Nikolai Evreinov (1870–1953) was a Russian playwright, director, and theorist of the theatre who played a leading part in the modernist movement of Russian theatre. Evreinov's 1911 monodrama The Theatre of the Soul(V kulisakh dushi) was staged by the Crooked Mirror theatre in St Petersburg in 1912. It was also performed in London (1915) and Rome (1929), and inspired Man Ray to create his aerograph The Theatre of the Soul (1917). In this article Alexandra Smith links Evreinov's play to Russian modernist thought shaped by the atmosphere of crisis associated with the Russo–Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that Edith Craig's production of Evreinov's play suggests that the philosophy of theatricalization of everyday life might enable modern subjects to overcome the fragmentation of modern society. Craig's use of the montage-like techniques of Evreinov's play prefigures cinematographic experiments of the 1920s and Marinetti's notion of synthetic theatre. Alexandra Smith is a Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

In this article, Michael Goron examines the working lives of the ‘refined girls’ employed in what was popularly referred to as the ‘D'Oyly Carte Boarding School’ – the working environment in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company of the 1880s and 1890s, in which backstage gender segregation was strictly enforced, and where a patriarchal management personally regulated the private behaviour of female performers. Here, the attempted ‘gentrification’ of the West End theatrical milieu in the later nineteenth century was transposed by Richard D'Oyly Carte to the popular musical stage. Just as ‘unwholesome’ elements of late-nineteenth-century burlesque were absent from both the content and presentation of comic opera at the Savoy, so the ‘respectability’ of its female performers, offstage as well as on, was actively promoted to forestall middle-class antitheatrical prejudice. The working lives of these performers helped to create an image of theatrical respectability which transformed public perceptions of musical theatre in the final decades of the Victorian era. Michael Goron is a PhD student and part-time Associate Lecturer at Winchester and Southampton Solent Universities.

Steven Berkoff has remained a polarizing and influential figure in British theatre for almost forty years, yet his work has received scant critical attention despite its widespread imitation and regular appearance on British stages. In this article, Jon Foley Sherman identifies choral movement as a key element of Berkoff's signature aesthetic of exaggerated, precise, and violent movement and language. Tracing a trajectory from his 1971 experiments with Agamemnon to his direction of Coriolanus, this article analyzes the uses to which choral movement has been put, and reveals a startling political development in Berkoff's work that belies the consistency of his chorus's manner of moving. His commitment to a particular kind of ensemble performance not only altered the political valences of his source texts, it eventually resulted in a stark assessment of self-government that is rendered more problematic by Berkoff's deployment of polyracial casts. Jon Foley Sherman is a visiting assistant professor at Beloit College; he recently earned a PhD in theatre and drama at Northwestern University, where his dissertation proposed a phenomenology of stage presence in contemporary performance. One of Jacques Lecoq's last students, he is also the artistic director of Sprung Movement Theatre.

Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral worked for a number of years with Gardzienice before founding Teatr Pieéń Kozła – Song of the Goat Theatre – in Wrocław in 1996. The conversation that follows took place on 22 June 2009, during Song of the Goat's run of Macbeth, their most recent production. Created in tandem with the Year of Grotowski theatre festival, the ‘World as a Place of Truth’ held in Wrocław on 13–30 June 2009, it was one of a series of meetings, presentations, and performances organized by Joanna Klass of Arden 2 for the US Artists Initiative, a project established in partnership with the Grotowski Institute and the Center for International Theatre Development. Macbeth will be performed at the Barbican Centre in London as part of Song of the Goat's two-month-long British tour of this production in October and November 2010, accompanied by workshops and demonstrations. Its itinerary is Eastleigh (4–9 October), Birmingham (11–15 October), Cambridge (18–23 October), Manchester Metropolitan University (25–30 October), London (3–20 November), and Brighton (21–26 November). This conversation about some of the principles of the company's work was led by Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In this article Anna Porubcansky discusses the work of Song of the Goat Theatre not only in its artistic practice, but as a life practice. Based in Wrocław in Poland, the group continues a Polish tradition of experimental theatre practice as seen in the work of Juliusz Osterwa, Jerzy Grotowski, and Włodzimierz Staniewski. A fundamental influence on Song of the Goat has been the belief in Buddhism of its co-founders Grzegorz Bral and Anna Zubrzycki, which has shaped a performance practice rooted in the principles of interconnection and compassion. The group focuses its work on ‘coordination’, an approach that seeks to create a profound sense of harmony within and between each actor and every element of his or her work through training, improvising, and research on diverse songs, dances, myths, and rituals. Maintaining connection to the world through this material, Bral and Zubrzycki extend the group's artistic work through social projects such as the Brave Festival, which celebrates lost and dying cultural traditions in an attempt to create a performance practice that is actively integrated with the social world. Few academic publications are available on Song of the Goat, and this article draws on three years of extensive fieldwork with the company, utilizing interviews and personal observations of training, rehearsals, expeditions, and performance development for its most recent production, Macbeth. Anna Porubcansky is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Drama at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The television studio play is often perceived as a somewhat compromised, problematic mode in which spatial and technological constraints inhibit the signifying and aesthetic capacity of dramatic texts. Leah Panos examines the function of the studio in the 1970s television dramas of socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths, and argues that the established verbal and visual conventions of the studio play, in its confined and ‘alienated’ space, connect with and reinforce various aspects of Griffiths's particular approach and agenda. As well as suggesting ways in which the idealist, theoretical focus of the intellectual New Left is reflexively replicated within the studio, Panos explores how the ‘intimate’ visual language of the television studio allows Griffiths to create a ‘humanized’ Marxist discourse through which he examines dialectically his dramatic characters' experiences, ideas, morality, and political objectives. Leah Panos recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Dramatizing New Left Contradictions: Television Texts of Ken Loach, Jim Allen, and Trevor Griffiths’, at the University of Reading and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, which runs from July 2010 to March 2014.

The Golden Mask Performing Arts Festival, established in 1994, held each spring in venues throughout Moscow, features the best productions of the previous season from all performing arts. Maria Shevtsova reports on the edition of 2010.

The Shaw Festival, held annually in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, highlights plays from or about Shaw's lifetime. Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin, who teach at York University in Toronto, here report on the 2009 festival.

An overview of an ‘event’ which has become an indispensable element of London's theatre life, with a closer look at productions of 2009–10.

As Noah Birksted-Breen, founder of Sputnik Theatre Company ([email protected]), starts planning the second Russian Theatre Festival in mid-2011, he looks back on why he founded the festival, what to look out for in new Russian drama, why he chose this year's plays, and what comes next. The first festival was held at the Soho Theatre, London, 1–4 February 2010.