I grew up in the world of the Deutsches Theater, a witness of Reinhardt's early period in Berlin, in the years before the First World War. I remember Reinhardt's father, a noble, distinguished-looking gentleman, friendly, quiet, and dignified; Reinhardt's mother, shy and easily worried; their early home in Den Zelten, then later and for many years, the beautiful Old-Berlin house on the Kupfergraben; many evenings with endless telephone discussions between Max Reinhardt and my father, devoted to the interpretation of the play for which Reinhardt was preparing the Regiebuch; the exciting atmosphere of a dress rehearsal; the metropolitan, cosmopolitan glamour of a Reinhardt premiere; summers in Bavaria, where Reinhardt directed the Münchener Festspiele; the summer of 1913, in Massa and Carrara, when Reinhardt tried his hand with the new medium, the film. I came in touch with that world through the role played in it by my father, Arthur Kahane. It is his portrait that I should like to sketch.

Falstaff is first pictured in the frontispiece engraving by an unknown artist for The Wits or Sport Upon Sport (Plate I), a collection of drolls and playlets adapted from earlier plays, originally published in two parts: part one by Henry Marsh in 1662 (with a second edition published by Francis Kirkman in 1672) and part two by Francis Kirkman in 1673. The engraving appears in both editions of part one and shows a rectangular stage lit by candelabra and footlights in front of a curtain hung from a gallery with a curtained window above. On stage are seven characters from six different pre-Restoration plays. In the lower left are ‘Sr. I. Falstafe’ and ‘Hostes’ from the first playlet in the collection, The Bouncing Knight or the Robbers Robbed, an adaptation of scenes from Henry the Fourth, Part One: II.iv, III.iii, IV.ii. V.i. and iv.

It is a commonplace among historians that British theatre during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is best characterized on the one hand by its taste for scenic spectacle, and on the other by what Allardyce Nicoll termed ‘a general dramatic debility’. For the first time in British theatrical history, spectacle for its own sake became the principal attraction for most of the audience. Not spoken language, whether poetry or prose, but the sentient lure of elaborate scenery, pantomime, music, and mechanical effects swelled the receipts of the major and minor houses alike. The ascendancy of visual spectacle over dialogue drama of autonomous literary merit is customarily regarded as a debasement of theatre as an art form, attributed with varying degrees of emphasis to the legal shackles of the patent system and the Lord Chamberlain's censorship; to the cavernous expansion of the major houses; and to commercially expedient appeals by the managers to less cultivated tastes in the burgeoning, heterogeneous audience. This durable theory of theatrical prostration is a reductive judgement, the result of critical bias and a limited methodology that have been mind-forged manacles for historical research in theatre since its inception in the 1930s.

In 1699, James Wright's Historica Histrionica … In a Dialogue on Plays and Players chronicled the troubles of the London theatrical community after the Civil War, during which it had supported the Royalists almost to a man. Wright's character Trueman, in the spirit of Dryden's and Dennis' spokesmen, tells his compatriot Lovewit that

Afterwards in Oliver's time, they used to act privately, three or four Miles, or more, out of Town, now here, now there, sometimes Noblemens Houses, in particular Holland-house at Kensington, where Nobility and Gentry who met (but in no great Numbers) used to make a Sum for them, each giving a broad Peice, or the like.

At the end of this essay is a list of the black French plays first published in book form between 1980 and May 1983. In all there are 43 plays in 31 books, not counting mimeographed and journal items, nor performed plays that have not yet been printed. The rate of book publication continues high. I commented on most of the 1980 and 1981 plays in ‘Black French Theatre: The Latest Plays’ and ‘Black French Theatre Update’ so in a first section I shall present those missed from that period as well as the ones of 1982 and 1983. This will be done alphabetically by author except that Diouf is postponed until Sall, the two having written on the same subject.

In 1780 James Lewis published the first of two magnificent folios, entitled Original Designs in Architecture. The title page explains that it consists of ‘Plans, Elevations, and Sections, for Villas, Mansions, Town-Houses, &c. and a New Design for a Theatre. With Descriptions, and Explanations of the Plates, and an Introduction’. Plates XIX-XXII are for ‘a New Theatre, designed for the Opera’. In fact, the designs are for a new opera house intended to occupy the site on which John Vanbrugh's Queen's/King's Theatre in the Haymarket had stood since 1705. The building would consume all the existing site and much of the surrounding property. Lewis explains the origins of his plans: ‘Our Theatres being upon a very small scale, compared with those of other principal cities in Europe, about two years ago [that is, in 1778] a report prevailed that a New Theatre was intended to be built by subscription, which might serve as well for all Dramatick Performances, as Concerts, Assemblies, Masquerades, &c. And the proprietors of the Opera House intending to purchase several adjoining houses and ground, to render the theatre eligible for the various purposes mentioned, suggested the idea of making a design adapted to the situation of the present Opera House, with the principal front towards Pall Mall’ (p. 12). This grand edifice would be like no other theatre in London.

This article examines the relation between the anticipating spectator and the transitoriness of theatre from an existentialist viewpoint. Referring to Heidegger's concept of ‘the anticipation of death’ (Vorlaufen), it is argued that any anticipation of the end of a performance is capable of reflecting temporality as a whole. In this regard, the performances of the English live art group Forced Entertainment exemplify how to bring the temporality of Dasein into the limelight.

Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat, one of the last major plays by the Syrian Sa'dallah Wannus, published in 1994, is one of the most innovative plays from the Arab world in the twentieth century. Based on a historical incident, it dramatizes the story of the fall of the Naqib of Damascus when he is arrested with his mistress Warda. The Naqib's enemy, the Mufti, saves him from disgrace by substituting the Naqib's wife, Mu'mina, for Warda, although Mu'mina leaves the Naqib and becomes a notorious prostitute. The play also overtly treats male homosexuality. Previous analyses of Wannus's plays have focused on the influence of Brecht and the Thousand and One Nights, and criticism of this play's feminist theme. This article argues that much of the play's novelty and aesthetic power derive from aspects of Shakespeare, principally Measure for Measure, and from motifs, lexicon and ritual theatricality derived from Sufism as aesthetic form and religious practice.

Theatre historians often turn to art history, not only for information about source images that can help with the speculative reconstruction of lost performances, but also for lessons in historiographic method. Historians from both disciplines have long shared the difficulties of ‘ekphrasis’, i.e. the translation of nondiscursive images into descriptions, and vice versa, as well as other vexing problems of general history like periodization, documentation of events, and so on. Unlike theatre history, art history has a recognized pantheon of interpreters, which has been subjected to overview studies like Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art as well as specific treatments of major critics and their influence, like Michael Ann Holly's work on Panofsky. Theoretical concerns about historiography, sometimes assumed by literary critics of ‘master narratives’ to be synonymous with postmodernism, developed somewhat earlier in art historical writing, which would appear to be an advantage.

I sketch those characteristics of the mise en scène at the Ring of Brodgar stone circle and associated sites that might solicit within the visitor something like a dynamic performance. Drawing on surrealism, Robert Smithson and archaeology, I argue that the mise en scène at Brodgar – and the visitor's response to it – is characterized by a sense of presence which exists in a dialectical tension with the perception of that which is absent. Brodgar is indexical (like a photograph) and hauntological, in semiotic terms. The Neolithic site is, at some level, unknowable. The visitor becomes aware of coincident yet incompatible manifestations of time and space (heterochronia) and imagines the potential return of unknown, cryptic ritual performances (metatheatre). This solicits within the viewer something akin to Max Ernst's model of frottage. As Breton put it, ‘The imaginary . . . tends to become real’.

From a contemporary Israeli perspective there is a clearly discernable connection between the concrete expressions of the national theatrical culture and some of the most comprehensive and fundamental ideological assumptions of this society. These assumptions are primarily based on its Jewish culture and religion and the national movement of Zionism as it has developed ideologically as well as practically during the last century, in particular through the establishment of the state of Israel. This article will examine the expression of some of these ideological trends and developments in the Hebrew and Israeli theatrical culture from the early 19208 until the mid-1970s.

São Paulo's Grupo Macunaíma has established a paradigm for a unique form of poor theatre, which has had a marked influence on alternative troupes in Brazil attempting to break the commercial mould and to return to a social vision, lost during the darkest years of the military dictatorship. Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre outlines the abstract formulation and practical applications of the method he elaborated in his Polish Laboratory Theatre. The director-theoretician proposed first and foremost to overturn what he called rich theatre: a form of staging using ‘borrowed mechanisms’ from movies and television and expensive scenic technology. The Polish Laboratory was also an actor-centred theatre in which the stage was redesigned architecturally for each performance to allow the performers to interact with the audience and in which there were no naturalistic sets or props, no recorded music or sophisticated lighting. The actor, through a complex system of signs, continually created and recreated the meaning of text, constumes, set, and props. ‘By this use of controlled gesture the actor transforms the floor into a sea, a table into a confessional, a piece of iron into an animate partner, etc.’ (Poor Theatre, p. 21). Grotowski's plays were filled with costumes made of torn bags, bathtubs serving as altars, bunkbeds becoming mountains, hammers used as ‘musical’ instruments. ‘Each object must contribute not to the meaning but to the dynamic of the play; its value resides in its various uses.’ Other tenets of the Grotowski system germane to this study are a return to mythical and ritual roots, the theatrical remaking of classical works, and the collective basis of stagecraft.