picara, a larger-than-life character popular in Spain for four centuries. The play was written in 1499 by Fernando de Rojas, who coined the term tragicomedy to describe it.

The American theatre and film critic Stanley Kaufman once told the following version of the ‘Napoleon’ joke. It seems a French official in the 1820s on a visit to an insane asylum was taken around the institution by one of the inmates. As the tour progressed, the official was increasingly impressed by the inmate's evident knowledge of the asylum. There were times when his guide even seemed to be running the place; he commanded orderlies to open locked doors or to remove other inmates from confinement, and the orderlies always obeyed. Finally, they came to the last room on the tour and the inmate explained that the people within suffered from delusions of grandeur. Sure enough, the official looked through the bars and saw an entire roomful of men dressed like French generals, strutting about with one hand thrust inside their vests. ‘Those poor fools all think they are Napoleon’, said the guide. Certain now that his guide was as rational as he, the official asked him how soon he was going to be released. The inmate drew him aside and whispered confidentially, ‘They'll never let me go. They're afraid of my power in France. They know all these other Napoleons are fakes.’

If spectacles are effects of power, designed to win wars, win elections and win customers, then how can these spectacles be better understood, so that we can better understand how they seek to work on us and others around us? And what part can theatre play in developing this understanding? In this article I explore Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of ‘violence without violence’, as set out in his essay ‘Image and Violence’ (2003). The synthesis of life's variety and disarray into an artwork is a violent act for Nancy. But if this violent act itself explodes the very seams which hold it together, it can enable ruptures or openings that prevent its violence from becoming ideologically oppressive. In this way the image inevitably participates in the ‘violence’ of representation, but simultaneously avoids the ‘violence’ of ideology. By way of an example I analyse the singular ways in which Lola Arias's production MINEFIELD – first staged at the Brighton Festival in 2016 before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre during the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) – disarticulated the spectacles of power, heroism and virtuosity that are often weaponized by leaders and by the dominant media for the purposes of fighting and winning wars.

Mei Lanfang's contact with Stanislavsky during his 1935 tour in the Soviet Union and the latter's often-cited ‘appraisal’ of the acting of traditional Chinese theatre have exerted a profound and lasting influence on the Chinese understanding and evaluation of the art of their traditional theatre. Through extensive research into the related archival material, as well as contemporary records, this article investigates the historical facts and circumstances that underlie this historic intercultural moment on the twentieth-century international stage. It unweaves the historical construction of this remarkable intercultural phenomenon and exposes its political and ideological underpinnings as well as its theatrical and artistic placements and displacements. It underscores the necessity of deconstructing the creation of such an intercultural myth for today's historical understanding of the art of traditional Chinese theatre and, by implication, in a larger context, of the global making of twentieth-century intercultural theatre.

When in 1932 M. C. Bradbrook put forward the view that the Elizabethan style of acting was probably formalistic, she initiated a debate that has not yet ended, between those who accept her view and those who, like Marvin Rosenberg, believe that Elizabethan acting style was probably realistic, akin to modern style. She wrote: ‘There would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalised. Conventional movement and heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off dramatic illusion.’ There is no real conclusion to be drawn, and those who take a middle way, arguing for a more complex fusion of the formalistic and the naturalistic, are probably close to the truth. The reason why the argument cannot be resolved is that there is virtually no contemporary evidence about acting styles in general or about particular performances, so that discussion rests less on scholarship than on conjecture based upon the few hints that can be gleaned from the plays and elsewhere. In this paper I want to consider the ways in which female roles might have been acted by boys and young men, taking my perspective from the performance of the onnagata, or female impersonator, in the Japanese Kabuki theatre.

This article explores the work of choreographer Dianne McIntyre as an improvisational artist entangled in questions of intermedial relations among sounds and motions. It discusses the terms of performance in relation to emergent paradigms of Afro-pessimism, and argues for a black regard as a method of engaging with experimental performances by artists of African descent. The article explores theoretical terms of witness and encounter with black performance in relation to queer alterities, and non-normative modes of physical expression. The article suggests further need for research into the work of an outstanding black American female artist of theatre and dance.

The image of the National Motherhood is the potent cultural code for Koreans. The word ‘Feminism’ in the Korean context is identified as a system of ideas originating from the West. What happens when these two disparate cultural/historical impulses meet at the intersection of modern Korean theatre? This study examines the cultural transfer of Western feminisms and feminist plays in the Korean theatre from the 1920s, when Ibsen's play A Doll's House was first introduced to Korea, to the present. More specifically, it analyses six Western feminist plays such as Nell Dunn's Steaming and Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother, by focusing on how the Korean women's movement and modern Korean drama movement intersect with each other in terms of historical and cultural background; how these two historical impulses interact with Western feminist plays in terms of the intentions and reception of such plays in the Korean theatre arena, and how the image of the National Motherhood, the potent cultural code for Koreans, intervenes in this process.

In 1982 Ferdinando Taviani proposed in Il segreto della commedia dell'arte that the earliest known actresses in Italy may have been drawn from the ranks of the courtesans, the oneste meretrici, forced from Rome after the Council of Trent (1545–63) by papal reforming zeal. This hypothesis has been affirmed by several other scholars in Europe and the United States and is becoming widely accepted not just as a feasible theory but as gospel, the exclusive conduit through which women entered the western theatre.

The struggle to eradicate naturalism from the theatre (or its satiric counterpart, the comedy of manners strongly rooted in the Latin American dramatic tradition and still very much alive), led the Colombian New Theatre forerunners consciously to seek new approaches to reality in their work. At the same time, there was the need, from the very beginning, to turn their practice into a functional system flexible enough to adapt to the needs and challenges of every new play.

This article considers five tipping points or phases in the development of modern theatre studies in South Africa. It begins with the period from 1925 to 1935, a time when the first major theatre history appeared, a fully fledged (Western) theatre system was established and the African theatre tradition was recognized. It details 1945 to 1962 for the establishment of a coherent professional theatre system, the first state-funded theatre company and the first drama departments. Thereafter, 1970 to 1985 is identified as the most significant period in relation to the political struggle for liberation in South Africa, while the last two phases (1988–94 and 1997–9) under consideration are characterized by an increase in research output and by the need for practitioners and commentators to seek reconciliation and healing through theatre and performance.

In 1984, Duma Kumalo was sentenced to death under the apartheid law of common purpose. He was only spared by the transitional negotiations that led to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. However, his suffering did not end with his release. Nor did his appearance alongside many other victims of human rights abuse at the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission provide any measure of therapeutic relief. Instead, he continued to confess, as part of his performance in Yaël Farber's He Left Quietly (2002), to a trauma so overwhelming as to undo, it seems, any such a claim to healing. It has now been ten years since Kumalo passed away and this article returns to Farber's play in order to examine the theatrical form this melancholy takes, the challenge it poses to confessional orthodoxy and the ethical ends towards which such a melancholy performance might potentially drive, even still.

Two lesser-known fragments written by Heiner Müller in 1979 and 1990 openly refer to Brecht and offer perspectives on the problematic relationship between the two playwrights. Form and content in Brechtian dialectical theatre are treated ironically in both fragments. Müller reveals an ambivalence that accepts the tenets of Brechtian dramaturgy in order to surpass them. Müller criticizes perceived limitations in Brecht's poetics yet redirects the dialectic for the postmodern times in which he lived. The degree to which Müller radicalizes Brecht's principles and practice represents an endpoint of (but not an all-out break with) Brechtian dramaturgy. An important corollary of this conclusion is that Müller is still associated with the Enlightenment project. This latter assertion is at odds with many readings of the later plays as documentations of ‘the end of history’, a category Müller roundly criticized in his life and resisted in his own dialectical drama.

What shape was the Blackfriars' auditorium? Those reconstructions that have been made to date are agreed that it was rectangular, the galleries following the line of the walls of the Upper Frater or Parliament Chamber, the large rectangular room in which the theatre was fitted up by James Burbage in 1596. Because the room was oblong, so was the auditorium. Yet the sparse material evidence about the playhouse is silent on this point, and no serious study has been made in an attempt to justify the usual interpretation. The matter is far from trivial, for a rectangular house suggests kinship with the routine fitting-out of the various halls at Court for the performance of plays and masques, while the alternative – that the Blackfriars had a segmental or U-shaped auditorium – would almost certainly indicate derivation from a European theatre tradition most readily available in the woodcut designs published by Sebastiano Serlio in the second book of his Architettura (Paris, 1545), and stemming originally from the rounded form of the ancient Roman theatre.

The profound spatial turn experienced by the humanities and social sciences over recent decades has prompted a re-examination of how space and place inform our understandings of theatre and performance. In this article we investigate the ways in which the theatrical labour that occurs within rehearsal and backstage spaces involves not only the making of theatrical performance but also the making of theatrical performers. Drawing on fieldwork-based research, and exploring the concepts of orientational metaphor, tactical inhabitation and training zones, we argue that performers’ use and inhabitation of rehearsal and backstage spaces is a key means through which they are formed as professional artists.

The charlatans of seventeenth-century Paris attracted customers to view and buy their wares by producing and participating in free theatrical performances in the open air. Some of them worked solo, at ground level or ‘mounting a bench’—hence the term ‘mountebank’. Others, however, worked with sizeable troupes of performers on large stages in busy metropolitan interchanges traversed by all strata of society. This made them public figures, among the best known in France. They worked on the same principle as commercial television: attract people, by means of some sort of entertainment, to focus their attention on one spot, and then take a break to sell them wonderful products at a very low price that will make them young, hard-bodied, and happy.

Ahmed and Mohammad Malas, two Syrian actors who have made themselves the unofficial clowns of the revolution, have emerged from a vibrant culture of cyber-activism. They have made use of Facebook and YouTube to circulate work that simultaneously reflects on the possibilities for, and failures of, social media and satellite television to forge a new idea of Syrian identity – one that prominently features active participation in the public sphere. I argue that unlike earlier Syrian plays that employed similar tropes (the interrogation scene as emblematic of the state–citizen relation, the failed actor as symbol of the disheartened citizen), the Malas twins use these tropes to demonstrate the necessity of resistance. Their plays assert that Syrians will persist in resistance because new technologies have provided new options and have transformed Syrian identity.