The death on 1 July 2004 of the playwright Peter Barnes robbed the British theatre of one of its most individual and richly imaginative yet shamefully neglected writers. Although his best known work for the theatre – which included The Ruling Classes, The Bewitched, Laughter, Red Noses, and Dreaming – won widespread admiration, and his later radio and television work brought him before a wider public, he remained a theatrical outsider, his plays transcending the conventions of critical labels and movements – the singe discernible influence that of Ben Jonson, whose eccentric genius he championed throughout his life. Here we include three personal tributes: the oration delivered at Barnes's funeral by the stage and screen actor Alan Rickman; recollections from the avant-garde director Charles Marowitz of his association with Barnes's early career at the Traverse and his own Open Space Theatre in the 'sixties; and the impressions of a personal friend, the lecturer and writer Elaine Turner. An analytical assessent of Peter Barnes's work will appear in a later issue.

The death on 1 July 2004 of the playwright Peter Barnes robbed the British theatre of one of its most individual and richly imaginative yet shamefully neglected writers. Although his best known work for the theatre – which included The Ruling Classes, The Bewitched, Laughter, Red Noses, and Dreaming – won widespread admiration, and his later radio and television work brought him before a wider public, he remained a theatrical outsider, his plays transcending the conventions of critical labels and movements – the singe discernible influence that of Ben Jonson, whose eccentric genius he championed throughout his life. Here we include three personal tributes: the oration delivered at Barnes's funeral by the stage and screen actor Alan Rickman; recollections from the avant-garde director Charles Marowitz of his association with Barnes's early career at the Traverse and his own Open Space Theatre in the 'sixties; and the impressions of a personal friend, the lecturer and writer Elaine Turner. An analytical assessent of Peter Barnes's work will appear in a later issue.

The death on 1 July 2004 of the playwright Peter Barnes robbed the British theatre of one of its most individual and richly imaginative yet shamefully neglected writers. Although his best known work for the theatre – which included The Ruling Classes, The Bewitched, Laughter, Red Noses, and Dreaming – won widespread admiration, and his later radio and television work brought him before a wider public, he remained a theatrical outsider, his plays transcending the conventions of critical labels and movements – the singe discernible influence that of Ben Jonson, whose eccentric genius he championed throughout his life. Here we include three personal tributes: the oration delivered at Barnes's funeral by the stage and screen actor Alan Rickman; recollections from the avant-garde director Charles Marowitz of his association with Barnes's early career at the Traverse and his own Open Space Theatre in the 'sixties; and the impressions of a personal friend, the lecturer and writer Elaine Turner. An analytical assessent of Peter Barnes's work will appear in a later issue.

It is not yet ten years since Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking reached the stage of the Royal Court, during its West End exile in 1996; yet the play has already become, with Sarah Kane's Blasted, identified as central to the emergence of so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. While Mark Ravenhill recognized the influence of such writers as Martin Crimp and David Mamet, it was only recently, during a discussion over coffee about a possible screenplay, that he began to consider the effects of both private and public events of 1993 upon his emergence as a writer – the death of a partner, and the infamous murder of a child by other children. In the following article he identifies recurrent concerns in his first three plays which he now sees as a working-out of his responses to a year which was crucial not only to his own personal narrative, but to others for whom the James Bulger murder epitomized all the worst aspects of a society that the Thatcherites claimed no longer to exist. Among Mark Ravenhill's more recent plays have been Mother Clap's Molly House, which transferred from the National Theatre to the Aldwych in 2002, and Totally Over You, written for the 2003 Shell Connections youth theatre season at the National. This article was first presented as the Marjorie Francis Lecture at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, on 5 May 2004.

Many of Copeau's students and colleagues in the first half of the twentieth century used a specific vocabulary to describe successful performance. The performer was ‘in a trance’, or ‘possessed’, or in an ‘altered state of being’. Decroux spoke of ‘evicting the tenant from the apartment so that God could come to live there’. For Copeau and others, the mask was an important tool in the discovery of this optimum state. In this article, Thomas Leabhart suggests that the ideas of the American theatre theoretician David Cole might help us to explore what this language means in terms of shamanic voyages. Thomas Leabhart is Resident Artist and Professor of Theatre at Pomona College in California, editor of Mime Journal, and author of Modern and Post-Modern Mime (Macmillan, 1999). He is also a member of the artistic staff of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and teaches workshops and performs internationally. Leabhart studied with Etienne Decroux from 1968 to 1972, and served as his teaching assistant and translator.

Aeschylus, father of Greek tragedy, was also the first to realize the potential of drama taking place ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – a change from his earlier plays which is quite clear from the Oresteia onwards; and although the Elizabethan theatre was unconcerned with the literal representation of place, exits and entrances were no less crucial to its dramaturgy. Along with the proscenium arch came the stage doors actors fought hard to preserve until the nineteenth century, when first the box set and then the dominance of naturalism required doors to be literalized – as essential for slamming in Ibsen as for the complex avoidance strategies of a Feydeau farce. In the following article, Arnold Aronson discusses the role of the door, actual, assumed, and iconic, in world theatre – and takes a lateral look at its significance in the TV sitcom. The author is Professor of Theatre at Columbia University in New York, and author of American Avant-Garde Theatre: a History (Routledge, 2000), American Set Design (TCG, 1985), and The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (UMI Research Press, 1981). Arnold Aronson served as President of the International Jury for the Prague Quadrennial in 1991 and 1999, and will be Commissioner General of the 2007 Quadrennial. A version of this essay was presented at Brown University at the conference held in 2003 in honour of Don B. Wilmeth.

Lev Dodin has broken numerous boundaries with the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg, the company he has directed since 1983. Their collective devising, explorations, and discoveries for a repertory theatre based on the long-term development of its actors and the change, over time, of its productions make Dodin and the Maly unique on the international stage. Maria Shevtsova, whose recently published book Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004) closely follows the company's work, here details Dodin's direction of opera, which, she argues, is inextricable from his approach to the theatre as such. Her discussion refers to opera productions which feature in her book, but she pays particular attention to Salomé and The Demon which, staged in 2003, could not be included in it. She also indicates Dodin's relation to such directors of opera as Strehler and Sellars. This article is a revised version of her keynote address at the FIRT/IFTR Annual Conference held in May 2004 in St Petersburg on the theme ‘The Director in the Theatre World’. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths' College, University of London.

The explosion of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre that dominated the British stage in the 'nineties has had both vocal champions and detractors. Here, Ken Urban examines the emergence of this kind of theatre within the cultural context of ‘cool Britannia’ and suggests that the plays of writers such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane explore the possibilities of cruelty and nihilism as a means of countering cynicism and challenging mainstream morality's interpretation of the world. Ken Urban is a playwright and director, whose plays The Female Terrorist Project and I [hearts] KANT are currently being produced by the Committee Theatre Company in New York City. His play about the first US Secretary of Defense, The Absence of Weather, will premiere in Los Angeles at Moving Arts Theatre Company, which has named it the winner of its national new play award. At the request of the Sarah Kane Estate, Urban directed the New York premiere of her play Cleansed. He teaches Modern Drama and Creative Writing in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. An early version of this article was first presented at the ‘In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s’ conference at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2002.

A recent preoccupation with space and place has drawn together theorists and workers in a wide range of disciplines, including human geographers, archaeologists, architects, cartographers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, poets, novelists – and theatre practitioners. There are therefore a range of lenses, a range of vocabularies, through which site-specific theatre and performance can be considered. In this article, Cathy Turner focuses on Mike Pearson's descriptions of site-specific work, particularly his involvement with archaeology, before proposing that we might find a useful, complementary vocabulary within psychoanalytic theories of object relations. She refers to performances by Lone Twin and to her own work with site-specific company Wrights & Sites, who created An Exeter Mis-Guide and A Courtauld Mis-Guide in 2003. Cathy Turner has produced a number of site-specific ‘mis-guided walks’, tours, and performances in her work with Wrights & Sites since 1998. She recently completed a Research Fellowship at Exeter University, investigating writing processes in contemporary performance, including site-specific work. She is now a Teaching Fellow at Exeter University and an Associate Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts.

Personal memories – and lapses of memory – two months after a unique event arranged by Richard Gough and the Centre for Performance Research for the SCUDD Annual Conference at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, on 3 April 2004.