Little attention has been paid to the fact that Grotowski's first tour abroad with the Laboratory Theatre was to the Scandinavian countries rather than to Paris, as is often imagined. In this article, Franco Perrelli focuses on the responses of critics, especially in Sweden, to performances of The Constant Prince and to the seminars and other discussions accompanying the tour. He thus provides a comprehensive account of the impact made by Grotowski and his actors in their first encounter with spectators outside Poland. A specialist in Scandinavian theatre, Franco Perrelli is Chair of Performing Arts and Head of the Doctoral School in the Department of Art, Music, Theatre and Cinema (DAMS) at the University of Turin. His books include Echi nordici di grandi attori italiani (2004), La seconda creazione. Fondamenti della regia teatrale (2005), I maestri della ricerca teatrale. Il Living, Grotowki, Barba e Brook (2007), and Strindberg: la scrittura e la scena (2009).

In this article Tom Cornford examines the policy of extending and adapting the permanent stage of Shakespeare's Globe for each new production, as pursued by Dominic Dromgoole since the beginning of his tenure as Artistic Director in 2006. The article responds initially to John Russell Brown's equation in NTQ 102 of a particular kind of ‘intimate’ acting with ‘small theatres’. Cornford resists this conflation of acting and building, seeing in it a tendency to obscure both the role of reconstructed theatres to challenge contemporary notions of the ‘rightness’ of theatre spaces and the role of directors and actors to convert their apparent problems into opportunities. He explores the transformation of the Globe since 2006, using interviews given by Dromgoole and the directors working with the Globe's research team to critique the theory underpinning the ‘permanently temporary’ alterations to the theatre, and takes the evidence of performances to examine their use of the space in practice. Cornford offers a selection of staging solutions to the apparent ‘problems’ identified by Dromgoole and his team, and proposes an alternative model of reconstruction: not the rebuilding of the theatre, but the constant reviewing of theatre practice, including training. Tom Cornford is a freelance director and teacher of acting for the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota BFA Program, the Actors' Centre in London, and Globe Education at Shakespeare's Globe. He was, until recently, Artist in Residence at the CAPITAL Centre in the University of Warwick, where he is undertaking PhD research.

Although better known as a playwright and film-maker, David Mamet started his artistic career as a teacher of acting. In this essay Christophe Collard contextualizes the influences, evaluates the implications, and criticizes some of the implementations of his ‘Practical Aesthetics’ by bridging the divide between Mamet's aesthetic theory and its concretization in practice. Often mistaken for a disingenuous appropriation of the so-called ‘Stanislavsky System’, Mamet's derived ‘Method’ arguably is more functional than original. Nevertheless, Collard argues that his confusion between various interpretations of these precepts is deliberate and serves primarily a reflexive purpose, as illustrated here with an analysis of Mamet's rehearsal play A Life in the Theatre. Christophe Collard works as a research fellow in American theatre and drama at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels), where he recently completed a doctorate about media and genre crossings in the work of David Mamet.

The conversation below is a follow-up to Christopher Bigsby's interview with Amiri Baraka, published in Theatre Quarterly three decades ago, in 1978. It was recorded in the artist's backstage room in Katowice, Poland, immediately after a moving performance of the Amiri Baraka Speech Quartet in the Hipnoza Jazz Club in Katowice, during the ‘Ars Cameralis Silesiae Superioris’ Festival in 2009. The interlocutors were accompanied by a leading jazz pianist, Dave Burrell, and an excellent double bass player, William Parker. The interview, originally carried out for the Er(r)go: Journal of Theory, Culture and Literary Studies, was possible thanks to the help and encouragement of one of the most inspiring Polish contemporary poets, Bartek Majzel, an unswerving propagator of culture in Silesia and throughout Poland. Paweł Jędrzejko is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is the author of Liquidity and Existence: the Experience of the Land and the Sea in Herman Melville's Thought (Sosnowiec-Katowice-Zabrze: BananaArt.Pl/ExMachina/MStudio, 2008). He is also a co-founder and co-editor of the Review of International American Studies and regularly works with Er(r)go Quarterly.

Sydney-based Company B's 2008 season included The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles's Antigone in Irish poet Seamus Heaney's translation. This article shows how the production conveyed notions of war, social upheaval, displacement, and exile that are relevant to contemporary Australian spectators. With its ethnic and racial diversity, and one overt reference to the plight of indigenous people under colonial rule and its legacy, the production confirmed that the emotional resonances in this staging of Antigone reflect and yet transcend the contemporary Australian situation; and Peta Tait here argues that the production contributed to spectators' understanding of the emotions underlying contemporary political debates. Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University. Her recent publications include Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (Routledge, 2005) and Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces (Ashgate, 2002). She has published widely on theatre, drama, circus performance, and gender identity, and is co-editor (with Liz Schafer) of the anthology Australian Women's Drama: Texts and Feminisms (Currency Press, 1997).

Can retro media make us relive the virtual from digital media? Following McLuhan's thesis that the proper characteristics of a medium are revealed through remediation, it could well be that retro media re-enacting digital media can make explicit what the concept ‘virtual’ entails. Two recent works analyzed in this article take as their starting point antique theatrical techniques (the ballet pulley, the panorama) to evoke optical illusions, not to stage another illusion but for other purposes. Both works, which have no actual connection with cyberspace, include non-narrative interplay with antiquated technological installations that generate a challenging experience for the contemporary spectator in a digital era. The performance-installation I / II / III / IIII by Kris Verdonck stages a repetition in time in which the viewer gets trapped. By reviving virtual features into real ones and presenting them in replay-mode, the viewer discovers how a variation of sameness can evoke significant differences, or how identity arises due to a repetition in time. Hans Op de Beeck's installation Location (6) displays an all-round view in a real but generic space that induces the spectator's performative power – like an avatar, able to dwell in the virtuality of personal imagination. Robrecht Vanderbeeken has published on a variety of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics. Formerly a researcher in the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy, he now teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Art at University College Ghent (KASK), and is currently researching the philosophical implications of technological innovations in art and culture.

In 1986 professional theatre practitioners working in two underprivileged neighbourhoods in greater Tel Aviv in Israel created in collaboration with the local residents two large-scale productions. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem studies these rare encounters between professional public theatre and amateur, community-based theatre in Israel, employing a method similar to that of the historian who employs micro-history in order to reveal the excluded past of muted groups in a given society. Both productions – including the intentions of their creators and participants, the power struggles, and the results – serve as an historical record rich in information regarding Israeli society; and through the micro-history presented here the social and cultural role of the institutional theatre in general, and in Israel in particular, is also explored. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a senior lecturer, researcher, and practitioner, chair of the Faculty MA Program of Expressivity and Creativity in the Arts, and Head of Community-Based Theatre Studies in the Theatre Department of Tel Aviv University. She is also a community-based theatre facilitator/director and a trained actress who uses her acting experience in her research and teaching. Her recent publications include articles in Theatre Research International, Theory and Criticism, Social Identities, Israeli Sociology, and Research in Drama Education, and the full-length studies, Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (Haifa University Press, 2010) and Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Michael Gow's celebrated play Away (1986) commences with a tatty school version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Set in the era of anti-Vietnam War protests, Away ironically salutes the iconic performance traditions of the ‘romantic’ Dream. At the Prince's Theatre, Manchester, in 1901–02, actor-manager Robert Courtneidge directed elaborate productions of this play and As You Like It, and under the management of George Musgrove toured them to Australia, where Twelfth Night was added. These productions' ensemble casting was central to Courtneidge's and Musgrove's ambitions for addressing the ‘distinctive geographies’ of regional taste. Veronica Kelly is an Honorary Research Advisor at the University of Queensland. Her book The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama 1890s–1920s is published by Currency House (2010).