One could say that all plays, even those with an international reputation, are best understood within their national, ethnic and cultural contexts. But very few plays can be as intimately attached to their author, his city, his family, his friends and enemies, and fellow citizens in general, as the Jeu de la feuillée, written by the trouvére Adam de la Halle, and staged by him in 1276, in the Petite Place of the town of Arras. For the protagonist of the play is Adam himself, and some of the other characters are real people connected with him. This is a play of unrivalled audacity, in which Adam exposes himself for public scrutiny. He deals openly with his own ambitions and frustrations, with his intimate relations with his wife and his troubled relationship with his father, and with the lives of his friends and neighbours. All this is unfolded in front of an audience holding his acquaintances, some of whom are equally satirized in the play.

This article examines the ramifications of the hypothesis that encoded in the dialogue of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre texts are precise indications for the actors as to then-entrance and exit points, and that such indications constitute a stage management system, a dramaturgical system and a system of spatial semiotics which might invest these movement patterns with thematic or semiotic significance. Such a suggestion, that we may be able to access a range of ‘spatial’ meanings from an understanding of original performance conditions, is likely to be viewed with some scepticism by Shakespearian scholars of a literary orientation, so strong is the word-based tradition of analysis and interpretation. Yet this is the suggestion that underlies this work: that, complementing the verbal signification of the texts there may also be a verbally inscribed spatial semiotic which provides an additional range of meanings—and that such possible semiotic functions ride upon pragmatic stage management patterns which governed entrances and exits and the rhythms of the original performance context. It is argued that when the texts are interrogated in this light they reveal precise, consistent and coherent traces of such systematic indications in regard to the onstage-offstage spatial relationships operating in performance.

Of all the various features associated with the kabuki theatre, few are as well known outside Japan as the hanamichi, the raised runway joined to the stage at the actors' right and proceeding through the auditorium to a curtained room at the rear. Used for major exits and entrances, it is also the site of important acting sequences. Because the hanamichi brings actors and spectators into close proximity without abandoning a stage-auditorium relationship similar to that in Western proscenium theatres, it has been of considerable interest to international theatre artists. Although its aesthetic and practical uses have been described in various Western sources, little attention has been paid to the hanamichi's origins. Among Japanese scholars, there is nearly as much contention surrounding this question as there is among Western scholars regarding the origins of the proscenium arch, the Elizabethan theatre's alcove, or the classical Greek theatre's use of a raised stage.

In October 1672, a highly select audience in Moscow witnessed the court's first theatrical production, a setting of Artakserksovo deistvo (The Play of Ahasuerus) based on the biblical story of Esther. A month later, in contrast, Parisians would witness the escalating rivalry between Molière and Lully—as the former continued to capitalize on their tragédie-ballet, Psyché (with Lully's music), while the latter prepared to launch his first French opera, Les Fêtes de l'Amour et de Bacchus (with Molière's lyrics).1 At first glance there would seem to be little connection between the fledgling Muscovite theatre at Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's court, which in the event was to be closed down at his death only four years later, and the public theatres of Paris with their lyrical offerings of comédies-ballets, tragédies-ballets and, most recently, pastoral opera. Yet the two are linked in many ways, some subtle and some obvious, and the influences are both mutual and unexpected.

In an answer to the question, ‘Who are we as women?’, Western feminisms have developed diverse theories. Appropriating post-structuralist theories, Linda Alcoff rearticulates female subjectivity as positionality, thus avoiding essentialism and yet including a historical dimension in her configuration. Allison Weir calls for a reformulation of the concept of women's identity which includes difference, connection and heterogeneity. Thus, the issues of meaning and interpretation regarding the concept of woman seems to occupy the central locus in the discussions of Western feminisms.

One of the surest ways of registering disapproval of a play or a performance is to dismiss it as ‘melodramatic’, thus invoking a whole network of mistaken dramatic values and improper practice. In arts reviews, classrooms and text books, ‘melodrama’ recurs as the ‘other’ of ‘proper’ realist drama. In English Drama: A Cultural History, we describe the critical history of melodrama as ‘The Unacceptable Face of Theatre's importance and seriousness. One of the most influential interventions came from Peter Brooks, whose Melodramatic Imagination propounds two arguments in favour of melodrama'scultural centrality: first, Brooks shows how Diderot and Rousseau anticipated the French form of melodrama, then he makes connections between melodramatic gesture or sign and the work of Saussure or Barthes. My aim here is to develop the case further by suggesting that, in the case of English melodrama, the practice of the form as it emerged was very far from being non-intellectual, out of control or stupid. Indeed the dramatists themselves were well conscious of what they were doing formally: not only intelligence but also self-reflection were there from the start.

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carter's A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of women's lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.

At the beginning of October 1777, Sumarokov, dramatist and first director of the first Russian professional theatre, died in Moscow alone, poverty-stricken and deserted by all. A few actors carried the deceased to the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery and buried him at their own expense. A week later Catherine II received a communication from Prince Volkonsky: ‘In the last few days Aleksandr Sumarokov, being afflicted with a violent illness, has died, but otherwise all here goes well; having nothing more at present worthy of report to Your Imperial Majesty, I commit myself to Your Imperial Grace’.

Tari Ito is so far the only ‘out’ lesbian performance artist in Japan. After performing as a pantomime artist in Tokyo and Holland for ten years, she began her series of solo performances in 1989. In 1996, she ‘came out’ as a lesbian, in a performance entitled Self-Portrait. In her performances Ito makes various uses of a latex ‘skin’ which she uses to create an interface between discursive practices and desire, revealing the constructedness of our desire and sexuality. Along with this skin, Ito's verbal assertion of her lesbian identity at the end of the otherwise non-verbal Self-Portrait unsettles a heterosexual reading of her performances that would assume the construction of desire and sexuality in terms of heterosexuality.

The importance of scene painters to English theatre increased markedly toward the end of the eighteenth century—in part a response to the contributions of Philip James De Loutherbourg at Drury Lane in the 1770s. Advertisements began routinely to record the name of what we would now call the scene designer. Gaetano Marinari was identified as principal painter and machinist at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket between 1785 and 1789, when the old opera house burned. Thomas Greenwood held the equivalent position at Drury Lane, John Inigo Richards at Covent Garden, and Michael Angelo Rooker at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. For particular productions the names of assistant painters might also be advertised. On 20 December 1785, for example, Covent Garden listed Richards, Carver, Hodgins, Catton Jun., and Turner as the crew that executed scenery for the travelogue Omai, which turned out to be De Loutherbourg's last designs for the London theatre.

In December 1891, an adaptation by Paul-Napoléon Roinard of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon was performed at the recently created Théâtre d'Art, expressly to present a new idea of theatre as total art by engaging the visual, aural, and olfactory senses of the audience. One of the few theatre historians who has mentioned this remarkable endeavour notes that in it,‘music, words, colour, even perfume, were to be harmonized; all the senses were to be involved, simultaneously, in the one overwhelming experience’. Roinard's synaesthetic experiment drew on a range of sources including Baudelaire, Wagner and Rimbaud, and, most strikingly, featured scents pumped into the auditorium on cue by young symbolist poets stationed in the far edges of the proscenium and in the balcony and using hand-held vaporizers. According to the outline Roinard provided in the programme, nine scents were used: frankincense, white violets, hyacinth, lilies, acacia, lily of the valley, syringa, orange blossom, and jasmine. Each of these odours had corresponding orchestrations of speech (specific vowel sounds), tones (original music composed by Mme Flamen de Labrély), and colours.

As a materialist feminist from the former West Berlin I have always been in support of the German Democratic Republic as a system that granted womenextensive social benefits through the law. Before German reunification, rights to apprenticeship, employment, day care, and abortion were secured for East German women. Thus, in my imagination, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied a space where gender and class equality were guaranteed—at least on paper.

In 1895, Aby Warburg drew attention to ways in which information of theatre historical significance can be gained from visual images, in an article which outlines a clear methodology for their evaluation as historical documents, based on a comparative approach in the context of the surviving documentation concerning the event under investigation as a whole, the Florentine intermedi of 1589. ‘Probably the most described theatrical production in history’, these intermedi were especially devised to embellish dramatic performances by professional commedia dell'arte actors (La Zingana and Pazzia of Isabella) and amateur players (La Pellegrina) which were intended by the Medici as the greatest attraction of the celebrations in honour of the wedding of Ferdinande I de'Medici to Christine de Lorraine, and recognized by both contemporaries and historians as a highpoint of European court festival.

In 1875 George Henry Lewes published the following analysis of William Charles Macready's acting:

Whenever he had an emotion to depict he depicted it sympathetically and not artificially; by which I mean that he felt himself to be the person, and having identified himself with the character, sought by means of the symbols of his art to express what that character felt; he did not stand outside the character and try to express its emotions by the symbols that had been employed for other characters by other actors.

On 10 March 1913, the artist, arsonist, and suffragette Mary Richardson, alias Polly Dick, a member of the militant Women's Social and Political Union, walked into London's National Gallery and took an axe to Velázquez's ‘Rokeby Venus’. Her act resulted in the closure of the National Gallery and other museums. At her trial Richardson announced: ‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.’ In 1911 Umberto Boccioni wrote to his friend Gino Severini in heady enthusiasm about the manifestos he had co-written and signed—Futurist Painting and Sculpture (January 1910), and Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (April 1910). The first featured the familiar futurist exhortation to smash the ‘cult of the past, all things old, academic pedantry’, to bear ‘bravely and proudly’ the banner of ‘madness’ with which ‘they’ try to dismiss innovators. Boccioni echoes the words of Marinetti's The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909):

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! … Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! O the joy of seeing the glorious old canvasses bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded … Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the vulnerable cities.

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.

Of cherry-wood or pressed tin, lined with red plush or gutta-percha, hand-held or mounted in a self-standing case, the stereoscope was, by the mid-1850s, ubiquitous in the Victorian parlor, where the viewing device and its attendant cards provided an inoffensive and instructive amusement. ‘The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing-room’, reported the Art Journal of 1856, ‘philosophers talk learnedly upon it; ladies are delighted with its magic representations; and children play with it.’

In the autumn of 1997 the World Bank issued ‘China 2020’, a seven-volume report on the key issues and challenges that ‘China must face over the next two decades’. The opening passage reads:

China is in the throes of two transitions: from a command economy to a market-based one and from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. So far, both transitions have been spectacultarly successful. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, with per capita incomes more than quadrupling sine 1978, achieving in two generations what took other countries centuries.

In 1986, an international symposium on Chinese theatre was held in Beijing, and for the first time the process of aesthetics in the theatrical form was debated among scholars, critics and practitioners on an international scale. Among the discussion, the three dialectic concepts of ‘false but true, empty but full and few but many’ were often referred to and applied. What are they and why are they so important that they are regarded as the guiding principles that make Chinese theatre different from its western counterparts? Mu Gong, a theatre historian from Jiangxi province, offers the following explanation:

[On the Chinese stage] a horse whip, or an oar, is merely a piece of property if it is seen on its own. But when it is seen through the performers' acting combined with the story, it not only represents the form of ‘a horse’ or ‘a boat’ on the stage, but also transforms the flat stage into a three-dimensional mountain, battlefield or river. In addition, the character's action, feelings and desires are therefore underscored. … If a real horse or a boat is used on the stage, the object itself is true, but the character and its circumstances will become false.