In February 1997 a conference entitled ‘Women give voice to women’ brought together scholars from Britain, Europe and the USA to investigate the relationship between feminist theory and practice on the French stage. The starting point for our discussions was to determine how far French women playwrights of the last thirty years have contributed to remoulding what Marcelle Marini referred to as the ‘socio-symbolic space’. We wanted to explore what was new, in theatrical, political and social terms, in the large number of plays and productions by women during this period. A second question was: how useful is French feminist theory as an aid to the illumination of this work?

Although more has been written on the commedia dell'arte than on any other type of theatre, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, and opinions concerning its origins, early history, and definition are surprisingly divergent. It is evident that the term ‘commedia dell'arte’ would become virtually meaningless if it were stretched to include, without qualification, all manifestations of theatrical entertainment which feature characters representing, or deriving from, its stock types; or the full range of theatrical practises offered by the very versatile early comici d'arte, although all are of concern to commedia studies. The commedia dell'arte itself may be broadly defined as a type of professional dramatic performance associated with distinctive stock characters, that arose in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, whose evolving cultural derivatives have spread throughout Europe. Its stock types drew on a wide variety of sources, including mystery and mummers’ plays, carnival masks, street theatre and court entertainment; popular farces and erudite comedy; and have transcended the theatre to play key roles in music, dance, art and literature. The extreme complexity of its continuing interchanges with other cultural phenomena makes precise definition of the commedia dell'arte elusive, and the term itself also resists easy definition because it was coined only in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, two centuries after the type of theatre with which it is associated first came into being.

The goal of this series of articles is to examine the nature of twentieth-century civil war and civil discord in theatrical representations and the conditions of performance by listening to the words of playwrights, scholars, performers, politicians and theatre historians in America, Africa, and Europe.

In an extraordinary passage of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, the Hungarian journalist and philosopher, René Fueloep-Miller, made this observation in the 1920s on the innate theatricality of the Russian people:

If a Russian recounts an incident in company, in his political club, or even in the street, he does not for long confine himself to verbal description. Suddenly, he sends a gesture into space, like an arrow from a bow, at the same time giving a cue to another in the circle, who immediately becomes an actor in the drama. Though at first the whole thing looks like a very excited discussion, soon many emphatic gestures and words creep in and an increasing number of bystanders begin to take part in the scene. Suddenly the recital takes living form: chairs and tables are shifted with a few touches, and soon stand in a particular relation to each other and to the events being enacted. Men and things are now subject to new and different laws. Those taking no part look on in astonishment and soon become an audience, just as the story, which was at first merely related, becomes reality and attains complete actuality in the people acting and the improvised scenery … This lasts as long as the anecdote enacted, then the company at once returns to ordinary life … and the members of the circle sit smoking and talking again in their former quiet tones as if nothing had happened.

Early modern mountebanks, also known as charlatans or quacksalvers, were commercial travelling showmen associated with the sale of quack medicines and other products. They achieved wide recognition as a significant influence on the rise of professional acting, through their employment of performers to attract customers for their wares, and are frequently discussed in the context of early professional popular entertainment. Many depictions of mountebanks include commedia dell'aite costumes, but it has remained an open question whether some of their shows (as well as some of their costumes) fall within the sphere of the commedia dell'arte. Inconclusive evidence is presented by the relatively few studies which incline towards accepting a significant overlap between mountebank activity and the commedia dell'arte and clear-cut distinctions are routinely made between the repertoire of street performers, and that of the comici d'arte. Richards and Richards concede that ‘mountebank stages … may well have been the breeding grounds of many of the first regular actors’, but repeatedly emphasize the distinction ‘between performers of the trestle and those of the stage’, and are careful to dismiss mountebank stage routines as at the most ‘short playlets’. If the presently perceived lack of detailed documentation concerning mountebank entertainment is justified, then so is the cautious approach typified by Richards and Richards. On the evidence presented to date, it would appear that mountebank performances are at most distantly related to the commedia dell'arte.

My aim is to explore what kind of lesbian subjectivity is brought to life in Monique Wittig's play Le Voyage sans fin, and to what extent it fits in with Wittig's project as a whole. Is it consistent with the representational strategies at work in her fiction?

In both the play and the film of Marguerite Duras's India Song no verbal exchange is seen to take place on stage or in camera shot and all the dialogue emanates from disembodied voices which reverberate across the filmic or theatrical imagery. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sound of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals. These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. In this essay, I want to focus on the composition and the ‘enactment’ of the sound script of India Song and consider the way in which it functions as a stratum of eloquent signifying systems in the performance of this rich and poetic text. My concern will be with the ‘composite’ text of novel/play/ film and the way in which sound is evoked across the spectrum of reader, spectator and auditor, though my intention is not to suggest that the written text, the film and the play performance are interchangeable. I shall refer to the published text, Duras's own 1974 film version, and Theatr Clwyd's performance directed by Annie Castledine and Anabel Arden in 1993.

In 1986 Howard Barker abridged Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women and wrote a new ending. This version was published and staged as a collaboration between the Jacobean and the modern playwright. There are a number of differences, but also points of connection between Barker's version and Middleton's Jacobean tragedy. Middleton sets out a moral fable on the corrupting nature of desire and greed. Leantio, a clerk, falls in love with Bianca, a rich man's daughter. They elope and live in secrecy with Leantio's mother. Despite her husband's exhortations to keep herself private, Bianca is spotted by the Duke of Florence, who determines to make her his. A wealthy neighbour, the widow, Livia, aids him in this, luring Bianca and the mother to her house where Bianca is raped by the Duke. Bianca's story is mirrored by that of Isabella, who is being ‘sold’ into marriage with a rich fool and is tricked into an incestuous relationship with her uncle Hippolito. Bianca leaves her husband to become the Duke's mistress. Leantio is taken up by Livia.

Tiberio Fiorilli (1608–1694), son of the great Neapolitan actor and playwright Silvio Fiorillo, became famous in the role of ‘Scaramouche’ as the leading actor of the Théâtre Italien in Paris. In spite of his importance as a theatrical manager in France and in Italy, his life and personality have long remained a mystery. Dressed in his black suit, is how Molière depicted Scaramouche in the first verse of Le Sicilien ou l'amour peintre. Only recently has Fiorilli's theatrical career become the subject of serious investigation, and new documents are helping to clarify his image.

The charlatans of seventeenth-century Paris attracted customers to view and buy their wares by producing and participating in free theatrical performances in the open air. Some of them worked solo, at ground level or ‘mounting a bench’—hence the term ‘mountebank’. Others, however, worked with sizeable troupes of performers on large stages in busy metropolitan interchanges traversed by all strata of society. This made them public figures, among the best known in France. They worked on the same principle as commercial television: attract people, by means of some sort of entertainment, to focus their attention on one spot, and then take a break to sell them wonderful products at a very low price that will make them young, hard-bodied, and happy.

On 8 October 1990 a ceremony of remembrance took place at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui (Montreal) to commemorate the political crisis which, twenty years earlier, had shaken Quebec. The 1970 ‘October Crisis’ remains, to this day, a sensitive subject of Québécois history entirely oriented, as we know, towards the national question. The kidnapping, on 5 October 1970, of the English commercial attaché, James Richard Cross, by the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), followed on 10 October, by the kidnapping of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec Minister for Labour and Immigration, marked the climax of a movement which had been trying, since 1963, to turn the ‘peaceful revolution’ into armed insurrection. On 17 October Laporte's body was found in the boot of a car, and the terrorists were arrested before the end of the year. In exchange for Cross's liberation some were allowed to go into exile to Cuba; the others were jailed, but all were freed in the early 1980s.

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.

Though the world is aware of the political activities of the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, it might be difficult to find a better example of the relationship between a nation in a state of socio-political chaos and the arts in an African country than that of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Kenya as exemplified in Matigari:

Matigari, the main character [in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Matigari], is puzzled by a world where the producer is not the one who has the last word on what he has produced; a world where lies are rewarded and truth punished. He goes round the country asking questions about truth and justice. People who had read [Matigari] started talking about Matigari and the questions he was raising as if Matigari was a real person in life. When Dictator Moi [President of Kenya] heard that there was a Kenyan roaming around the country asking such questions, he issued orders for the man's arrest. But when the police found that he was only a character in fiction, Moi was even more angry and he issued fresh orders for the arrest of the book itself.

Ina Césaire and Simone Schwarz-Bart are among the most arresting Frenchwomen writing plays today. They are not, however, among the most studied, nor are they of ‘La Metropole’. One cannot even count them among the myriad ‘French women playwrights’, bom in Algiers, Oran, Cairo, or St. Petersburg, who now make Paris their home. Césaire and Schwarz-Bart are Antillean, Frenchwomen of colour, at this point in their lives returned from Paris to their respective islands—Martinique and Guadeloupe—after prolonged stays in the French capital, because, as Ina Césaire relates, life in Paris has simply become ‘trop méchanic’.

In 1880, the first modern editor to publish a collection of commedia dell'arte scenarios noted, not without surprise, that ‘the earliest professional actors were almost all writers as well’. ‘Almost all’ is perhaps an exaggeration. Yet the literary production of comic players, and particularly that of the second and third generation of actors, is impressive for its quantity as well as its variety. It ranges from Giovan Paolo Fabbri's Capitoli alla Carlona and Adriano Valerini's historically important essay on the beauties of Verona, to the Rime of Isabella Andreini, in which she established a dialectic connection between the art of writing and that of the theatre:

If you will read one day

my neglected verses, don't be taken in by

these feigned ardours

I am used to playing in dramatic love scenes

with such insincere passions

with lying and mock expressions.

I unfold the Muses' high furores

sometimes weeping in false sorrow

sometimes singing with false pleasure.

Contemporary women's theatre in France provides a rich corpus of plays that explore the social and psychological significance of food. Little wonder, given the deep, universal ties between women, particularly mothers, and food. As the anthropologist Carole Counihan explains:

Food is a particularly important concern and symbol for females in all cultures. Women have universal responsibility for food preparation and consumption … They are defined as nurturers and carry out this role principally throughfeeding. In addition, women themselves are food for their children during pregnancy and lactation, intensifying their identification with food and its relevance as symbol … Western women also use food as symbol of self.

In 1982 Ferdinando Taviani proposed in Il segreto della commedia dell'arte that the earliest known actresses in Italy may have been drawn from the ranks of the courtesans, the oneste meretrici, forced from Rome after the Council of Trent (1545–63) by papal reforming zeal. This hypothesis has been affirmed by several other scholars in Europe and the United States and is becoming widely accepted not just as a feasible theory but as gospel, the exclusive conduit through which women entered the western theatre.

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.

The profound influence of the commedia dell'arte on European theatre is commonly acknowledged, although it has not yet been extensively analysed. In Northern Europe some of its first traces are iconographic. There are masked Venetian characters among the paintings collected by the Danish king Christian IV. The first such masks to appear in a Danish context are three Pantaloons acting as stage hands in a court ballet which was part of Det store Bilager (‘The Great Wedding Feast’), the grandiose festivities celebrating the Crown Prince's wedding in 1634. Later, German troupes may have presented harlequinades. The first reliable accounts of Italian actors playing in Denmark feature a certain Venetian comedian-charlatan: Sebastiano di Scio, known as Harlekino, who travelled the country with a twenty-four strong entourage, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was employed as a royal comedian and physician, and furnished the Royal household with obscure medicines for obscure diseases. The combination of comedian and charlatan is, of course, typical.

In her essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous talks about bisexuality and writing. Feminist writing may be said to be truly bisexual not in the sense which does away with sexual difference thereby producing neutrality, but in the sense that male and female are both omnipresent, exchanging, intermingling, enriching each other. Freed from the constraints of conventional binary opposition, male and female are able to unite, divide, multiply in an almost endless expansion of possibilities. The celebration of difference which does not divide, which is at the heart of sexual pleasure, transfusing and transforming the whole living being, will be found in women's writing, since women's songs spring from a body which denies castration. I use the future tense, since in the same essay Cixous declares that these songs use the future tense, since these songs have not yet been written, that women must liberate themselves from the dominance of the phallus, of men's language, in order to give voice to thensensuality, their sexuality, in all its complexity; to speak in the language which existed before patriarchal dominance, the fore-language which has a multiplicity of tongues. To sing a woman's song, in the language of the body, which rejects the law of the castrating father, telling of a total sexual pleasure knowing no guilt, no boundaries, is a courageous act in a world which has invented the direst forms of punishment for such transgression.