In this essay Jim Davis considers two examples of everyday non-theatrical performance in nineteenth-century London: hoaxes and fires. Whereas an element of hoaxing can be perceived in some contemporary performance events and in the practice of ‘invisible theatre’, usually with some ethical intention, hoaxes in early nineteenth-century London were perpetrated for the sake of creating disruption and making dupes of unsuspecting witnesses. A more visible form of disruption and spectacle was created by fires and firefighting itself, which, at least after Captain Eyre Massie Shaw took control of the London fire brigade, became a form of public performance. Although hoaxes were common in pantomime and farce, and conflagrations often strengthened the impact of sensation melodramas, the disruptive effects of extra-theatrical hoaxes and fires on everyday life created a less reassuring and more dystopian sense of the metropolis. An earlier version of this paper was originally delivered at ‘The Audience through Time’ conference at Queen Mary College, University of London, in December 2011. Jim Davis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. His his most recent books are Victorian Pantomime: a Collection of Critical Essays (2010) and Lives of the Great Shakespearian Actors: Edmund Kean (2009). He is also joint author of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 (2001).

Nearly seventy-five years after his death, Konstantin Stanislavsky remains a toweringly influential figure, and many fundamental ideas about acting can be traced back to his practice. In this article, Marc Silberschatz examines the correspondences with, and divergences from, flow theory – the theory surrounding the psychological state associated with ‘being in the zone’ – in Stanislavsky's practice. Although separated by vast differences in social, cultural, and historical context, some significant and increasing correspondences between flow theory and Stanislavsky's practice are revealed and examined. Additionally, divergences from flow theory are identified and interrogated, suggesting that Stanislavsky's reliance on fixed, repeatable performance scores and divided consciousness are direct impediments to the achievement of flow. Marc Silberschatz is a PhD candidate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is also a professional theatre director whose work has been seen in both the United States and Scotland.

An actor's training continues throughout his/her professional career, yet they rarely have the time or inclination to write in detail about their processes, when building a character, to provide documents for inquisitive peers. In this two-part article, Bella Merlin articulates the discoveries made playing Margaret in Richard III at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Summer 2012, directed by internationally acclaimed actor-director Tina Packer (co-founder of Shakespeare and Company with Kristin Linklater in 1978). Merlin highlights how the shift from teacher to actor reactivates the ‘willing vulnerability’ that she demands of her own students. She focuses on Stanislavsky's three avenues of research: on the playtext; on the world of the play and playwright; and on the self. There can be resistance by some theatre practitioners to the application of Stanislavsky's tools to Shakespeare's texts, often due to a perceived over-psychologizing. Here, Merlin challenges some of these resistances. She demonstrates that Packer's insistence on connecting voice with thought to release the imagination implicitly harnesses Shakespeare's structure with Stanislavsky's underpinnings. Packer also lays emphasis on contemporary resonance, freeing the natural voice, and the significance of Shakespeare's female characters in Richard III for awakening an audience to the consequences of violence. The journey is unsettlingly personal and startlingly global. Part I, which follows, addresses research on the text and research on the play, drawing upon history, biography, accounts of grief, and chilling footage of the Rwandan genocide. Part II, planned for the next issue, uses the immediacy of a rehearsal journal to address research on the self. Bella Merlin is an actor, writer and actor-trainer. Acting includes seasons at the National Theatre with Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint Company. Publications include The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (2007) and Acting: the Basics (2010). She is currently Professor of Acting at the University of California, Davis.

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

The proliferation of pedestrian performances since the beginning of the twenty-first century has led to an active rethinking of the defining parameters of site-based practice. Does the action of walking deterritorialize or strengthen the boundaries of site, or is the terming of ‘site’ itself redundant for these types of performance? In this article Kris Darby examines one of the most influential types of walking practice on this mode of performance, that of the dérive (‘drift’), and its subsequent adoption and renovation by arts collective Wrights & Sites. Beginning with a contextualization of ‘drifting’ within the Situationist International, this study then focuses on key terms derived from the collective's use of this type of walking in their performance work. The three types of drifting defined by Wrights & Sites – reconnaissance, group, and simultaneous – are then analyzed, illustrating how, through ‘framing’, the defining parameters of site begin to shift further. The article concludes by suggesting that Wrights & Sites’ drifting can be termed situation-specific rather than site-specific, due to its movement across multiple places. Kris Darby is a PhD student in the Drama Department of the University of Exeter, whose research concerns an expansion of the defining properties of pedestrian performance.

Since the mid-twentieth century, urban cultural policies have tended to broaden citizens’ access to cultural and arts facilities in most European cities. Italy saw its theatre infrastructure being enhanced by the teatri stabili which have emerged since the late 1940s, in developed urban contexts, and the decentralization of theatre activities during the 1970s, in the suburbs of cities as well as in small regional towns. This changed the distribution of theatregoing accessibility, but not sufficiently to make opportunities equal across the country's different geographical areas. In the present article Marco Serino discusses the decentralization of theatre in Italy, in particular as it has affected the southern Campania region, basing his argument on his own census of the venues in existence in southern Campania in 2008. Social, economic, and political issues are involved in the discussion since these always influence theatre policy and practice. Marco Serino was awarded his PhD in Sociology, Social Analysis, and Public Policies in 2010 at the University of Salerno, Italy. His research focuses on cultural and communication processes, particularly on theatre organizations and audiences.

Eugène Ionesco was born in Romania in 1909, but he died in France in 1994. The name on his birth certificate was Eugen Ionescu, yet the name on his grave in the Montparnasse cemetery is Eugène Ionesco, as he is known across the world. In this article, Octavian Saiu explores these polarities of Ionesco's destiny from the perspective of his reception in Romania, where nationalistic claims are embroiled in contention over his identity. The paradoxes of this situation are clearly illustrated by the conflict surrounding the celebration of his centenary in 2009, when Marie-France Ionesco, the writer's daughter and the trustee of the estate, banned a series of Romanian performances of Ionesco's plays planned for the occasion. Her decision reflected the traumatizing relationship Ionesco had, even beyond his grave, with what he uncompromisingly called his ‘fatherland’. Octavian Saiu is an Associate Professor at the National University of Theatre and Cinematography (NUTC) in Romania and a Guest Lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is Vice-President of the Romanian Section of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) and Director of the Eugène Ionesco–Samuel Beckett Research Centre at NUTC.

Sistren Theatre Collective has been producing theatre and working with community groups in Jamaica for the last thirty-five years. Over the last decade the company has changed its profile to include male drama specialists and social workers in its team. This has come about due to new funding arrangement with the Jamaican Ministry of National Security, which won a large grant from the Inter-American Development Bank to establish the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP). The CSJP has a community outreach component in which Sistren has been employed to run socio-drama workshops and provide counselling to residents in Kingston's ‘garrison’ communities. In this article Karina Smith compares Sistren's theatre and outreach work under the CSJP programme with the group's previous theatre productions and workshops, devised when it was the leading women's popular theatre company and Women in Development non-government organization in the Caribbean region. Karina Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary and Gender Studies in the College of the Arts at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. She has published on Sistren Theatre Collective's work in Modern Drama, Theatre Research International, and in Suzanne Diamond's Compelling Confessions: the Politics of Personal Disclosure (2011). Her monograph on the Caribbean community's oral histories of migration to Victoria is forthcoming from Breakdown Press.