Exactly one hundred years separate two notorious dramatic aristocrats: Alfred Jarry's wild Ubu and Sarah Kane's apathetic Hippolytus. Ubu is iconic of Jarry's surreal reaction to nineteenth-century positivism and, at the same time, a criticism of modernism's abstract poetics and will-less aesthetic experience. Kane's Hippolytus is a witty and macabre response to the late twentieth-century ‘logic’ of capitalism. Nevertheless, these seemingly diametrically opposed characters share one trait that binds them – spending desire. In this article Dror Harari considers these figures as conspicuous waypoints along a broader spectrum of indispensable relations between body and desire in modern theatre. He tracks certain dramaturgies of desire, as theorized and/or realized by theatre practitioners and philosophers. Starting with modernist attempts to overcome desire by likening the performer's body to a machine, he closes with the indifferent Hippolytus becoming a desiring machine. Dror Harari is senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. His recent articles have appeared in The Drama Review, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Annual. His study Self-Performance: Performance Art and the Representation of Self is forthcoming in Hebrew from Resling Publications, an Israeli academic publishing house.

Created in an American rehearsal room, exported to an English workshop, and developed in Australia, among other places, ‘headphone verbatim theatre’ – also called ‘recorded delivery’ – is a truly global genre. In this article Caroline Wake focuses on the work of two pioneering practitioners, Briton Alecky Blythe and Australian Roslyn Oades, in order to trace the form's history as well as its methods, genres, and theories. In doing so, she considers how audio technology has evolved over the past decade and how the display or disguise of headphones has affected both the production and reception of the form. She identifies three dominant genres of headphone verbatim theatre (the social crisis play, the social justice play, and the social portrait play, as well as three main performance modes – the epic, the naturalistic, and the mixed. The epic has been the most successful thus far, but the naturalistic and mixed modes are, in turn, begetting new ones. Finally, she suggests that in the same way that headphones have rejuvenated verbatim theatre, they might also reinvigorate the discourse on it by offering the opportunity to go beyond the politics of voice and visibility and to turn, instead, to listening. Caroline Wake is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines cultural responses to and representations of refugees and asylum-seekers as well as the role of testimony in law, performance, and visual culture. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as Text & Performance Quarterly, Modern Drama, and History & Memory. She is the co-editor, with Bryoni Trezise, of Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013).

Born from its usage in the Natyasastra, rasa, as both concept and experience, is notoriously difficult to define. As an experience, rasa is generated within performance but cannot be contrived. However, the conditions for its coming into being can be prepared for by both practitioner and spectator, who generate rasa together within the performance. Rooted in a deeply specific cultural context, rasa is the Indian classical contribution to the particular area of performance studies research that seeks to explore and discuss the ineffable experience of the spectator in performance. However, the concept gains traction in the understanding of and engagement with its cultural specificity, and therefore serves as a poignant example of how cultural specificity is a way through cultural barriers in performance. Scheherazaad Cooper has recently completed her PhD in practice-as-research at Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing on the contemporary Odissi Indian classical dance practitioner's cultivation of access points in performance. This article is developed from the research undertaken for her doctoral thesis, inspired and informed by Maria Shevtsova's work in the sociology of theatre and performance.

Richard Wagner's works have repeatedly been the focus of questions concerning the possibilities, limits, and nature of the director's role in opera productions, especially in Germany, and prominently at the Bayreuther Festspiele. In this article Clemens Risi discusses some recent developments in staging Wagner's operas at the Festspiele, including Katharina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2007), Hans Neuenfels's production of Lohengrin (2010), and Sebastian Baumgarten's production of Tannhäuser (2011). While all these productions could be categorized as ‘director's theatre’, they also marked new steps in the staging practice of Wagner's work, going beyond questions of the interpretation of a single piece and taking it as material for exposure in a setting of experimentation. Here Risi considers how a well-known work emerges under the conditions of a newly established situation, as in a laboratory. Currently acting as interim Chair for Theatre and Media Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Clemens Risi was previously Assistant Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Auf dem Weg zu einem italienischen Musikdrama (Tutzing, 2004), and is currently completing a book on opera in performance and preparing another monograph for the 2005 Parma Verdi Prize on performance practice in mid-nineteenth-century Italian opera.

In his essays and speeches, Harold Pinter addressed issues that are central in political and philosophical debates: national identity and the other, the ethics of responsibility, the relational nature of human rights, the politics of death. Discussing his treatment of these issues, Maria Germanou sees Pinter as a Foucauldian intellectual engaged in the politics of truth, and argues that in these texts the postmodern writer enables the political activist. Pinter subjects to scrutiny naturalized political rhetoric, discloses the affinity between meaning and power, and challenges the legitimacy of established hierarchies and their practices. His ultimate purpose is to restore ethics to politics. To this end, he places responsibility for the other at the core of his problematic in ways similar to Emmanuel Levinas, and invites western democracies to redefine ‘humanity’ and the ‘international’ community by taking into consideration accountability for those allowed to die in the name of an alleged justice. Maria Germanou is Professor in English Drama at the University of Athens. She has published in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Gramma, and elsewhere. Since 2008 she has been co-editor of Synthesis, an e-journal of comparative literature.

He production of Haifa / haifa, performed in winter 2011 at the Haifa University Theatre, based on Tamar Berger's essay Rooftop, Cellar, 1, 100 Stairs and Four-Way Exposure, directed by Helit Michaeli with Jewish and Arabic theatre students, was a piece of devised or ‘post-dramatic’ theatre. The title of the play hints at its general stance, not only by using both languages, Hebrew and Arabic (here represented by italic caps), but also by replacing the hyphen, symbolizing co-existence, with an unsettled slash. In this article Dorit Yerushalmi examines the various layers of Haifa / haifa: first, the literary context of Berger's essay; second, the participants‘ voices which reflect the whirlpool of interpersonal relationships in which they found themselves when confronted with conflicting narratives; and finally, the theatrical means of expression which comprise what, following Emmanuel Levinas, she terms the ‘poetics of proximity’. As a case study, the Haifa / haifa project illustrates how an interventionist work in a university theatre may provide a shared space in which a new understanding of dialogical practice can be constructed – dialogue not merely as a meeting of equals but also (and mainly) a call for responsibility for the ongoing suffering of the others among ‘us’. Dorit Yerushalmi is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Haifa. Her research interests include Hebrew-Israeli theatre history, theatre and gender, theatre and pedagogy, and interventionist theatre.

Young Romanian theatre artists are very concerned to address issues from the recent past and in using collaborative art to educational and therapeutic ends. The implications of the increased ethical consciousness in their work is addressed here by Cristina Modreanu, who focuses on the productions of directors Gianina Cӑrbunariu and David Schwartz. She analyzes the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary work against the backdrop of post-Communist Romanian society and in a global context, as well as the dynamics connecting the new wave of Romanian theatre to internationall tendencies in contemporary art, as observed by authors such as Jaques Rancière and Claire Bishop. Cristina Modreanu's doctorate on Romanian theatre after 1989 is from Bucharest University of Theatre and Film, and she has also developed the subject in lectures at Tel Aviv University and Plymouth University. A Fulbright alumna and former Visiting Scholar at New York University, Performance Studies Department, Modreanu currently lectures in Contemporary Performance at Bucharest University. Her publications include articles on Romanian and Eastern European theatre for journals such as Theater, Theater der Zeit, and Alternatives Théâtrales, and for the anthology Romania after 2000: Five New Plays, edited by Martin E. Segal.