As author of one of the pioneering books advocating the study of Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (1966), founder of the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre, John Russell Brown is in a uniquely authoritative position to look back over the intervening years as ‘Performance Studies’ have increasingly displaced the study of Shakespeare's plays as texts. But has this been as helpful as many, including the author, hoped, when in practice it is so often based on the second- or third-hand recreation of lost and isolated theatrical moments, and fails entirely to give a sense of the progressive experience of watching a play? John Russell Brown here argues for closer attention to what he calls the ‘secret language’ of the plays – implicit instructions to actors that are buried in the texts themselves, at a time when there was no director to encourage or impose a particular interpretation or approach. He concludes: ‘Rather than trying to describe and understand what very different people have made of the plays in very different circumstances and times, we can best study them in performance by allowing them to reflect our own lives.’ John Russell Brown's most recent books are Shakespeare Dancing (Palgrave, 2005) and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare (2008). In 2007 he was appointed Visiting Professor at University College London.

Time structures are essential to any analysis of drama or theatre performance, and in this article Jerzy Limon takes the final scene from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia as an example to show that non-semantic systems such as music gain significance in the process of stage semiosis and may denote both space and time. The scene discussed is particularly complex owing to the fact that Stoppard introduces two different time-streams simultaneously in one space. The two couples presented dance to two distinct melodies which are played at two different times, and the author explains how the playwright avoided the confusion and chaos which would have inevitably resulted if the two melodies were played on the stage simultaneously. Jerzy Limon is Professor of English at the English Institute at the University of Gdańsk. His main area of research includes the history of English drama and theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and various theoretical aspects of theatre. His most recent works, published in 2008, include a book on the theory of television theatre, Obroty przestrzeni (Moving Spaces), two chapters in books, and articles in such journals as Theatre Research International, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism, and Cahiers élisabéthains.

In this article, Christian M. Billing considers the relationship between representations of mythic narratives found on ancient pottery (primarily found at sites relating to the Greek colonies of south Italy in the fourth century BC, but also to certain vases found in Attica) and the tragic theatre of the fifth century BC. The author argues against the current resurgence in critical accounts that seek to connect such ceramics directly to performance of tragedies by the major tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Using five significant examples of what he considers to be errors of method in recent philologically inspired accounts of ancient pottery, Billing argues for a more nuanced approach to the interpretation of such artefacts – one that moves beyond an understanding of literary texts and art history towards a more performance-conscious approach, while also acknowledging that a multiplicity of spheres of artistic influence, drawn from a variety of artistic media, operated in the production and reception of such artefacts. Christian M. Billing is an academic and theatre practitioner working in the fields of ancient Athenian and early modern English and European drama. He has extensive experience as a director, designer, and actor, and has taught at a number of universities in the UK and the USA. He is currently Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull.

Ingemar Lindh's work on the principles of collective improvisation has crucial implications for the history of twentieth-century laboratory theatre. His early work with Étienne Decroux and Jerzy Grotowski contributed to the development of a unique practice that resists directorial montage, fixed scores, and choreography; and the ethical dimension that accompanies Lindh's research on collective improvisation is illuminating for a more holistic understanding of the technical and aesthetic considerations in theatre. In this article, Frank Camilleri discusses some of the key aspects of this dimension, notably the dynamics of hospitality and encounter that inform Lindh's approach and the question of responsibility in the actor's work. Frank Camilleri is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent. From 2004 to 2008 he was Academic Coordinator of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta. He is also Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project – an ongoing research laboratory that investigates the intermediary space between training and performance processes. Camilleri's work with Lindh in the mid-1990s was instrumental for the development of this research practice.

Tanika Gupta is one of the most prolific and outstanding new writers in contemporary British theatre. Born in Chiswick in 1965, she is a bilingual British Bengali who – after reading modern history at Oxford University – began her career in 1991, when her Radio 4 play, Asha, was part of the BBC Young Playwrights Festival. In 1995, her BBC film, The Rhythm of Raz, was nominated for a Children's BAFTA and the following year her film Bideshi won an award at the Bombay Short Film Festival. Meanwhile, although she made a living writing for Grange Hill and EastEnders, her play Voices on the Wind was being developed and, in 1996–98, she was Writer-in-Residence at the Soho Theatre. In 1997, A River Sutra was staged at Three Mills Island, London, and Skeleton at the Soho Theatre. In 1998, Flight, her BBC2 screenplay, won an EMMA. The Waiting Room (2000), staged by the National, won the John Whiting Award, and was followed by Sanctuary (National) and Inside Out, toured by Clean Break (both 2002). In 2003, Gupta's Fragile Land opened the new Hampstead Theatre's education space, her Asian version of Hobson's Choice was staged at the Young Vic, and she won the Asian Woman of Achievement Award. Later, she had further success with her campaigning play about the Zahid Mubarek case, Gladiator Games (Sheffield Crucible, 2005), and Sugar Mummies (Royal Court, 2006). A year later came a play for the National Youth Theatre, White Boy (Soho). What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz's ‘In Conversation with Tanika Gupta’, part of the ‘Universal Voices’ festival held at Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, Kent, in April 2007, organized by Nesta Jones.

The jihad of Uthman dan Fodio in the early ninteenth century had by 1806 established Islamic cultural and religious hegemony over the Hausa territory of present-day Northern Nigeria. In the process, Islam had succeeded in pushing indigenous religious and cultural practices such as Bori to the margins or underground. However, while most of the other indigenous forms died or became inactive and ineffectual, Bori has managed to hold its own against the persecution and cultural war waged against it by Islam, mainly because the belief in the power and ability of the spirits to influence human life which is at the centre of Bori practice was never lost. In this article, Osita Okagbue argues that marginalization has made Bori attractive to groups and individuals in Hausa society who feel themselves similarly marginalized and oppressed for articulating alternative identities and viewpoints to those of the mainstream society. He also examines how the possession performances of the Bori cult enable members to subvert and occasionally to use moments of trance and possession to invert the power relationships between oppressed groups and their oppressors. Osita Okagbue teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of African Theatres and Performances (Routledge, 2007). He is President of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) and editor of African Performance Review.

Swan Lake has a central place in the ballet repertoire. Generally seen as the ballerina's ballet, one of the greatest difficulties in presenting Swan Lake as a credible drama has been the historically marginal role played by Siegfried, the Prince. As choreographer-producers have struggled in the challenge to make the ballet work dramatically, his character has been transformed from onlooker to major influence in a series of reinterpretations of this classic work. In this article Gregory Sporton raises questions about what motivates Siegfried and why that is important for our understanding of the ballet, offering an alternative view of Siegfried's character. Gregory Sporton is Director of the Visualisation Research Unit in the Department of Art at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. His interest in Swan Lake emerges from his background as a dancer and long periods of research in the former Soviet Union during 2004–2006, when he was able to see at first hand most of the Russian productions referenced in this article. His other published work includes ethnographic accounts of dance and its place in the flow of culture.