While the dialogical relationship between the early twentieth-century British theatre and the rise of socialism is well documented, analysis has tended to focus on the role of the playwright in the dissemination of socialist ideas. As a contrast, in this article Philippa Burt examines the directorial work of Harley Granville Barker, arguing that his plans for a permanent ensemble company were rooted in his position as a member of the Fabian Society. With reference to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Maria Shevtsova's development of it in reference to the theatre, this article identifies a correlation between Barker's political and artistic approaches through extrapolating the central tenets of his theory on ensemble theatre and analyzing them alongside the central tenets of Fabianism. Philippa Burt is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. This article is developed from a paper presented at the conference on ‘Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the University of Lancaster in July 2011.

The only collection of commedia dell'arte scenarios to have been published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of the actor-manager Flaminio Scala, in 1611. This can serve, among other things, as a primary source of information about the style of acting in commedia dell'arte performance in its golden age, from 1570 to 1630. While English drama of the same period provides us, in the main, with only the words the actors were to have spoken, the Scala collection rarely provides us with these, but rather, with a wealth of descriptions of actions and emotions. These descriptions enable us to make inferences about the style in which they were acted – that is, about the particular way in which the stories the actors presented were said, performed, or expressed. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theatre, Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published on commedia dell'arte in Viator, Renaissance Drama, and Text and Performance Quarterly, and previously in New Theatre Quarterly on Stanislavsky (NTQ 8), on theatre in its historic moment (NTQ 23), and on John Cage (NTQ 41).

For over half a century the Italian Nobel playwright and performer Dario Fo (b. 1926) developed a theatre that challenged the authority of hegemonic culture, while promoting the validity and dignity of folk and popular cultures. In his satire of the Catholic Church, Fo presents the paternalistic God the Father as an instrument of suppression, while showing Jesus as being closer to the hearts of the folk. His references to apocryphal gospels – the gospels of early Christianity that were rejected by the Roman Church – play into this schema. In two of his plays, First Miracle of the Christ Child (from Tale of a Tiger and Other Stories) and Johan Padan Discovers America, Fo borrows elements from various apocryphal texts as a basis to underscore his father/son dichotomy, and to contest hegemonic dominance. At the same time, he presents a human Jesus who is more akin to the Jesus of certain apocrypha than to official gospels. Antonio Scuderi is Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri, where he founded the Italian programme. His interdisciplinary articles on Italian performance traditions have been published in leading journals of theatre, folklore and literary studies, and in essays for books. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and co-editor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition (Southern Illinois UP, 2000). His latest book, Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination (Lexington Books, 2011), examines the influence of concepts derived from folk culture, anthropology, and Gramscian Marxism on the development of Fo's theatrical praxis.

Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) was a filmmaker, theatre director, and performance artist. In his Hamlet at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich in 2001 – his only staging of a classic – Schlingensief deployed the strategies of intervention typical of his whole work. In this article Thomas Irmer focuses on the actors' troupe in the play, performed by former neo-Nazis. Schlingensief was asking whether an audience would accept the reintegration of people who were determined to leave this extremist group with the support of the German government. At the same time, Schlingensief referred to a historical performance of Hamlet by Gustaf Gründgens, whose career in Nazi and post-war Germany is played in counterpoint against the neo-Nazi outsiders potentially to be reintegrated. Schlingensief's ambivalence here challenged ready-made opinions about overlap between political and aesthetic experience. Thomas Irmer is a scholar, theatre critic, and co-director of four documentary films on theatre, including Die Bühnenrepublik: Theatre in the GDR (2003) and Heiner Müller: a Biographical Portrait (2009). He teaches American theatre at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is a regular contributor to Theater Heute, editor of the book Castorf's Volksbühne (2003), and author of the forthcoming Life and Times of Andrzej T. Wirth.

The Craiova International Shakespeare Festival has been a major touchstone in Europe for theatre artists, theatregoers, and scholars for nearly two decades. This overview briefly situates the Festival historically, indicating the ideals and perspectives developed for it by its founder Emil Boroghina, former director of the National Theatre of Craiova. It identifies as well a number of the Festival's many highlights over the years, Romanian as well as international, and focuses on examples from the 2012 programme, including Silviu Purcarte's The Tempest and Robert Wilson's Shakespeare's Sonnets performed by the Berliner Ensemble. Attention is drawn to the presence at the successive editions of the Festival of productions directed by Purcarete, who established his career at the National Theatre of Craiova, to which Boroghina had invited him, and who won international fame after performances of his Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival. Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Taryn Storey believes that a series of letters recently discovered in the archive of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) makes it important that we reassess the genesis of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Dating from November 1952, the correspondence between George Devine and William Emrys Williams, the Secretary General of the ACGB, offers an insight into a professional and personal relationship that was to have a profound influence on the emerging Arts Council policy for drama. Storey makes the case that in 1953 Devine not only shaped his Royal Court proposal to fit the priorities of the ACGB Drama Panel, but that Devine and senior members of the ACGB then collaborated to ensure that the proposal became a key part of Arts Council strategic planning. Furthermore, she puts forward the argument that the relationship between Devine and Williams was instrumental to new writing and innovation becoming central to the future rationale for state subsidy to the theatre. Taryn Storey is a doctoral student at the University of Reading. Her PhD thesis examines the relationship between practice and policy in the development of new writing in post-war British theatre, and forms part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Giving Voice to the Nation: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Development of Theatre and Performance in Britain 1945–1995’, a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A strong case can be made against world theatre history as a subject of scholarly study. This paper analyzes seven arguments that can be levelled against world theatre history as an academic subject. It then offers rebuttals to each of these arguments. In so doing, it seeks not only to establish the legitimacy of world theatre history as a subject of study, but also to clarify the methodologies and the goals of such study. Steve Tillis received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at St Mary's College of California. He has previously published articles on world theatre history in Asian Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Survey.

Report on the PAZZ Performing Arts Festival, held in Oldenburg, Germany, 20–29 April 2012.

Tribute to the long-serving Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, who died on 30 January 2012.