The genre commonly referred to as the ‘concert party’ remains largely neglected by scholars of popular entertainment. In this article Bernard Ince presents a new reading of this most distinctive and underrated branch of theatrical activity. The period before the First World War saw the growth of an ‘industry’ which provided seaside amusement during the summer months. During the inter-war years, however, a more sophisticated form developed whose performative characteristics drew increasingly on revue and cabaret. The period after the Second World War saw further adaptations that gave rise to the summer show, an altogether more lavish spectacle that nonetheless inherited much of the concert party ethos of earlier times. Changes in audience expectations and public holiday preferences, the catastrophe of the two world wars, and the emergence of radio and film were challenges all successfully negotiated, further underscoring the resilience and adaptability of the genre. In the wider context, the concert party not only offered a critical path to the variety stage but in the simplicity of basic form also provided a template for experimentation and innovation. The author is an independent theatre historian.

In this article Sylke Rene Meyer traces the historical derivation of tragedy as a patriarchal cultural achievement. To this end, she organizes the pertinent developments, and shows how tragedy came into being with the transition from nomadic to sedentary agrarian societies, principally through the onset of livestock farming in the Mediterranean. Tragedy in this context is the reinterpretation of pre-patriarchal myth in the mindset of this new way of life, and can be seen as developing in response to the male guilt complex in early patriarchal society, serving as a non-religious exculpation instrument and collective therapy. Until today, the dramatic form consolidates power by privileging an ideology of change (that is, drama) that individualizes conflict as an opportunity for personal growth, and in so doing, distracts from the systemic conflict that can be solved only by subverting the dominant social order. Sylke Rene Meyer is Professor of Screenwriting and Dramaturgy at the International Film School in Cologne. She works as a writer and director in theatre, film, and mixed media works, some of which have received significant awards.

Although written two centuries apart and in divergent cultures, the kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan and Shakespeare's Macbeth exhibit marked similarities (as well as differences) in plot. Here, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes some of the ways that these plays reflect (mostly male) anxieties regarding shifting patterns of gender and political power in Jacobean England and Tokugawa Japan. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition, 2015). She is also a playwright whose latest play, Ghost Light, is a contemporary fusion of Macbeth and Yotsuya Ghost Stories, in which the ghost of a Japanese-American actress returns to wreak vengeance on the husband who betrayed her. The play will be staged as an Equity Showcase in New York in Autumn 2015.

The actor-manager system remained pivotal to West End production throughout the later nineteenth century. Focusing on one actor-manager, George Alexander, and using records of his expenditure on productions during the early 1890s, Lucie Sutherland demonstrates how financial data can be used to examine evolving relationships between industry leaders and dramatic authors in this era. She argues that this kind of evidence demonstrates not only the fiscal dimension to such relationships – level of investment per production, percentage of royalties paid – but also that the data may be analyzed to ascertain the responsiveness of an actor-manager to income generated. Here, significant attention is paid to box-office revenue and expenditure for the first productions of Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, exploring the income Alexander achieved by staging Wilde's drama prior to the arrest and trials of 1895. The use of quantitative data allows for close scrutiny of the work undertaken by prominent figures in the professional theatre; familiar narratives can be contested and endorsed through engagement with this type of material. Lucie Sutherland is a Teaching Associate in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She has written on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British theatre, including regional performance cultures and the impact of increasing professional regulation (for example the emergence of an actors' union) upon commercial theatre. She is currently completing a critical biography of Alexander.

One of the most important influences on the development of Cherríe Moraga's feminist theatre was undoubtedly the work of Maria Irene Fornes, the Cuban American playwright and director. Moraga wrote the first drafts of her second play Shadow of a Man while on Fornes's residency programme at the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory in New York, and later Fornes directed the premiere at the Brava-Eureka Theatre in San Francisco (1990). The play radically restages the Chicana body through an exploration of the sexual and gendered politics of the family. Much has been written on how the family has traditionally been the stronghold of Chicana/o culture, but Shadow of a Man stages one of its most powerful criticisms, revealing how the complex kinship structures often mask male violence and sexual abuse. Using archival material and a range of critical studies, in this article Elizabeth Jacobs explores Moraga's theatre as an embodied feminist practice and as a means to displace the entrenched ideology of the family. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, as part of the 2014 International Women's Day events. Elizabeth Jacobs is the author of Mexican American Literature: the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 2006). Her articles have appeared in Comparative American Studies (2012), Journal of Adaptation and Film Studies (2009), Theatres of Thought: Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy (2008), and New Theatre Quarterly (2007). She works at Aberystwyth University.

In this article Andy Kempe discusses how a nationwide project has marked a significant step forward in improving access to the theatre for UK audiences who have hitherto felt largely excluded from theatre by mounting a number of ‘relaxed performances’. He makes particular reference to autistic spectrum disorders to illustrate how, in order to widen participation, theatres need to cater for a diverse range of individual needs. The article explores the challenges of catering for children and young people who may be, variously, under- or over-sensitive to sensory stimuli, in both the way performances are adapted and how the front-of-house is organized. A case study is offered of how one small regional theatre sought to address these challenges by giving a ‘relaxed performance’ of its annual pantomime. The impact of the production is considered as well as insights that have emerged from the enterprise. Andy Kempe is Professor of Drama Education and a Teaching Fellow of the University of Reading. His work with students of all ages and abilities has informed his numerous publications on a variety of issues in drama and arts education, including Drama, Disability, and Education (Routledge, 2012).

Due to the lingering aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe being mostly out of sight, the peripheral victims of the Fukushima disaster were no longer able to discern the boundary between the here of the safety zone and the there of the afflicted area. What ensued after this geographical unification was psychological unity in which the harmony-conscious ethics of the Japanese were excessively fortified, formulating what is often called the code of wa (harmonious integration), which implicitly coerced all to speak from hisaisha no tachiba (the standpoint of the afflicted people). Kyoko Iwaki, a doctoral student at Goldsmiths, University of London, after fourteen years as a theatre journalist in Japan, provides in this article a socio-psychological analysis on how the code of wa materialized as the unwritten law after the catastrophe, and argues how in Current Location (Genzaichi), playwright-director Okada Toshiki grapples with this code by developing a post-Fukushima aesthetic. By pertinently using the apparatus of ‘fiction’ as a guise for relieving the audience of the code, Okada develops a theatre language that voices discord in content, yet accord in form, permitting the characters to speak both from the here and the there.