In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.

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.

Stage speech, like the other techniques of acting, such as gesture, movement, and the interpretation of character, has always been subject to the theatrical conventions of an age. The conventions, while superficially based on current fads and fashions are on a more profound level the result of an underlying creative method reflecting commonly held views about the correct or ‘natural’ methods of imitating nature on the stage. Nothing demonstrates the enormous changes in stage speech over the last hundred years more vividly than the few existing recordings made by actors who had most of their training and their careers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

In 2017, a group of African women migrants and I devised Uncomfortable Conversations for FORWARD, a London NGO, to speak publicly about FGM and gendered marginalization. This article, braiding theories from Tompkins, Rancière and Kershaw, explores the effects on participating actors.

Rock ’n’ Roll Circus promotes an expectation of performance that is energetic, challenging, irreverent, and sexual. Their 1998 production in Brisbane of Sweetmeats follows the company's earlier work, such as The Dark, which established its reputation in Australia for idiosyncratic physical theatre with an acute awareness of its erotic potential and appeal. A close analysis of the construction of (sexual) desires and erotic energies in Sweetmeats illustrates how the study of sexuality is also the study of what may appear to be non-sexual. Interactions are a key to an appreciation of this form of physical theatre, whether they are between body and body, human and apparatus, sexual and non-sexual, desires and anxieties, and straight and queer. Lines of demarcation are blurred and superfluous. This analysis of Sweetmeats in performance makes use of Peta Tait's investigation of sexed bodies in physical theatre, and Elizabeth Grosz's (re)conceptualization of lesbian desire and its generation through contact between surfaces. Grosz's approach is particularly applicable to a form of theatre which relies on the energy of physical contact between performers, and between performer and apparatus. The latter is exploited effectively in Sweetmeats such that a circulation of multifarious, strange desires (and anxieties) permeates the production, in some sense ‘queering’ it.

In this short article, the author, who was one of the performers in The King Lear Project, reflects on critical responses to the trilogy, and on what they reveal about the process of evaluating theatre. Having played the role of the Producer in the trilogy, Paul Rae notes that one of his functions was to deliver pre-emptive judgments on the performances as they developed, thereby challenging reviewers to be more than usually self-reflexive in delivering their own. In largely failing to meet this challenge, Rae asserts, the critics' response to the trilogy underscored the role of misrecognition, prescriptiveness and an implicit violence in the act of theatrical judgment.

Gothic drama deals obsessively with the spectacle of pale, broken and effectively castrated masculinity. The scopic epistemology of gothic drama insists that the emaciated male form be fetishized as the lost paternal origin of the dramatic action and the source of psychological dread. These plays embrace ‘unnatural absurdity’ as a way of breaking through the complacency of bourgeois ideology and challenging sexual normativity with the spectacle of sexual excess. The resulting ‘sensationalism’ begins to suggest a revolution in the coding and decoding of sexual identities, just at the moment when such identities are being produced for the purposes of wholesale cultural labelling, as well as to articulate theatricalized resistance to the normative dictates that those identities presuppose.

This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.

Let Down (2018) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women's experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public. Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who dance alongside a digitally transposed and augmented soundscape of sonic aspects of maternal experience, and improvise to the live sounds produced by infants in the audience. The work responds to a ‘quietening’ of maternal corporeality in some Western societies through a feminist dramaturgy of sonic disruption that refigures intermedial relations between sound and movement in performance to make unheard experience sensible. Attending to the complex sociopolitical and affective terrain that informed the work's creation, I discuss how a methodology of ‘quietening’ developed during the choreographic process generated space for a dialogue between private and public spheres of experience. I propose that the methodological concept of quietening offers both an alternative approach to choreographies of affect, and a critical framework for questioning representations of socially ‘quietened’ corporealities.

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

This article proposes to address the tension between digital co-presence and embodied spectatorship inaugurated by the pivot to online and hybrid forms of (post-)pandemic performance through the lens of the postdigital. The term is developed as a way of accounting for the complex mediatized co-presence between performer and audience in a representative example of this genre, Dead Centre's To Be a Machine (Version 1.0). As its theoretical framework, the article brings together the concept of ‘postdigital performance’ (Causey) with co-presence as a central element of liveness and spectatorship. It puts forth the hypothesis that To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) constructs a postdigital sense of co-presence that is characterized by a blurring of the lines between embodied and virtual spectatorship, temporal co-presence and real-time interaction with the remote audience, and an increased sense of emotional alignment with the remote audience in lieu of physical proximity.

Colombian theatre-makers have been searching for aesthetic languages to speak about the national conflict for decades. By analysing two of the most prominent theatrical productions from the 2010s, I explore the mechanisms they employ for the inscription of testimonies on audiences. I argue that the use of ghosts onstage to make the disappeared present transforms these plays into both ritual spaces and testimonial encounters at the same time. I do this by engaging with Derrida's works on spectres, along with the work of Latin American scholars who have explored the ethical and aesthetic challenges of making art in times of war.

Some recent performances have addressed events that created ‘human no-go zones’ such as Chernobyl (CEZ), Fukushima (FEZ) and the Korean DMZ. In the wake of the destruction that results in the absence of humans, non-human residents begin the process of recuperation, and the ‘no-go zones’ become inadvertent sanctuaries for wild and abandoned domestic animals. Each of the following productions takes a different view of what occurs when both the norms of nature and the practices of human societies and economies are profoundly disrupted. In addition, one play has depicted a community exercising a new restraint to establish an intentional ‘no-go zone’ to ensure its own survival. When confronted with catastrophes that threaten the existence of all life, as well as the surprising possibilities of renewal, dramatists employ heightened poetic diction and resort to mythical precedents in the attempt to capture the immensity of both the event and its aftermath.

This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where the official legal–scientific terrain has failed to protect victims of state repression. These artists advance a commitment to what I call forensic performances, and their investigative practices revitalize theatrical experience in a time of debilitated democracies. Forensic performances give theatre a role in violent societies where mass graves are woven into life: they carry out some of the work of investigative journalism, without its dangers. Theatre opens up a space to do a forensics that is orthogonal to a state forensics claiming a certain kind of reality and truth that is dangerous for democratic politics.

Among the additional manuscripts in the British Library is a nineteenth-century transcript of the diplomatic correspondence of the Florentine agents in London from 1616 to 1679/80. The agents – or Residents, as they were sometimes called – were during this period the Salvetti, father and son. Amerigo wrote the dispatches every week until his death in 1657, after which the task was undertaken by his son Giovanni, though there were at first a few letters also from Giovanni's brother, Amerigo the younger. As befitted people with Florentine connexions, both father and son were interested in the Court theatre, and among their voluminous accounts of the affairs of state there are frequent references to the staging of plays and masques, so frequent indeed that they constitute a useful supplement to the calendars of the period published by G. E. Bentley and W. Van Lennep. In this article I print for the first time translations of the dramatic references culled from the correspondence of 1660–9; passages from the letters of 1670–9 will appear in a later issue. The more methodical notes of Salvetti père on the Jacobean and Caroline Court stage will, I hope, be published elsewhere.

This article focuses on an incident of censorship and police intervention at the Königstädtische Theater in Berlin in 1828, occasioned by a performance of Gotthilf August von Maltitz's The Old Student (Der alte Student). Identifying how the playwright and his actors sought to represent political topics onstage allows me to explore how theatre functioned as a potential player in an incipient public sphere. In turn this reveals how the desire to represent political topics onstage and to become a performative player in the public sphere was already under way in the 1820s, well before the revolutionary turbulence of 1848.

In times of crises and existential disorientation, the arts often lean on gestures of radical doubt, the articulation of which demands the art of masquerade, deception, diversion and dissimulation, and simultaneously includes characteristic constellations of pathos and melancholy. The authors of this article analyse different artistic projects in Slovenia, Germany, Russia and elsewhere, which were created in the breakthrough period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and connect these projects to the wider social events of the previous two decades. In their treatment of the contemporary ‘art of doubt’ they focus especially on the perspective of the political and existential and in addition point out the fundamental historical concepts of doubt which have influenced the development of theatre and experimental knowledge in Europe from the beginnings of the early modern era until today.