The death of Harold Pinter on 24 December 2008, at the age of seventy-eight, has prompted an inevitable slew of respectful obituaries, and the facts about his life and opinions are available in plenty. Here, we print two personal recollections of Pinter's early years – from Charles Marowitz, who, as an editor of Encore magazine, saw The Birthday Party into print in 1959 while the play was still enduring critical scorn, and Simon Trussler, co-editor of NTQ, who published one of the first studies of Pinter's plays, and, with Marowitz, edited Theatre at Work (Methuen, 1967), which included the earliest lengthy interview with the playwright.

Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance, representing an Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British, and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social, and cultural), their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John's case is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry, and prose. Like Britain's most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics to represent universal themes and to centralize black women's experiences. With subject matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing, and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets, including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lennie James, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams. She is the editor of Hidden Gems (London: Oberon Books, 2008), a collection of plays by black British dramatists.

Histories of mime largely overlook one of the most remarkable theatrical phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the ballet-pantomime. In contrast, it is widely discussed in dance history circles, as if there were a tacit understanding that only one half of this hyphenated art mattered: the ballet rather than the pantomime. This article explores the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices. Through the works of Noverre particularly (since Decroux declares himself an admirer), but with reference also to other famous and less famous eighteenth-century choreographers and dancers, Edward Nye discusses five aspects of mime: use of the body, mime and dance, mime and language, objective and subjective mime, and pedagogy. He finds differences as well as similarities between modern and eighteenth-century mime, but overall argues that there is no reason to exclude the ballet-pantomime from histories of mime. 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 Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000), and of dance, in Danse et littérature; sur quel pied danser? (ed., Rodopi, 2003).

One of Russia's foremost theatre directors, Valery Fokin graduated from the Shchukin School at the Vakhtangov theatre in Moscow. At the Sovremennik and Yermolova theatres, of which he was the artistic director, he staged a wide repertoire that included contemporary writers (Mikhail Roshchin, Aleksandr Vampilov, Viktor Rozov), Soviet classics (Gorky), Russian classics (Gogol, Dostoevsky), and, from the international arena, Nabokov and Albee. He taught at the renowned school GITIS from 1975 to 1979 and in Krakow and Tokyo in 1993 and 1994. He has increasingly directed abroad, including Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea. In this article Maria Shevtsova focuses on his most recent productions at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, where he has become a St Petersburg director while maintaining his professional links at the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow, which he founded in 1991 – aptly, since it is with Meyerhold that Fokin's name is most closely connected. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and author of Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004).

In 1936 Joan Littlewood staged Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century play, Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well); in 1945 Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden; and in 1958 Fernando de Rojas's sixteenth-century La Celestina. There were also plans to produce Lorca's Blood Wedding in 1948. The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each. Gwynne Edwards is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays, have been published by Methuen, and many have been given professional productions. He has recently completed the libretto of an opera on the last days of Dylan Thomas.

In this article, Jung-Soon Shim indicates how Han Tae-Sook transforms Lady Macbeth's subconscious into an interculturally emotional space in which the Christian concept of guilt and the Korean ethos of Han intersect. In this way, the director conducts an intercultural dialogue, negotiating the Western world view in Shakespeare's Macbeth together with the traditional Confucian-shamanistic world view to be found in Korea. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, currently President of the Korean Theatre Studies Association (KTSA), and a founding member and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT). Her numerous books include Twenty-First Century Korean Women Theatre Directors (2004).

The coinings of ‘verbatim theatre’ and the ‘testimony play’ have added new factors to any consideration of documentary drama. It is a form that has been proliferating recently, whether in enacted judgements of public policy – privatization of the railways in David Hare's The Permanent Way, the invasion of Iraq in Called to Account at the Tricycle – or in exploring the ‘truth’ about more private issues. In the following article, Stuart Young questions whether the form is appropriate to the discovery of such ‘truth’, but finds that two recent works in the genre, Aalst and Taking Care of Baby, have effected a more complex and reflexive intervention by emphasizing the process of writing or reporting, thereby drawing attention to the methods of construction in documentary theatre and to the problematic issues inherent in those methods. Stuart Young is Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Theatre Studies programme at the University of Otago. He has published on Chekhov in performance abroad and rewritings of the plays, New Zealand drama, and gay and queer theatre, and also translates Russian and French drama. He is currently working on a documentary theatre project on family violence in New Zealand.

Arthur Schnitzler's cycle of sexual permutations in fin de siècle Vienna has always been prone to problems of translation – not least of its title, properly in German Reigen, but often miscalled La Ronde, after Max Ophüls's film version of 1950. But its problems for translators also derive from the cultural specificity of its time and place, and in this article Heidi Zojer first examines how its numerous English translators have tried to overcome the difficulties the play presents, illustrating from a cross-section of versions examples of its resistance to easy translation, whether ‘faithful’ or colloquial. She concludes that freer adaptations such as David Hare's The Blue Room (1998) have in fact been truer to the spirit of Schnitzler's play – while perhaps truest of all has been Carlo Gébler's complete rewriting, in Ten Rounds (1999), which ‘translated’ the play to contemporary Belfast during the years of the peace process. Heidi Zojer was awarded her D. Phil. from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in 1999. From 2000 to 2002 she was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and since then has been teaching at University College Dublin.