Since the 1970s, belief in the importance of participatory empowerment has been constantly asserted through various mass-inclusive developmental strategies. The growing interest in theatre for generating socio-political capacity-building among people gave rise to the Theatre of the Oppressed, conceptualized and developed by Augusto Boal. This article provides a brief outline of the modus operandi of Boal’s practice, and focuses on investigating the theoretical and practical methodology of Jana Sanskriti, the West Bengal group of practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed. The article investigates the dialogical relationship between actors and audience in the three phases of the group’s theatre-making process: pre-performance; during the performance; and after it. It proposes an illustrative model of Jana Sanskriti’s dialogical approach towards experiencing a developmental surge in society. Shubhra Ghoshal is a research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) in Dhanbad, India. Nirban Manna is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) in Dhanbad.

Tackling violence against women in the theatre is often a controversial matter. To identify the ethical risks that victim representation may entail, we conduct a comparative analysis of two works about Ciudad Juárez’s feminicides staged in Barcelona: 2666 (2007), an adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel directed by Àlex Rigola, and House of Strength (2011) by Angélica Liddell. This article argues that while Rigola reduces victims to mere sexual objects with no narrative of their own, Liddell places the voice and resilience of Mexicans in the foreground and represents their bodies respectfully. Adriana Nicolau is completing her doctoral studies on ‘Feminisms in contemporary Catalan theatre’ at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona. Her publications include articles for Feminismo/s. Teresa Iribarren is an assistant professor at UOC, where she is the Director of the Catalan Literature, Publishing, and Society research group. Her current research focuses on narratives of violence and the promotion of human rights in literature.

In 2015, the Unfolding Kafka Festival was initiated by Thai dancer/choreographer Jitti Chompee, exploring the writings of Franz Kafka as a source of creativity for performers in Thailand and the Southeast Asian region. Three of the presented artworks focus on the concept of metamorphosis, and the body’s interaction with the environments it both creates and inhabits. Inspired by Isabelle Schad’s dance Der Bau (The Burrow), Chompee and visual artist/scenographer Yoko Seyama created Silence of the Insects, which adopted the cicada as a model of bodily transformation. Together, the two dances and the installation form an assemblage that can be considered under the rubric of Una Chaudhuri’s concept of a ‘theatre of species’. Catherine Diamond is Professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University in Taiwan, and is the director/playwright of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project, creating new plays addressing environmental issues in Southeast Asia.

The melodrama For Ever, by Paul Meritt and George Conquest, first performed at the Surrey Theatre on 2 October 1882, was a controversial late-Victorian stage production that fed the period’s appetite for dramatic histrionics, exotic displays, and monstrosity. An ephemeral piece that enjoyed no literary archetypes and few revivals, the play’s raison d’être was Conquest’s portrayal of Zacky Pastrana, a ‘man-monkey’, and his unrequited love for the murderous Ruth – a theme unique in the context of simian-based drama. Central to the play’s infamy was the covert allusion to the age-old myth of unnatural unions between simians and humans, and, although condemned as absurd and revolting by some critics, and laughable by others, its notoriety ensured popular success. Drawing on the original script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing and censoring, and situating Pastrana among famous fictional monstrosities adapted from literature for the British stage, most significantly Caliban, this article is a thematic analysis of Conquest’s unique role. It highlights through a series of interrelated readings how Pastrana’s multidimensional otherness and hybrid fluidity serves as a site of conceptual contention located at the animal–human boundary, exposing the cultural tensions in late-Victorian Britain. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to NTQ.

During the 1930s, the two Hebrew repertoire theatre companies in Palestine – the Habima and the Ohel – performed a large corpus of plays dealing with the landscapes of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl. Their fascination with the shtetl is surprising, considering the fact that these two companies were deeply committed to the Zionist project, whose ethos was building a new society in Eretz-Israel and negating the diasporic condition of Jewish existence. This article explores the landscapes of the shtetl as they were presented on the Hebrew stage of the 1930s and analyzes their aesthetic and cultural meaning for their audiences at that time. It shows that the shtetl plays formed a memory landscape that served the formation of a modern, consolidated, ethnic Jewish collective in Palestine, which shared a unified narrative of its past, as well as national aspirations for the future. Shelly Zer-Zion is a lecturer of theatre at the University of Haifa and was previously a Fulbright post-doctoral scholar at New York University. Her recent publications include Habima in Berlin: The Institutionalization of a Zionist Theatre (Magness Press, 2015), and her research is currently supported by the Israeli Science Foundation.