Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place (February 2011) by Muhammad ‘Azīz (1955–) documents how Egyptian youth played a leading role in coordinating and organizing the 25 January 2011 revolution through social media networking and how the battle fought at Tahrir Square exemplifies genuine human networking. ‘Azīz's play constructs its social and historical grounding as a fabulous mix between the real, the fictional and the virtual. It reimagines the possibilities of political theatre in the context of postmodern virtuality. This study explores how realism can incorporate other worlds as a way of rethinking theatre and politics in a richly multicultural, post-revolutionary Egypt. It illuminates Egyptians’ complexities, where individualities are reinforced against an oppressive regime. This analysis focuses on the dynamics of space and resistance, as multiple selves move from individualistic, alienated spaces towards connection through the space of resistance and shared political activity.

In the Shakespearean theatre, the removal of dead bodies from the stage was a theatrical necessity, owing to the absence of a curtain between the stage and the auditorium. Despite the many non-realistic conventions accepted in the theatre, the disposal of corpses had to be carried out in such a way as not to disrupt the reality of the fictional world. An analysis of certain kinds of intriguing situations, such as suicide scenes, reveals how efficiently Shakespeare and his contemporaries utilized the stage hangings, the upper gallery, and the stage trap so as to avoid the necessity of bringing on bearers for the corpses at the ends of the scenes. Only at the end of the play, when the logic of the fictional world stops functioning, could the spectacle of a corpse getting up and leaving the stage have been accepted by the audience.

Performance studies and queer studies are two of the most significant paradigmatic shifts to energize the analysis of Irish theatre and performance in very recent times. The development of these critical approaches can be seen to respond to the growth of more experimental, performance-centred methods of making and interpreting practice, and the emergence of a wide range of identities within theatre and performance sites, and the Irish social and cultural landscape more generally.

A shibboleth has grown up around the work of Edward Bond. The tag ‘controversial dramatist’ has continued to dog both the man and his work. This article will hope to explore some of the contradictory, and sometimes frustrating manifestations that such ‘celebrity’ has produced. Since the reception of The War Plays [1985] by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theatre Bond has largely withdrawn his work from mainstream British theatre. Since the late 1990s he has looked to a new home – La Colline Theatre – in France, to premiere new work and run retrospective seasons of older plays. Here, Bond's celebrity is of a different kind, and has allowed him to enhance and develop his work as a playwright, director and writer about theatre. While this article draws on secondary sources it also uses material based on personal correspondence with Edward Bond.

It was as a branch of ‘genetic criticism’ that a genetics of the theatre first established itself in France as a scientific field of study. Applied to literature alone in the first place, it has since then gradually widened its scope of investigation. Taking Marguerite Duras's first play, Le Square (1956) as an example, this essay aims to demonstrate the main effects of such a disciplinary gestation on the ‘French’ approach to the creative processes as regards the theatre. On the one hand, the existence of well-tried methodological procedures for the study of manuscripts permits both a dynamic re-examination of dramatic works and a criticism of the myths which often surround them. On the other, apprehending the different textual materials and the other kinds of genetic documents produced around the stage according to a methodologically coherent manner reveals the constant interdependence of techniques and arts, and the need to improve models constructed for altogether different studies.

The Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress met in New York City over 4–10 June 1967 at the same time as the Arab–Israeli War was taking place. This context very much framed the delegates’ debates over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with the concept. The participants focused on three key questions: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. This article focuses first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.

The Europa Europa anti-nationalist cabaret was created in the run-up to the 2014 Swedish elections by the Ful collective in collaboration with ‘house band’ the Knife. Part rally and part concert, Europa Europa responds to the Sweden Democrats party's anti-immigrant propaganda specifically and the migration policies of the European Union more generally, by enacting a kind of ‘no-borders’ politics in a moment of rising nationalisms. The cabaret aims to build a temporary coalition between different but like-minded audiences as an aim distinct from changing minds. This solidarity is also practised by the performers onstage, who use the ambiguous theatrical positioning of migration stories to challenge conventional imaginaries of heroes and criminals. Through Europa Europa and its inheritances, from historical agitprop to the Macarena, this essay extends performance's repertoire as a form in which to practise strategic anti-nationalism, and to engage with friction in the process.

When Adrian Noble directed Measure for Measure at the RSC in 1983–4, colour supplement coverage focused on the costumes: the exuberance of the production was indicated by the extravagance of the designs. On 25 April 1985, before the opening of the director's new As You Like It, the Sunday Times Magazine ran an interview with him and with his Rosalind, Juliet Stevenson. There was a sense, not merely to be put down to the artificial hype of the publicity machine, that a new production and above all a new Rosalind were matters of concern and interest to a wide range of consumers of life's good things. Noble's Measure for Measure had been covered almost as a design story but As You Like It was treated very differently. Noble's views on the significance of the retreat into Arden were sought and reported: there was an underlying assumption that the readership had a stake in the representation of this play, that what was being staged was a property held in common by the journal's readers and that the play had a place in the public imagination independently of what directors did with it.

It is common to describe the end product of an actor's labour as ‘an interpretation’, but somehow the expression's serious, critical dimension is never fully intended. Only a scholar with his pipe and tweeds would seem to possess the appropriate gravity to render judicious overviews of this kind. When one wants to know what Hamlet is ‘about’, they naturally turn to heavily footnoted exegesis found in periodicals with circulations under a thousand. What could someone prancing before a number greater than this in a single evening, wearing grease paint and tights no less, possibly add to such an exalted investigation?

The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris (1897–1962) achieved a legendary reputation as the ‘Theatre of Horror’, a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night. Indeed, the phrase ‘grand-guignolesque’ has entered the language to describe any display of heightened, remorseless horror. Such is the myth of the Grand-Guignol: the reality is subtler and far more complex.

The aims and ambitions of this article are initially fairly limited. I want to examine a series of events which occurred at the Comédie-Française in April and May of 1765, leading to a complete disruption of normal performances at the theatre, to the imprisonment of most of the company's leading actors, and to the temporary withdrawal from performance of what might otherwise have been eighteenth-century France's biggest ‘box-office hit’, Le Siège de Calais, a patriotic tragedy by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy. In themselves these events, sometimes known as l'affaire Dubois after the actor most directly involved in them, are little more than a bizarre and sporadically scurrilous footnote to the theatrical history of France in the eighteenth century. But the more one examines them, the more they illuminate certain rather murky areas of literary and social history, two areas in particular: firstly, the social relations of the acting profession at a time when it was, despite considerable pressure from numerous sources, still barred en bloc from the sacraments of the Catholic church; and secondly, the degree of autonomy which could be said to have existed for a company which was, legally, a kind of workers' co-operative but which, at any rate at that stage, operated within a rather ill-defined administrative limbo (it was simultaneously autonomous and totally subject to noble whim). The strike which brought about the cancellation of performances of Le siège de Calais in April 1765 is, then, a specific and in no way typical event, but one which draws together a number of historical strands – literary, theatrical, economic, moral and political – in a particularly interesting way. I want, in the course of this article, to deal with two questions – questions to which I do not really feel able to give definitive answers but which may, when examined, cast doubt upon one or two familiar preconceptions about the nature of the eighteenth-century theatre as a profession, and at the same time open up certain areas of enquiry with regard to the theatre as a material reality rather than a predominantly literary or artistic form. The questions are in themselves quite simple: why did the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française refuse, on Monday, 15th April 1765, to perform a play which, given its enormous success earlier in the year, it was very much in their economic interests to present? And why did the resulting situation become so irreducible that, far from the usual discreet pressures being brought to bear on the relevant authorities to resolve the dispute, it led to the imprisonment of three of the most popular ‘stars’ of the century, and to an effective lockout lasting for almost a month?

For the French speaking minorities of Manitoba, the struggle against oppression has often meshed with battles for justice and human rights waged by other Canadian minority groups. Over the past two decades, plays by English and French speaking playwrights have echoed theatrical themes of the nineteenth century by centring on the plight of the Métisse. Being of Amer-Indian and Franco-Canadian descent, the history of the Métisse offers a fascinating perspective on Anglo-French and Anglo-Indian relations. In many of the plays, much attention is paid to the legendary story of Louis Riel, a Métisse chief who led the fight against British expansion into Western Canada and who was executed by the Crown for the murder of Thomas Scott, a British officer. With Riel as an emblem, anglophone and francophone playwrights have forged new outlooks on the historical struggle for control of Western Canada. Furthermore, while investigating the past playwrights have uncovered ways in which conflicting interpretations of history throw light upon present-day Canadian cultural complexities.

The town of Madrid was first chosen as the permanent seat of the Court in 1561; for a few years, from 1601 to 1606, Valladolid challenged Madrid's supremacy, but in that year Madrid was confirmed as the capital of Spain. The years from 1561 saw, as a result, a rapid growth in Madrid, an explosion of population and of size which was not to have its counterpart again until the 1870s and, more recently, the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, the growth of Madrid sucked into the town a great number of peasants and, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, a significant part of the population must have consisted of first- and second-generation town-dwellers, imbued, to judge from the evidence of the plays performed in the commercial theatres, with a nostalgia for the country-side, a nostalgia which was reinforced by and expressed in terms of the old literary topos of the dispraise of life in the city (or at Court) and the praise of country life.

Marguerite Duras developed a theatrical form that both staged a severing of the woman's body/ presence from discourse/subjectivity, and gave expression to the distressed source of the woman's voice beyond discourse. This form of theatre appeals to the spectator who is willing to become involved in its uncovering of possible meanings of female identity through a meticulously orchestrated, slow, rhythm-based and essentially uncomfortable sifting and dredging of the processes of memory and desire. In exploring this terrain, Duras went some way toward realizing Irigaray's feminist project of ‘playing with mimesis’, whereby the woman resubmits herself to ideas about her self that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, in order to uncover the place of her exploitation by discourse.

Ophaboom Theatre was formed in 1991 with the aim of developing, researching and performing a contemporary version of commedia dell'aite to provide humour and resonance for a modern audience. By returning to the roots of commedia, on the streets, Ophaboom's performances, we hoped, might recapture its popular appeal, and be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In doing this we have questioned many of the traditional ideas associated with this form, and also its contemporary relevance. Our approaches to each mask or character type, such as the Zanni (servant), the innamorata (lover), and Pantalone (old man), are tested in live performance in turn, and only when satisfied with it do we move on to the next mask. This return to the roots is aimed at invigorating the form methodically through an evolution possibly analogous to that of the original commedia. Our belief is that the eighteenth-century manifestation, which is often the only perception and thus representation of commedia today, does not appeal to a wide public. At its height, commedia owed its vitality to its wideranging appeal, and by rediscovering its spirit we hope to revitalize this popularity.

Although sixty years have passed since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War scant regard has been given to the theatre's contribution during the conflict to the entertainment and education of soldiers. Yet drama was prominent in the range of cultural and pedagogic activities which was a marked characteristic of the Republican army. A distinct genre, known as teatro de uigencia (theatre of urgency), was actively promoted by the Republican authorities as a means of encouraging soldiers and civilians towards a ‘correct’ pro-Republican perspective. Teatro de uigencia works were generally short, single act pieces but with a surprising variety of dramatic styles and propaganda intentions. Satirical lampooning of Franco's Nationalist forces took place, for example, alongside drama whose earnestly expressed purpose was to train the enthusiastic but inexperienced Popular Militias in battlefield strategy, the importance of fortification and the need for rigorous self-discipline. Such plays were performed by a variety of theatre companies. Some, such as Lorca's La Barraca and Max Aub's El Búho, had existed since before the war but travelled to frontline locations during the conflict to lend vigorous support to the Republican forces. Other companies, known as Guerrillas del Teatro, arose from initiatives of the Ministry of Education and were attached to the Army of the Centre and the Army of the East. Still more groups were encouraged by the General Commissariat of War through its Sub-Commissariat of Agitation, Press and Propaganda. While precise details are extremely sketchy, it is also clear that, within army units themselves, performance troupes were formed for the purposes of entertainment and politico-military education through drama.

Textual and performance innovation in twentieth-century Peking Opera is not new and the experiments by practitioners in Taiwan today demonstrate approaches that both reflect past attempts and contemporary variation. There has been resistance to change in the art form, however, because it was supposed to have reached perfection with Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), who, because of his artistic pre-eminence and international status, was able to introduce several daring innovations that revolutionized the medium without upsetting its parameters. Mei not only experimented by acting in contemporary non-traditional plays, but also within the Peking Opera tradition and was responsible for shifting the limelight away from that of the old man role (laosheng) to that of the young woman (dan), his own role. He and his playwright collaborator, Qi Rushan, wrote new style Peking Opera scripts that made best use of Mei's unique performing talents. Instead of the stylized costume evolved from Ming and Qing, dress, Mei would occasionally use historically accurate costumes from earlier dynasties. He introduced the use of classical dances and encouraged the inclusion of the eihu, the second, lower pitched fiddle into the accompanying orchestra.