Hanns Johst's play Schlageter is generally regarded as the most successful piece of Nazi theatre. Following its first performance in the early months of the Third Reich, it dominated German theatrical life throughout 1933 and 1934. This has traditionally been regarded as evidence of the essential conformity of the Third Reich's stage; yet since no other play achieved a similar prominence in the period, Gerwin Strobl finds that line of argument unconvincing, arguing that the success of Schlageter was due to its clever manipulation of its audience's emotions. The play was perfectly suited to the mood of many German theatregoers in 1933, betraying in its plot and characterization considerable psychological insight and a ruthless determination to exploit that insight for Nazi purposes. As such, Schlageter was the prime example of the Third Reich's ‘theatre of inner experience’, the ultimate aim of whose practitioners was to get German audiences to abandon reason and accept the irrational vision of history underlying the Nazis' ideological project. Gerwin Strobl is Lecturer in Modern German History at Cardiff University, specializing in popular perceptions and propaganda. He is the author of Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2000), has published on Shakespeare in the Third Reich in History Today (May 1997) and the Journal of Contemporary History (July 1999), and is currently writing a study of Nazi theatre.

In this essay Adrienne Scullion explores the representation of war – and in particular of the Second World War – in contemporary theatre for children, considering how the narrative and performative conventions of drama communicate ideas about the conflict to young audiences. She argues that a taxonomy identified in relation to juvenile war literature – discourses of testimony and documentary, propaganda and escapism, myth and metaphor – resonates just as significantly in drama. This proposition is investigated in readings of three recent plays – Stephen Greenhorn's King Matt (TAG, 2001), David Greig's Dr Korczak's Example (TAG, 2001), and Nicola McCartney's Lifeboat (Catherine Wheels, 2002). She proposes that all three plays make different use of the conventions of telling war stories and those of theatrical performance to represent and describe war and, thereby, to explore contemporary values and expressions of citizenship – a declared goal of public policy-making in the UK. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.

In pantomime the Dame and comics, and to a lesser extent the immortals, are positioned between the world of the audience and the world of the story, interacting with both, forming a link between the two, and constantly altering the distance thus created between audience and performance. This position allows these characters to exist both within and without the story, to comment on the story, and reflexively to draw attention to the theatricality of the pantomime event. In this article, Millie Taylor concludes that reflexivity and framing allow the pantomime to represent itself as unique, original, anarchic, and fun, and that these devices are significant in the identification of British pantomime as distinct from other types of performance. Millie Taylor worked for many years as a freelance musical director in repertory and commercial theatre and in pantomime. She is now Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Music Theatre at the University of Winchester. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Arts and Humanities in Hawaii (2005), and an extended version will appear in her forthcoming book on British pantomime. Her research has received financial support from the British Academy.

In this article, Ioana Szeman makes a case for combining micro- and macro-analyses of power relations in Theatre of the Oppressed and other community theatre work, and for borrowing methods from anthropology and performance studies – including fieldwork – in both the planning and implementation stages. It focuses on Alternative, a project carried out in a Romanian orphanage in 1997, which illustrated the dangers of treating Theatre of the Oppressed as a technique to be passed down to the marginalized. Contrary to Augusto Boal's belief that, in Theatre of the Oppressed, ‘it is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution’, in Alternative the organizers emphasized the end-product to the detriment of the process, envisioning ‘oppression’ as a static concept and the ‘oppressed’ as lacking agency. Ioana Szeman offers a sobering reminder that community theatre work sometimes may be more about the organizers' needs to find solutions than about the concerns of people in the community. In order to avoid that, she suggests that the oppressed need to be envisioned as people with agency, and local perspectives have to go hand in hand with concerns about larger power networks in a culturally sensitive application of the methods. The binary of the oppressed and oppressor becomes especially irrelevant, she argues, where totalitarianism, as in Romania, has left a legacy of nested hierarchies of power, and where a wider critique of systemic power is therefore necessary. Having gained her PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University with a dissertation on performance, marginality, ethnicity, and nationalism in Romania, Ioana Szeman has recently taken up a lecturing post at Roehampton University. She has also published in Theatre Research International.

In this article, Silvija Jestrovic introduces the notion of spatial inter-performativity to discuss theatre's relationship to actual political and cultural spaces. Focusing on the Berlin of the 1920s in performances of Brecht and Piscator, then on a street procession of the Générik Vapeur troupe that took place in Belgrade in 1994, she examines how theatrical and political spaces refer to and transform one another. Silvija Jestrovic was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, and has recently taken up an appointment in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Avant-Garde and the City.

In this article, Victoria Hunter explores the concept of the ‘here and now’ in the creation of site-specific dance performance, in response to Doreen Massey's questioning of the fixity of the concept of the ‘here and now’ during the recent RESCEN seminar on ‘Making Space’, in which she challenged the concept of a singular fixed ‘present’, suggesting instead that we exist in a constant production of ‘here and nows’ akin to ‘being in the moment’. Here the concept is applied to an analysis of the author's recent performance work created as part of a PhD investigation into the relationship between the site and the creative process in site-specific dance performance. In this context the notion of the ‘here and now’ is discussed in relation to the concept of dance embodiment informed by the site and the genius loci, or ‘spirit of place’. Victoria Hunter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Leeds, who is currently researching a PhD in site-specific dance performance.

In this article, Gwynne Edwards examines recent London productions of Lorca's Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, two great Spanish plays which, in comparison with the works of Ibsen and Chekhov, are performed relatively rarely in the United Kingdom. He argues that, because these plays are among Lorca's rural tragedies and are deeply rooted in the soil and traditions of southern Spain, their performance and translation require a sound knowledge both of that background and of Lorca's dramatic style. In this context, the two productions at the Almeida and the National Theatre are seen to be a useful guide to the pitfalls of staging Lorca's plays in a cultural environment which is very different from his own. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a specialist in Spanish theatre. Ten of his translations of Lorca's plays have been published by Methuen, and most of these have had professional productions. A number of his translations of Golden Age and South American plays have also been published and performed.