This article analyses Stories of Love & Hate, a headphone verbatim play produced in the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Australia. While verbatim theatre typically invites audiences to listen therapeutically, Stories of Love & Hate enacts and enables two alternative forms of listening. First, it enacts the paradoxical mode of ‘ethical eavesdropping’; second, it enables the metatheatrical mode of ‘mediatized listening’. In doing so, the play asks spectators to reconsider whom they listen to and how. It also asks scholars to reconsider claims that verbatim theatre gives voice to those who go unheard by the media. Instead, the article argues that in the case of Stories of Love & Hate, headphone verbatim theatre enables the audience to listen to how the media listen.

Surveys of nineteenth-century drama and theatre in England fall approximately into two categories: an examination of the development of the drama itself – tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, etc. – with some theatrical context provided, and a study of changing theatrical conditions, with some reference to the drama. In both cases what we are told about the theatre relates to acting, architecture, methods of production, lighting, costuming, company organisation, the actor-manager, and so forth. Never, or hardly ever, are we told anything about audiences: what kind of audiences went to what theatres, what their class was, what jobs they did, how much they got paid, what their non-theatrical tastes were, how often they went to the theatre, where they lived and under what conditions. Such information, however, is essential if we are fully to understand the repertory or style of a particular theatre at a particular time in history, and ultimately the character and content of the drama itself.

The history of the earliest documented Chinese opera performances in California (1852) and their successors during the following decades reveal how Chinese theatre in the diaspora was produced and consumed by Chinese immigrants, European visitors and Americans. On the one hand, a familiar repertoire eased the nostalgia and reinforced the national consciousness of Chinese immigrants, while on the other, the ethnocentric reading and writing of Chinese theatre helped establish an eternal frontier in the ‘old West’ to protect American national identity in late nineteenth-century California's periods of economic and political turmoil. Finally, the exoticism of California's Chinese theatre in America contributed to a European sense of American cultural uniqueness. Chinese opera performances played a crucial role in the invention of Californian identity.

Focusing on the UK, where feminism is gaining momentum through multiple sites of activist dissent from a neoliberal hegemony, my primary concern in this article is to understand how, given this renewal of feminist energies, theatre might be able to play its part in agitating for change. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe's compelling description of a ‘network of resistance’, as a possible way forward I conceive of theatre politically as a series of heterogeneously formed sites of oppositional and affirmative activity, each linked into articulating dissent from neoliberalism and the desire for socially progressive change. This provides the critical framework for my engagement with three radically diverse performances ranging from new playwriting (Lucy Kirkwood's NSFW), through the flash mob (Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising campaign), to the West End musical Made in Dagenham.

Theatre created by Pacific Islanders is perhaps the most recent significant development in New Zealand theatre of the 1990s. Exploring this new phenomenon within a concept of diaspora, productions, producers and themes are linked to notions of displacement, home, and disruption on several levels. Three recent plays and productions are examined: Think of a Garden by the Samoan-American John Kneubuhl, which explores memory as the basis of diasporic identity; Home Fires, a collaborative production between Pacific Island and Ma°ori artists in which a new kind of syncretic theatrical style transcending specific cultural codes was developed; and Tatau – Rites of Passage, a performance created by the Christchurch-based group Pacific Underground and the Australian community theatre group Zeal Theatre which explores the notion of ritual reincorporation – involving actual tattooing on stage – as a means of transcending diaspora and repairing the ruptures caused by it.

In an attempt to distinguish themselves from the increasing proliferation of like projects, some theories, training programmes, productions, sub-disciplines and the like project a kinship with already authoritative voices. This artificial association characterizes the inevitably ‘intercultural’ product not simply as another element in the postmodern mix, but as a truth validated by tradition and transcending the limits of cultural fads. Richard Schechner's self-styled ‘rasaesthetics’ seeks to associate itself with the rasa concept of classical Sanskrit theory. But rasa and ‘rasaesthetics’ have little in common, and Schechner's attempt to project their kinship requires misunderstandings of theatre in India and in the West. Ultimately, ‘rasaesthetics’ is an example of a tendency in dramatic theory not to try to explain phenomena but to try to legitimize practices.

Analysing a performance from the viewpoint of what is presented to the public always overlooks the creative work which led to it, the preliminary work which leads up to the performance in question and is made up of explorations, trials and errors, forward and backward moves during which the basis for the final performance is laid down. These moments are witness to the life animating a performance's preparation and explain its development. This means that to study any representation of a performance with a view to analysing it will always remain a single moment in a process which constantly needs to be reaffirmed. This ‘genealogical’ work of preparation; the phases of the staging's constructive work; the research carried out by the actor on his or her text; and the hesitancies, erasures, choices and discoveries generated by a collective work are fundamental to comprehending the representation. They bring its meaning to light and allow us to observe creation at work: creation of the stage setting, of a part, of a character and so on. This procedure is not only indispensable for a better understanding of the performance under study, but also affords a better comprehension of the phases of the creative act itself. Therefore the following essay, an introduction to those that follow, attempts to lay down the basis for defining what should be the tools and corpus for such a field of study.

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and by Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt's theorization of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children's appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt's work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children's relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child's potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt's gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded.

At Florence, housed in the Archivio di Stato in the noble rooms of Vasari's Uffizi, there lies a great collection of letters sent back to Tuscany from the many parts of Europe where representatives of the Medicean court were posted. Among them are files of dispatches written from London during the seventeenth century, and buried within these is a mine of information about the court theatre of the time. Masques, tilts and plays were occasions of some significance for the diplomatic community, for they were external signs of the power of the Stuart realm, and the Florentine agents who took up their residence in London during the course of the century were careful to note when such events took place, how well they came off and who was invited to them.

Amateur theatre constitutes a largely unexplored narrative within the dominant histories of British theatre that traditionally foreground professional practice. A consequence of advanced capitalism has been an increasing emphasis on professionalism in all sectors of society that constructs the amateur as incompetent and expects guaranteed rewards for professional expertise. Statistically, however, amateur theatre has represented a major experience of performance for a significant proportion of the population especially those of the small nations that have been subsumed within the British nation-state. Much of today's state-funded theatre that ostracizes the amateur, has its roots in early twentieth-century amateur/professional collaborations and grassroots activity in the inter-war years. An examination of the ideological basis of aesthetic value judgements which are, in fact, socially constructed judgements of taste, raises issues about both the cultural value of performance and the responsibility of the historian to the experience of the past.

Despite the tendency for Victorian performers to be credited with increasing respectability and middle-class status and for actors to receive the highest official commendations, the popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses' inappropriate sexual conduct endured throughout the nineteenth century. In the United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influences were not as influential on the theatre, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places actresses did have real links with the oldest of all ‘women's professions’, but the notion that the dual identity of Roman dancers or the exploits of some Restoration performers justify the popular association between actresses and prostitutes in the Victorian era is patently insufficient. The notion persisted throughout the nineteenth century because Victorians recognized that acting and whoring were the occupations of self-sufficient women who plied their trades in public places, and because Victorians believed that actresses' male colleagues and patrons inevitably complicated transient lifestyles, economic insecurity, and night hours with sexual activity. In the spirit of Gilbert and Gubar's axiom that experience generates metaphor and metaphor creates experience, the actress and the prostitute were both objects of desire whose company was purchased through commercial exchange. While patrons bought the right to see them, to project their fantasies on them, and to denigrate and misrepresent their sexuality, both groups of women found it necessary constantly to sue for men's attention and tolerate the false imagery. Their similarities were reinforced by coexistence in neighbourhoods and work places where they excited and placated the playgoer's lust in an eternal loop, twisted like a Mobius strip into the appearance of a single surface.

On 22 July 1823 William Godwin addressed the following in a letter to Mary Shelley, who was returning to London after five years on the Continent:

It is a curious circumstance that a play is just announced, to be performed at the English Opera House in the Strand next Monday, entitled, Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein. I know not whether it will succeed. If it does, it will be some sort of feather in the cap of the author of the novel, a recommendation in your future negociations with booksellers.

This essay considers the virtuoso in music, theatre and dance as a liminal figure of performativity. It draws on cultural studies as well as the history of science to offer a critical reading which follows the virtuoso's oscillation between science and art. The escalating dynamic in the virtuoso's technical control of material (of the body, the ‘instrument’, language) leads to a polarization between artistic ‘creation’ and virtuoso performance: the virtuoso thus occupies a seismographic function within the aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century. The article also outlines the relationship between the media and virtuoso performance and the relevance of the anecdote for the virtuoso's charismatic impact. This essay will contribute to our understanding of how the contemporary media influenced the virtuoso concept, and address the issue of whether the (partial) disappearance of the virtuoso from the theatre stage translocates the figure of the virtuoso onto other ‘cultural stages’.

This article explores the notion of participation in contemporary theatre and performance on two levels, namely how participation is shaped within performance, and how performance participates in the public sphere. Using recent examples from Sudan, Russia and Lebanon/Netherlands, I investigate how the political premises underlying the call for participation are reimagined aesthetically, and, conversely, how artistic strategies of shaping audience participation render visible the failures and possibilities of people's participation in the public sphere. The connection between these two dimensions of participation is made by engaging the concepts of ‘representation’, ‘collectivity’ and ‘theatricality’, which I call ‘vectors of participation’. I discuss how the artistic representation of an idea is complementary to political representation, how the demand for collective participation in the public sphere transforms into collective creation in the artistic sphere, and how theatricality in spectatorship is linked to the political call to bear witness.

There is much evidence, it seems, that Elizabethan dramatists spent a measure of their creative energy revising old playbooks. The title pages of some quartos advertise that their contents are ‘amended’ or ‘newly corrected’, and the similarity of plays on such subjects as the Yorkist kings and tamable shrews have made it plausible that one text is a revision of the other. In the 1908 edition of Henslowe's Diary, W. W. Greg lent sanction to the idea of playhouse revision; defending the sign ‘ne’ as the mark of new plays, he offered as an exception a play ‘new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations’. In the Cambridge editions of Shakespeare's plays, J. Dover Wilson systematically identified textual variants and cruxes in the early plays as evidence of revisions, allegedly made for a revival. Over the years, editions of and monographs on plays with more than one textual version have reinforced the association of major alterations with a play's return to the stage after some period of retirement. For such an apparently widespread playhouse practice, G. E. Bentley developed a ‘rule of thumb’: ‘almost any play … kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain later revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company’.

This essay is an attempt at a partial reconstruction of the finances of the United Company in London between 1682 and 1692. Ideally, one would wish to discover the ‘day bookes of the Theatre’ so often referred to ‘for greater certainty’ in lawsuits after the turn of the century. But even without them, we can calculate approximate figures for the company's fixed expenses and its declared profits year by year. Such a framework gives us a perspective from which to view an analysis of house charges, managers' fees, actors' incomes, and investments in particular productions. I have drawn together various bits of evidence, some of them well-known to specialists, but I have used the information in new ways. I have also speculated freely on how the pieces we have might fit together. There are limits to what we can deduce from available evidence, but this reconstruction does give us a much clearer idea than we have previously had of the scale of theatre as a business in late seventeenth-century London. A startling amount of money flowed through the United Company.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has inspired several pieces of theatre that emphasize the powerful aesthetics of testimony and the challenges of an ethical response. While many of these are experimental plays with high production values and engage with Ålite liberal audiences on a metaphoric level, the theatrical space remains a comment upon, but does not merge with, everyday reality. The focus here is on three plays in which audiences are not watching an ‘other’ but are watching themselves. They are brought on a journey of healing as a community. That Spirit by Mina Nawe, Thetha Ngikhulume (‘Speak so that I may speak’) by Bongani Linda and The Victory Sonqoba Theatre Company and The Story I am About to Tell by Khulumani Support Group belong to the category of Theatre for Development (TfD). TfD most often stages intellectual debates on social and political issues affecting a particular, usually geographically defined, community. However, rather than exploring the socio-political aspects of the TRC, these plays focus on the deep emotional trauma that remains with survivors as the TRC goes about ‘healing the nation’. This article draws on the theories of social change associated with TfD, Augusto Boal's theories of theatre as therapy, psychologists’ theories of post-conflict recovery, and, theories of restorative justice to evaluate the healing potential of both the TRC and TfD.

After more than thirty years of solo autobiographical theatre created by LGBTQQIA performers throughout the West, the primary focus of shows made by artists of these identities has more or less remained stable since 1980. In 1982, queer performance artist Tim Miller presented the autobiographical solo show Post-War, and he is part of what is now a tradition of presenting out, celebratory, authentic LGBTQQIA stories onstage. As a self-identified trans performance artist and performing researcher, I have taken part in this practice. Performances, extending from Miller in 1982 to J MASE III in 2014, continue to revolve around the necessity of ‘coming out’, presenting the stories of how we came to know and experience the ‘truths’ of our identities. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon confirms that these autobiographical works have largely been concerned with, and successful in, ‘using the public arena to “speak out”, attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to “talk back”, aiming to challenge, contest and problematize dominant representations and assumptions about those subjects'. Works such as Miller's Glory Box (1999), which used his personal history of having a partner who is not a US citizen to discuss gay marriage and legal immigration for same-sex couples, and trans and Tamil performer D’Loco Kid's D’FaQto Life (2013), which presented an intersectionally marginalized trans person of colour's experience and narrative, have been critical in supporting political and personal empowerment for audiences and performers alike.