Václav Havel's plays of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were evaluated primarily for their dissident content. Leaving, which he wrote in 2007, followed his thirteen-year premiership and presidency of the Czech Republic. In this article, Michelle Woods asks whether perception of Havel's plays in England was confined to their alleged politics, how this view affected their translation, adaptation, and reception, and whether they can now be read beyond the ideological positions of the Cold War. She focuses on Protest at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1980 and Sorry on BBC Television in 1977, as well as on two commissions which failed to be produced: The Garden Party for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964 and The Conspirators for the National in 1970. She argues that the plays were fundamentally misread through the prism of a Western conception of East European dissidence, which determined whether they were produced or not, and led to the dismissal of Havel's translator, Vera Blackwell. Material from Blackwell's recently opened archive is here used to reassess her role in the dissemination of Havel's plays in the English-speaking world. Michelle Woods is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz and is the author of Translating Milan Kundera (2006) and several articles on the translation of literature and film.

The late 1960s and early 1970s are known as a period of rebellion and turbulence in the Soviet Russian theatre. Dynamic directors such as Georgy Tovstonogov, Anatoly Efros, Oleg Efremov, and Yury Lyubimov, with varying degrees of acceptance by the authorities, revolutionized the staging of classics and inspired a number of new works based on the realities of everyday life. Less well known is that this activity took place during the regime of Elena Furtseva (1910–74), first as a member of the Presidium, then as Minister of Culture. Furtseva is a paradoxical figure: the very model of a line-toeing Party member, she also used her femininity to advance her career. Uncultivated in the arts and ruled by her personal taste, she alternately bullied and coddled the artists she was supposed to control. Although Furtseva's influence was ever present from the Khrushchev era to the early Brezhnev years, she is rarely mentioned in Western accounts of Soviet theatre, and this sketch of her career is the first in English. The author, Laurence Senelick, is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. His books include The Chekhov Theatre: a Century of Plays in Performance (1997) and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2007). Several of his articles have appeared in Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly, the most recent being an article on Michael Chekhov in NTQ 99.

One of the most creative communicative strategies of German twentieth-century political song has been narrative role-play. From the songs of Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring in Weimar cabaret during the 1920s to the dramatic monologues of Franz Josef Degenhardt in the 1960s and beyond, singers have assumed identifiable roles to parody the language, mannerisms, and characteristics of known establishment social types. Role play has also been evident in the narrative identities constructed by singers and performers, either by means of literary association or by association with certain political ideas or stances, as in the case of Ernst Busch embodying the proletarian worker. This article examines different types of role-play, including that of Hans-Eckard Wenzel and Steffen Mensching who, in their 1980s performances, assumed the ironic masks of clowns, with which they projected an alternative ‘carnival’ vision of society in the German Democratic Republic. David Robb is Senior Lecturer in German at Queen's University of Belfast. He is an experienced songwriter and performing musician, the author of Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens: das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (1998) and the editor of Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (2007).

Hysteria, first performed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro's Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the show's critique of Western feminism's claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).

The radio play has long survived the competition from television in Britain, and also has a long tradition in the German-speaking world in the form of the Hörspiel – but its strength has lain precisely in demanding a visual contribution from the listener's imagination. What happens when a radio play is ‘staged’ before a live audience? In 2005, under commission from the Royal Festival Hall, the composer Carter Burwell proposed writing a sound score for new plays; and under the banner of Theatre of the New Ear, he recruited his long-time collaborators on film, Charlie Kaufman and Joel and Ethan Coen, to write specifically for sound-only. In this article Jenn Stephenson describes the experience of ‘watching’ a radio play, and offers a theorization of its qualities and the effects on its audience. Jenn Stephenson received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2003 and is now Associate Professor of Drama at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Her recent publications include articles in Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Theatre Research in Canada. She is co-editor of the ‘Views and Reviews’ section of Canadian Theatre Review.

In this article Anselm Heinrich argues for a renewed interest in and critical investigation of theatre in Britain during the Second World War, a period neglected by researchers despite the radical changes in the cultural landscape instigated during the war. Concentrating on CEMA (the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts) and the introduction of subsidies, the author discusses and evaluates the importance and effects of state intervention in the arts, with a particular focus on the demands put on theatre and its role in society in relation to propaganda, nation-building, and education. Anselm Heinrich is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Entertainment, Education, Propaganda: Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945 (2007), and with Kate Newey and Jeffrey Richards has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009). Other research interests include émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe, contemporary German theatre and drama, and national theatres.

In this article, Poonam M. Ganglani investigates how the preserved manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's archives of John Hart's stage version of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1961 reflect the social and theatrical landscape of the times. The notion of the Lord Chamberlain as a custodian of morals, the dangerous power attributed to stage semiotics, and the response to sexual impropriety on stage are among the areas discussed. The Lord Chamberlain's correspondence files offer the only significant glimpse into this theatrical adaptation of Lawrence's novel, as into other unpublished plays of the time; this article also investigates the ways in which the Lord Chamberlain's archives in the British Library, London, serve as a unique and valuable tool for the post-war British theatre historiographer in research related to such unpublished plays. Poonam M. Ganglani is a postgraduate under the Mundus Masters ‘Crossways in European Humanities’ international study programme, having studied in three European universities over two years: the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia in France, the University of Sheffield in England, and the Università degli studi di Bergamo in Italy.

The issue of attitudes towards the arts in England is here compared and contrasted with those evident in the rest of Europe today. This article was written in June 2009, following discussions in Wroclaw during the festival ‘The World as a Place of Truth’, part of the Year of Grotowski. Jon Hewitt is Artistic Director of Admiration Theatre Company, based in London. He has directed several productions, the most recent being Romeo and Juliet Docklands, set in the East End of London. In February 2010 his latest production, Tower Hamlet, opens at the Courtyard Theatre.

In this article Steve Earnest discusses contemporary approaches to performance training in Germany, comparing the content and methods of selected programmes from the former Federal Republic of Germany to those of the former German Democratic Republic. The Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock and the University of the Arts in Berlin are here utilized as primary sources, while reference is also made to the Bayerische Theater-akademie ‘August Everding’ Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, and Justus Leibig Universität in Giessen. The aim is to provide insight into theatre-training processes in Germany and to explore how these relate to the national characteristics that have emerged since reunification. Steve Earnest is Associate Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His publications include The State Acting Academy of East Berlin (Mellen Press, 1999) and articles in Performer Training (Harwood Publishers, 2001), New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Western European Stages.