When a company of Japanese actors under the leadership of Manzaburo UMEWAKA* presented some noh plays at the Aldwych Theatre in 1967 as part of the World Theatre Season, a good many British critics confessed themselves to be more than a little baffled. Opinions ranged from one reviewer's: ‘Noh is stylised to the point of static incomprehensibility’ to Philip Hope-Wallace's guarded appreciation: ‘The sound which prevails is curious; wailing and hooting noises like owls with indigestion. But the combination of strange noises and slow, potent, intense movement adds up to some very exotic and memorable poetry; to those (so to speak) in the know, it must be a lifetime's experience.’ To Irving Wardle the cultural barrier was impenetrable. ‘I found the performance totally alien: a blank cheque with no doubt centuries of artistic credit behind it, but which might equally almost have been staged as a hoax on the cultural community… I doubt whether any such vision can be transmitted without a shared language…’ Even critics anxious to enter into the spirit of this, to them, wholly new experience admitted that they found it hard going. W. A. Darlington wrote, ‘The plays were performed by a company trained from childhood to a stylised form of art of which one cannot hope, without study, to appreciate the finer points.’

Feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work and the articulation of unrepresented voices. Irish women's participation in the public sphere and cultural fabric of society has been hindered in the course of the twentieth century and this is reflected in limiting representations of femininity as perpetuated by discourses of nationalism and Catholicism: the dominant imagery of the idealized mother which merges the feminized nation – Mother Ireland – and the Virgin Mary. In Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Paul Murphy highlights the ‘contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects’. The incongruity between the shifting realities of Irish women's lives and the inflexible institutions that shape cultural representations is the focus of much feminist theatre research in Ireland. This research examines work which articulates the experience of estrangement from the dominant cultural imaginary and attends to the possibilities of staging more accommodating models through three interlinked strands: self-representation and the unhomely experience; constraint and freedom as explored through space and form; and a shift in focus to performance and the body.

Although more has been written on the commedia dell'arte than on any other type of theatre, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, and opinions concerning its origins, early history, and definition are surprisingly divergent. It is evident that the term ‘commedia dell'arte’ would become virtually meaningless if it were stretched to include, without qualification, all manifestations of theatrical entertainment which feature characters representing, or deriving from, its stock types; or the full range of theatrical practises offered by the very versatile early comici d'arte, although all are of concern to commedia studies. The commedia dell'arte itself may be broadly defined as a type of professional dramatic performance associated with distinctive stock characters, that arose in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, whose evolving cultural derivatives have spread throughout Europe. Its stock types drew on a wide variety of sources, including mystery and mummers’ plays, carnival masks, street theatre and court entertainment; popular farces and erudite comedy; and have transcended the theatre to play key roles in music, dance, art and literature. The extreme complexity of its continuing interchanges with other cultural phenomena makes precise definition of the commedia dell'arte elusive, and the term itself also resists easy definition because it was coined only in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, two centuries after the type of theatre with which it is associated first came into being.

In the process of concluding my thesis, ‘Alfred de Vigny and the French Romantic Theatre’ (Cornell University, 1973), I had written to France requesting permission to publish the various iconographic material relevant to the productions of Vigny's plays. A note from M. Sangnier was forwarded to me via the Association des Amis d'Alfred de Vigny concerning the existence in M. Sangnier's collection of two costume sketches by Delacroix ascribed to Vigny's La Maréchale d'Ancre. This ascription came as a pleasant surprise to me as there is no mention of Delacroix' association with the production in either his or Vigny's published papers, or in contemporary reviews of the production. A quick check of Delacroix biographies and catalogues confirmed my suspicion that the sketches (Plates I and II) had been heretofore unknown.

In the summer of 1671, after the court had left London and after his performance as Ladislaus in John Crowne's Juliana – a play thwarted, as the preface declared, by the fact that ‘the Dog-Star was near his Reign’ – Thomas Betterton made his way with Joseph Haines to Paris. What they, and particularly what Betterton, saw there helped to determine the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre which was then under construction, and which would open in November that year. When we compare what was happening on the French stage during and immediately after Betterton's visit with what we know of the Dorset Garden Theatre, however, it becomes clear that Betterton's experience was to have an effect on the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre not immediately, but in the years that followed its opening, and that the single most influential work was not one that Betterton saw on his visit to France in 1671, but one which was first performed two years later.

Since it was restored to the English theatre during the 1930s, Volpone has enjoyed a unique currency amongst Ben Jonson's works; it has had a more consistent and successful performance history than any other of his plays. Although its beast fable scheme has apparently rendered it more immediately accessible (and allegedly more universal) than the author's humours comedies, it has also provoked responses of ambivalence and unease, in that its coupling of the animal and the human actively unsettles the ethical relations between nature, culture, economics and morality that the allegory ostensibly intends to clarify. In performance, the play has given rise to a critical discourse of vituperation, deviance and excess which reflects the tensions and contradictions endemic to the cultural vocabulary of anthropomorphism. Theatre practice has dealt with the play's problems and provocations by incorporating the image of the animal into an inclusive, consensual and predominantly realist mode of characterization and mise en scène. A notable exception was in 1968, when Tyrone Guthrie directed a production for the National Theatre at the Old Vic which literalized animal identities to the point of excess. The result was a radically contradictory rethinking of the play, and of the performance vocabularies which have been, and can be, deployed to animate it.

As anyone who has dealt with bureaucrats or authoritarian regimes knows, sometimes it pays to act a little dumb. Glazing over good-naturedly in the face of a petty or corrupt demand can occasionally bring to light the inanity or cruelty of the situation in such a way as to prompt a momentary softening, be it through pity, impatience or even embarrassment. The stakes in such situations can be high: in the domain of the international with which this this journal is preoccupied, it might concern free passage on the one hand, or the right to remain, unhindered, on the other. More often the circumstances are banal, though not, for all that, without complexity. They point not only to the importance of stupidity as an enabling feature of life in complex and diverse modern societies, but also to the myriad forms it can take, from strategic ignorance, through the stupefaction necessary to manage the teeming stimuli of urban environments, to willing, if circumspect, participation in whichever confederacy of dunces makes up our place of employment, the organizations with which we affiliate, or the communities in which we participate.

A primary theme of twentieth-century theatre has been the actor's body. Numerous directors from Stanislavsky to Anne Bogart have evolved stage theories and related training methods to promote a more expressive body on stage. In her 1995 article ‘Developing a Physical Vocabulary for the Contemporary Actor’, Lea Logic provides an overview of many of these approaches. While acknowledging the contributions of these director-teachers, she suggests, ‘If body shape and movement are to retain and increase their power as the central focus of theatre, actors must learn to maximize the expressive potential of their bodies.’ Quoting Copeau, Chekhov, Stanislavsky or Barba, she maintains the primary problem is an actor's tendency consistently to return to physical choices related to their personality and not necessarily to the role they are playing. She quotes Copeau's description of actors: ‘I always know, in advance what they are going to do. They reduce everything to the level of their habits, their clichés, their affectations. They do not invent anything.’ While Copeau's complaint is not directed at actor teachers, but actors, his words define one of the primary challenges for them, to teach actors to expand their expressive abilities beyond their self image.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Shanghai, the remnant of wenmingxi (civilized drama), China's first form of Western-style spoken drama, which had flourished in the 1900s and 1910s as a hybrid of Western spoken theatre and indigenous performance, experienced a brief resurrection and ultimate demise under the name of tongsu huaju (popular spoken drama). Considered until then as popular entertainment inferior to the officially recognized form of modern theatre, huaju (spoken drama), that adhered to Western realistic dramaturgy and performance, tongsu huaju staged a six-play festival in January 1957 thanks to liberal art policies, received a warm welcome in Beijing and other cities, and attracted the attention of some huaju experts who praised its affinity to indigenous performance, thus triggering a debate over its efficacy as a localized alternative to huaju for the future of modern Chinese theatre. Using contemporary sources, this article examines tongsu huaju’s brief rise and fall in Shanghai, with a focus on its performances, the debate, the policy changes that decided the fate of China's first form of modern theatre, and the implications of its fate for the narrative of periodization in modern Asian theatre.

The presence of Italian professional actors has, for the second half of the sixteenth century, been signalized in Bavaria, at the Emperor's court in Vienna and at the court of the French kings, in England and elsewhere, but it has not yet been shown that the comedians also included the Low Countries in their wanderings. It is therefore interesting to find that an identifiable troupe visited Antwerp in the year 1576. This year was a particularly critical and turbulent one in the protracted struggle of the Netherlands against Spanish domination, for it was, among other things, marked by the outrages of the Spanish Fury, which started in the week beginning Sunday, 4 November. The period of the Spanish Fury, soon to be followed by the negotiations of the Pacification of Ghent, constituted the apogee of the leadership of William of Orange. It was in the tense months preceding the sack of Antwerp that Italian actors were performing their plays in the city. By a happy chance the records of their presence, now preserved in the Municipal Archives in Antwerp, have survived because the city authorities had to make sure that the players were not disbanded or mutinous soldiers and so a certain number of Italian merchants residing in the city were asked to stand surety for them. This appears from the so-called Certificatieboeken; that is, books in which statements were entered to ‘certify’ formally that certain people fulfilled temporarily enforced legal requirements. Thus the Certificatieboeken bearing the numbers 36 and 39 contain the following entries relevant to Italian actors.

Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms (1924) has been adapted twice into traditional Chinese theatre (xiqu), or into Sichuan opera (chuanju) and Henan qu opera (henan quju) to be specific. A close reading of the adaptations reveals that the traditional theatre has been in a persistent search for intercultural perspectives, which at the same time also proves self-reflective. All through the two Desire adaptations there runs a significant indigenous vein, bringing to the American play a mixture of historical memories and contemporary experiences peculiar to China. Both scripts mirror the current spectacle of dramatic encounters between heterogeneous elements – native and foreign, traditional and modern – producing unceasing collisions and fragmentary images in the process. They nevertheless suggest the possibility of reaching a plateau where boundaries are crossed and seemingly incompatible elements merge. The kind of selective assimilation of modern Western thoughts and dramatic techniques evidenced here bring about a new turn in the traditional Chinese theatre.

This article examines the representation of Aboriginality in Charles Reade's It is Never Too Late to Mend (1865). It does so by imagining the character of Jacky-Kalingaloonga in performance, specifically in performance by Stanislaus Calhaem – by a white actor in black-face – on the opening night of the melodrama's first London production. Bringing Calhaem back on stage in the mind's eye turns on recovering historic modes of reception, on reconstructing how audience members participated in bringing Jacky-Kalingaloonga ‘to life’. This problematizes readings of the mid-Victorian construction of Aboriginality which presume ‘fact’ claims such as Reade made for Jacky-Kalingaloonga were straightforwardly accepted by Victorian audiences as grounds on which to interpret the character as an authentic ‘anthropological’ specimen. Any promotion of this outcome instead became part of a play between the anthropological and the theatrical which Victorian audiences were expected to negotiate, incorporating that negotiation into an imperialist gesture effected in the process of performance on stage and in the auditorium.

This is my first issue as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International. As I have worked I have been conscious of the editors who have preceded me, first and foremost Elaine Aston. Her wit, insight and generosity have been models for me over the three years we worked together. Now, as she has ended her term and I have begun mine, I am more aware than ever of the precedent she has established. I will have to work very hard to match her editorial discernment, wisdom and creativity. But I am also aware of a legacy from previous editors – Freddie Rokem (with whom Elaine was privileged to work as Associate Editor), Christopher Balme (currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research) and Brian Singleton (also a past IFTR President). What this means to me is that I am privileged to inherit a journal that has long been recognized as a leader across the globe for the best in original content and methodology. Joining me is the new Associate Editor, Paul Rae from the National University of Singapore. He has already proven to be an invaluable colleague, and I am happily anticipating our work together on TRI over the next three years.

This article examines the relationship between the performing arts and Amerindian peoples, specifically the Araweté, Juruna/Yudjá and Kamayurá peoples, which belong to the Tupi branch, whom I met as part of postdoctoral research carried out from February 2018 to January 2019, at the University of São Paulo (USP). It analyses the conjuncture of the fight of Amerindian and riparian peoples before the destruction of the forest and rivers of the Amazon, based on case studies of two theatre performances: Altamira 2042, a scenic ritual instauration triggered by listening to the testimony of the Xingu river about the Belo Monte dam, and Os Um e Os Outros (The One and the Others), loosely based on The Horatians and the Curiatians by Bertolt Brecht.

Written by Lee Yun-taek, arguably the most prolific and influential of contemporary Korean dramatists, The Dummy Bride (1993) is of considerable significance to the Korean political theatre's search for a new dramatic idiom in the increasingly apathetic post-ideological era. Although the issue of modernization of tradition has been a constant preoccupation with a number of other Korean playwrights in the 1990s, Lee's exploration of the relationship between tradition and contemporary social reality strikes a much more political note under the influence of Brecht and Artaud. His incorporation of the utopian realm of imagination into everyday life does not offer a stable sense of resolution to the audience. Swerving away from the ‘decontextualization and museumization’ of tradition and cautiously guiding against the excessive optimism of madang theatre, a dominant form of political theatre in the 1980s, his unique theatrical aesthetic stands as a vigilant rehearsal for how to dream without disregarding or succumbing to a frustrating reality.

For about 130 years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spectators sat on the stage in Paris public theatres. In Molière's theatre only 32 spectators were permitted on stage. However, by the mideighteenth century, before the practice was discontinued, there were often more than 200 persons behind the curtain of the Comedie Française, sitting on benches or standing around at the back of the stage. This contingent of spectators was exclusively male – a collection of foppish petty nobility who found the stage an excellent vantage point from which to ogle and be ogled.

Greek tragedy served as a disciplinary state apparatus that displaced women's public performances of the lament. Yet, in spite of its displacements and regulatory structures, the tragedy has been adopted by Euro-American playwrights and performers for political and even feminist political purposes. From Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial to readings of the comedy of Lysistrata, the structures of the Greek stage are currently deployed to stage the relation of gender to state practices. While these examples may seem to be in contradiction to the Greek structures, they actually further the use of the classical dramaturgical devices for their purposes within the tradition. However, certain Arabic revisions of Lysistrata reveal the assumptions in the model that prevent its adoption.