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 following comparison between the Yiddish ‘Shund’ play Dos Yudishe Hertz by Joseph Lateiner and August von Katzebue's most popular melodrama Menschenhass und Reue aims to throw light on a very significant aspect of the Yiddish ‘Shund’ Theatre. I believe that the conclusions of this comparison show how Yiddish ‘Shund’ playwrights tried to answer their audience expectations and how they manipulated their audience by trying to evoke a certain kind of response.

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 Since the reception of The War Plays [1985] by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theatre Bond has largely withdrawn his work from mainstream British theatre.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.

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.

In 1529 Agrippa von Nettesheim criticized the ‘futility and uncertainty’ of science. Indeed, the triumphant rise of European culture and science has always been accompanied by shadows of dissent. While, on the one hand, the rhapsodic shattering of reason was heavily criticized, on the other hand, equally sharp criticism was raised against the hermetic spirit of universal systems. The accepted authority of scientific knowledge was continually served a Lenten repast, and mighty edifices built on theory have bowed to the weight of doubt, crumbling into ruins of truths. The path which we call ‘progress’ is overlaid with traces of our own actions in the image of Sisyphus in Hades, who is condemned to push a huge boulder uphill. He is forever forced back to the beginning of his task, because of the perfidious nature of the stone.

Introduced, compiled and edited by Elin Diamond, this forum brings together feminist theatre/performance scholars to revisit the question of identity politics. Does it still have currency? Does it still matter for feminists today? In what theatre and performance contexts do we still discuss identity politics? Following an overview (from a US perspective) of past and present concerns by Elin Diamond, the forum voices a range of international views as contributors consider identity politics, theatre and performance in their countries of origin: Nobuko Anan (Japan), Denise Varney (Australia), Katrin Sieg (Germany), Bishnupriya Dutt (India) and Tiina Rosenberg (Sweden).

This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances by Indigenous companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku. It sets the scene with a visit to the Curtain Tree in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia, arguing that the vitality and display of its root system models a special kind of reciprocity between the performative elements of the environment and the environmental elements of theatre and performance. This is traced through recent short-run immersive works, Hanna Cormick's Mermaid (2020) and Melinda Hetzel and Company's Conservatory (2020), and a rereading of a canonical Australian drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

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 widespread discourse of ‘truth’ in theatre is problematic. Truth, as that which exists objectively before verification or as the correspondence between propositions and the world, may not fit with theatre as a creative process. While it might seem that there are correct or definitive choices on the rehearsal room floor, one might argue that these choices are merely subjective and relative. However, an alternative understanding of truth offered by Martin Heidegger's term aletheia might be helpful. In this article, I explore this notion of truth as ‘unconcealment’ by revisiting Gay McAuley's case study of a workshop for Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis by the South Australian company Brink. I argue that the rehearsal was not simply about meaning-making, but about the ‘disclosure of Being’ made possible through the energized play-space of the performance process.

In October 1997 the City of Buenos Aires hosted its first International Festival of theatre, music, dance, and the visual arts with performances by groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Latin American theorists, among them Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama, who have long considered such a transcultural event not as culturally transcendent but, rather, as culturally transformative, provide a frame for reading the Buenos Aires Festival as a site of transnational and transcultural operations. Particular focus is placed on the Festival's geopolitico-cultural project, constructed out of the complex relations of local, national, regional, and international politics and performance.

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.

This study explores the theme of carnivalesque homoeroticism in medieval decadent Cairo as portrayed by oculist and littérateur Ibn Dāniyāl in his third shadow play The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion. The playwright's satirical response to Sultan Baybars's campaign against vice in Egypt in the thirteenth century falls within the irreverent burlesque tradition. The article analyses the playwright's carnivalesque and satirical shadow play in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He related the carnivalesque – a burlesque dramatic genre aiming to secretively challenge and sabotage the social and political hierarchy of an autocratic regime through satirical obscenity and rhetoric – to the medieval carnivals and feasts of fools throughout Europe. Bawdy burlesque comedies were intended to provoke hilarious laughter by mockingly satirizing the despotic government's absurd subjugation of its citizens. The study shows how carnivalesque dialogic, long thought to be limited to medieval literature in Europe, found fertile soil in medieval Cairo. Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy Ṭayf al-Khayāl, which consists of The Shadow Spirit, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, and The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion, can unquestionably be studied in the context of Bakhtin's plebeian popular culture of laughter and the carnivalesque tradition.

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.