Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

Council estates, otherwise known as British social housing estates, have been subject to media scrutiny since their inception, and widespread criticism of social housing remains a prominent feature of British Welfare State discourse. In recent media coverage, for example of the 2011 riots, these spaces remain central to discussions of class, economics, and crime in the UK. This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore contemporary representations of the council estate on the Royal Court stage – with a focus on narratives of ‘authenticity’. Here, two plays, Off the Endz (Agbaje, 2010) and The Westbridge (De-lahay, 2011), are studied to assess how narratives of authenticity work in theatrical representations both to reinforce and to resist popular impressions of council estate spaces. Charlotte Bell is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the urban social housing estate and the contemporary cultural economy. Katie Beswick is a Research Associate in Applied Theatre at the University of Leeds, where she has recently completed her PhD on the representation of the council estate in theatrical performance practices.

Gay Sweatshop spent twenty-two years producing plays as Britain's first openly gay professional theatre company. Their alternative and political work primarily took the form of author-driven new writing, though experiments with performer-driven work intrigued the company from its earliest cabarets to its late phase of queer solo work under Lois Weaver. In this article, Sara Freeman pinpoints Sweatshop's tenth anniversary new play festival in 1985 as the moment when the company committed to new writing as a strategy for gaining greater legitimacy as a theatre group and as a central mode to encourage gay and lesbian voices and representation. She argues that while this had been the default mode of much 1970s political theatre including Sweatshop's, as it played out in the 1980s, a new writing strategy represented a move toward institutional stability as the locus of theatrical radicalism shifted aesthetics. In this analysis, the celebration of company anniversaries and the creation of festival events provided occasions for the company to experience the success or failure of its policies. Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound. She is the co-editor of Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012) and International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2008). Her recent publications appear in Modern British Playwriting: the 1980s. Readings in Performance and Ecology, and the forthcoming volume The British Theatre Company from Fringe to Mainstream: Volume II 1980–1994.

During the period of confusion and divided loyalties that followed the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the resources of the Moscow Art Theatre were severely depleted, and its artists and staff found themselves giving barebones performances for the enlightenment of often mystified working-class audiences. By 1919 the decision was taken to split the company, with a contingent sent out on tour with the intention of rejoining the parent group for the new season. In the event, with civil war raging between the forces of the Red Army and the White Guard, this did not happen, and groups of former members of the Art Theatre worked independently in the provinces and eventually abroad. While some returned to Moscow in 1922, the ‘Prague Group of the Moscow Art Theatre’ continued to lead an independent existence, and in this article Laurence Senelick traces the events leading up to and following its creation – which caused much annoyance to Stanislavsky and confusion in the West. A frequent contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the St George medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for services to Russian art and scholarship. His latest books are Stanislavsky: a Life in Letters (Routledge) and the forthcoming Soviet Theatre: a Documentary History (Yale University Press).

R.G. Davis founded the company that became the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an experimental project of the Actors' Workshop in 1959. He left the Troupe in 1970, formed the Epic West Center in Berkeley for the study of Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre, and became a pioneering director in the United States successively of the plays of Brecht and Dario Fo, on which he wrote in the original Theatre Quarterly 40 (Autumn–Winter 1981) and in New Theatre Quarterly 8 (November 1986). In this article he traces the course of his subsequent career in creating experimental storytelling events and, via an interlude garnering academic qualifications, into the field of ecological aesthetics, which he defines as ‘a Brechtian aesthetic and ecological socialism interrogating each other within a scientific ecological conception of nature’. The present article is based on a lecture he gave in June 2013 at Stanford University.

In this article Liliane Campos links Complicite's Master and Margarita (2011) to the company's previous productions, from The Street of Crocodiles (1992) to Shun-Kin (2008). She develops a close analysis of The Master and Margarita as it was staged at the Avignon Festival in July 2012, arguing that the company's aesthetic is characterized by a tension between narrative fragmentation and visual connections. While Complicite's shows overflow with postmodernist multiplicity and division, the urge to connect these ‘shards of stories’ is a driving force in Simon McBurney's artistic direction. This dynamic is explored here both on a semantic level, as a consequence of Complicite's physical language, and on a narrative level, through the use of framing and frame-breaking devices. The article highlights the company's recurrent themes and the defining traits of its performance style. Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She has published various articles on British drama and performance, and two books about the role of science in contemporary writing and devising for the theatre.

Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), exemplary for its enlightenment and humanist ideals, assembles Jews, Christians, and Muslims in dialogue during the medieval crusades in Jerusalem. Their encounters allow them to transcend conflict, to recognize their common humanity, and to resolve their differences through dialectical discourse and group arguments. In this article Eva Urban looks closely at the representation of enlightenment in this play and examines the potential role of plays and theatre practice in developing autonomous citizenship and intercultural understanding. Particular reference is made to the 2013 Berliner Ensemble production of Nathan the Wise in relation to aesthetic debates about modern political drama. Eva Urban is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2010) and has published a number of articles on political drama and Irish studies.