‘Verbatim Theatre’ has been the term utilized by Derek Paget during his extensive researches into that form of documentary drama which employs (largely or exclusively) tape-recorded material from the ‘real-life’ originals of the characters and events to which it gives dramatic shape. Though clearly indebted to sources such as the radio ballads of the 'fifties, and to the tradition which culminated in Joan Littlewood's Oh what a Lovely War, most of its practitioners acknowledge Peter Cheeseman's work at Stoke-on-Trent as the direct inspiration - in one case, as first received through the ‘Production Casebook’ on his work published in the first issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (1971). Quite simply, the form owes its present health and exciting potential to the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of the portable cassette recorder - ironically, a technological weapon against which are ranged other mass technological media such as broadcasting and the press, which tend to marginalize the concerns and emphases of popular oral history. Here, Derek Paget, who is currently completing his doctoral thesis on this subject, discusses with leading practitioners their ideas and working methods. Derek Paget teaches English and Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education, and has also had practical theatre experience ranging from community work to the West End, and from Joan Littlewood's final season at Stratford East to the King's Head, Islington.

Who is producing site-specific performance in Britain? Who sees it? Where do these performances occur, or, more particularly, ‘take place’? What tools are used to construct a performance of place? Why is the site-specific mode chosen? And, crucially, how is it variously defined? Drawing on a survey of British practitioners conducted between November 2000 and December 2001, Fiona Wilkie sets out to explore these questions. While pointing to the wide variety of practices that might be delineated by the term ‘site-specific’, she analyzes the implications of such generalizations as can be made – about the types of performance site chosen, the effects of funding policy on the character of work being made, the possibilities for identifying a ‘site-specific’ audience, and the debates surrounding the terminology itself. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD at the University of Surrey, on which this article is based, which aims to develop a theoretical model for site-specific performance, with particular reference to the spectatorial role.

One of the persistent problems in acting, and one that seems to grow steadily in importance, comes from the public identity of the actor. This study suggests that a semiotic approach to the acting sign can help to distinguish the function of celebrity in acting, the threats to authority that celebrity imposes, and the results of celebrity acting both on stage and in the efforts of the actor to achieve an identity. This essay is related to earlier discussions of the stage figure by its author, Michael Quinn, in Modem Drama and Gestus. applying the Prague School model of analysis that also supported his article on reading and directing in NTQ11 (1987). Michael Quinn, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, is currently working on a critical study of Vaclav Havel, as well as a longer study of the stage figure in different theatrical contexts.

The positive valuation of theatre as live performance, and therefore also its transience, is frequently accompanied by the urgent expression of the need to counter that transience by means of documentation. This desire to ‘save’ theatre reaches its most fervent expression (and hope of authority and permanence) with the live performance archive. Archive theory, however, now insists on the instability and uncertainty of the archive, which not only documents but also constructs its subject. In this article, Matthew Reason argues that, by tracing comparisons between archives and human memory, it is possible to establish a new formulation of the archive – as detritus, not completeness – that puts a value on mutability as a reflection of theatre's liveness. Matthew Reason is currently completing a PhD on representations of live performance at the University of Edinburgh. He has edited a special edition of the Edinburgh Review (ER106) on Theatre in Scotland, and has previously worked at the Edinburgh International Festival, where his responsibilities included maintaining the archive.

The community dance movement in the United Kingdom has been very active in organizing and delivering dance projects for disenfranchised communities and individuals for several decades. But initiatives have gained momentum following a shift in policy for arts funding after the 1997 General Election. This article examines how dance social-inclusion projects seek not only to allow those excluded from mainstream opportunities to participate in dance, but also to empower them. The aim of the paper is critically to examine these aims while acknowledging the work that the dance community has done in welcoming participation from groups traditionally not associated with the art form. Sara Houston firstly sets the political and social context that welcomes notions of empowerment to take root within arts projects, then goes on to debate what practitioners mean by the term within the context of championing a social inclusion policy, and discusses how examples of claims manifest themselves in practice, if they do at all. She examines one three-year initiative for residents of a sheltered housing unit and an eighteen-month project in an adult male maximum security prison, outlining what the projects offered and considering the limits of recording evidence of empowerment. Sara Houston lectures in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey. Her work on social inclusion initiatives in dance has been published by Animated, Primary Health Care, and has also been utilized in a Government White Paper.

A recent preoccupation with space and place has drawn together theorists and workers in a wide range of disciplines, including human geographers, archaeologists, architects, cartographers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, poets, novelists – and theatre practitioners. There are therefore a range of lenses, a range of vocabularies, through which site-specific theatre and performance can be considered. In this article, Cathy Turner focuses on Mike Pearson's descriptions of site-specific work, particularly his involvement with archaeology, before proposing that we might find a useful, complementary vocabulary within psychoanalytic theories of object relations. She refers to performances by Lone Twin and to her own work with site-specific company Wrights & Sites, who created An Exeter Mis-Guide and A Courtauld Mis-Guide in 2003. Cathy Turner has produced a number of site-specific ‘mis-guided walks’, tours, and performances in her work with Wrights & Sites since 1998. She recently completed a Research Fellowship at Exeter University, investigating writing processes in contemporary performance, including site-specific work. She is now a Teaching Fellow at Exeter University and an Associate Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts.

In this article Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, in different parts of the world, modern theatre was invented by way of interweaving cultures in performance. Different examples from the early twentieth century and the 1990s show how theatre acted as a laboratory for testing and experiencing the potential of cultural diversity. An innovative performance aesthetics enabled the exploration of the emergence, stabilization, and destabilization of cultural identity, merging aesthetics with politics. Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She has published widely in the fields of the theory and history of the theatre, and is the author of numerous books, including, in English, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005) and The Transformative Power of Performance: a New Aesthetics (2008). In 2008 she established a new research programme, ‘Interweaving Cultures in Performance’, at the Freie Universität. This paper was given as a keynote lecture at the fourteenth Performance Studies International conference, ‘Interregnum: In Between States’, in Copenhagen, 20–24 August 2008.

A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).

Twenty-five years ago, the original Theatre Quarterly pioneered the documentation of the rehearsal process in a series of ‘Production Casebooks’ which, in a wide variety of formats – dictated by the people and the facilities available for any particular production – delved pragmatically into then-uncharted territory. That such analyses are now more commonplace is thanks not only to the active participation of academics in the field of theatre studies, but also to what Gay McAuley here describes as the postmodern ‘shift in interest from the reified art object to the dynamic processes involved in its production and reception’. But the need to refine happenstance into methodology has served only to highlight the problems of observation, selection, and presentation involved – and of how to determine the degree of objectivity that is possible or desirable. The availability of video alongside audiotape and notebook provides an important additional tool – but presents its own problems of ‘editing’ and interpretation. Here, Gay McAuley, Director of the Centre for Performance Studies in the University of Sydney, compares the dilemma of the rehearsal recordist with that of the cultural anthropologist, and proposes the value of an ethnographic model in recognizing and starting to embrace if not always to overcome the difficulties which confront the involved observer. An earlier version of her paper was read at the IFTR/FIRT conference ‘Actor, Actress on Stage’, held in Montreal in June 1995.

In this article David Barnett investigates the ways in which plays can be considered ‘postdramatic’. Opening with an exploration of this new paradigm, he then seeks to examine two plays, Attempts on her Life by Martin Crimp and 4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, in a bid to understand how their texts frustrate representation and the structuring of time, and concludes by considering how the restrictions imposed upon the postdramatic performance differ from the interpretive freedom of text in representational, dramatic theatre. David Barnett is senior lecturer and Head of Drama at the University of Sussex. He has published monographs on Heiner Müller (1998) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2005), the latter as Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, Germany. He has also published articles on contemporary German, English-language, political, and postdramatic theatre.

The Futurist movement was not only an artistic but also a social and political force for innovation, conceived as a total and permanent revolution encompassing all aspects of human life. One such aspect was food. Banquets had been a highly developed performative art in the Italian Renaissance and were again placed in a theatrical framework by the Futurists after the First World War. They founded three night clubs, where food and drinks were served in Futurist fashion, and opened several restaurants dedicated to a renewal of Italian culinary habits. In the 1930s, the Futurists focused on the creation of a new lifestyle called aerovita, which included cooking and dining as paratheatrical arts. Many of the recipes (or rather scenarios) in the Futurist cookbook La cucina futurista of 1932 derived from banquets that Marinetti, the driving force of Futurism, had organized as a kind of savoury-olfactory-tactile theatre accompanied by music and poetry recitations. The highly imaginative table scenery and food sculptures were complemented by inventive lighting effects and an amazing mise en scéne of interior decor, furniture, and waiters' garb. This essay describes and analyzes some of the Futurist experiments with culinary theatre, the manifestos dedicated to Futurist cuisine, and some of the Futurist concepts of dining as a performative art. Günter Berghaus is Reader in Theatre History and Performance Studies at the Drama Department, University of Bristol, and has published a dozen books and a large number of articles on theatre anthropology, Renaissance and Baroque theatre, dance history, and avant-garde performance. Directing a number of Futurist shows led to the publication of The Genesis of Futurism (1995), Futurism and Politics (1996), Italian Futurist Theatre (1998), and International Futurism in the Arts and Literature (2000).

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

‘Community’ has, suggests Graham Woodruff, a friendly ring: yet it is also a weasel word, lending a stamp of often spurious togetherness to bodies politic or theatric. Thus, the use of ‘community’ in the geographical sense is often drained of any true meaning, where it is not a cover for the avoidance of contentious political issues. ‘Communities of interest’ had some success in speaking theatrically in the 'seventies, but now, Woodruff claims, the political situation is such that ‘community theatre’ can and should seek to express the common interests of the increasingly beleaguered working class, offering a way of extending the dramatizations attempted outwards from parochial to wider political concerns. Graham Woodruff was Head of the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham before becoming director of Telford Community Arts, on whose work he draws for the following article.

Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a full retrospective of the company's work – based since 1966 at Holstebro. in Denmark – will appear in a future issue of NTQ. It is a mark of the insularity of English-speaking theatre, however, thatBarba himself probably remains best known as an early collaborator of Grotowski's, whose ideas he was responsible for assembling into Towards a Poor Theatre. But Barba's own workhas in fact developed in entirely distinctive directions, always substantiated by a framework of theoretical debate – most recently through his involvement in the International School of Theatre Anthropology, whose activities will also be documented in forthcoming issues. Here, Barba discusses the concept of ‘dramaturgy’, and how methods of theatre analysis may best be utilized in discussing theatre works based in performance rather than in written texts.

British theatre between the two world wars has been a neglected area of interest for contemporary scholars and theatre historians, but a growing body of work in this field has of late begun to challenge the orthodoxies. Much of the new work has focused on the reclamation and repositioning of the work of ‘forgotten’ women playwrights and commercially successful gay playwrights such as Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. Here, John Deeney examines how the Lord Chamberlain's licensing of Christa Winsloe's lesbian-themed Children in Uniform, and the commercial and critical success of its production at the Duchess Theatre in 1932–33, invites a reassessment of the possibilities open to women playwrights for exploring ‘deviancy’; and how contemporary theoretical positions too frequently ignore the challenge of the historically and culturally specific. John Deeney is Lecturer and Course Director in Theatre Studies at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He is the editor of Writing Live: an Investigation of the Relationship between Writing and Live Art (New Playwrights Trust, 1998) and a contributor to the forthcoming Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories/New Historiographies (Manchester University Press) and British Theatre between the Wars (Cambridge University Press).

The quasi-theatrical kinds of performance-ritual which existed in pre-Columbian Latin America have been little investigated, and are almost entirely neglected by English-speaking theatre scholars. In NTQ 8, Robert Potter looked at ways in which the missionaries who followed in the wake of the Spanish conquistadores tried to adapt Aztec rituals to their own proselytizing purposes: and here, Adam Versényi, in the first of a series of articles on early Latin American performance, provides an overview of the ways in which the great pre-Columbian civilizations embraced performance into their often-unfamiliar world view – suggesting that in some cases the cosmogony expressed through the dramatic rituals made them particularly ill-equipped to confront the ‘otherness’ of the invading Spaniards. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

In this response to John F. Deeney's article, ‘Censoring the Uncensored: the Case of Children in Uniform’, which appeared in NTQ 63 (August 2000), Helen Freshwater enters the growing debate over our reclamation of historical depictions of homosexuality. She questions Deeney's contention that our contemporary critical prejudices obscure the circulation of dramatic images of lesbianism during the 1930s, proposing that the Lord Chamberlain's difficulties in identifying lesbianism demonstrate the impossibility of dispensing with the theoretical structure that informs our understanding of this identity. Her archival research also reveals that there were in fact many efforts to put the lesbian on the stage during this period, but that these were effectively suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain, who refused to contemplate the performative enactment of lesbianism, no matter how indistinct or conventionalized in form. Her article addresses the challenges faced when addressing these dramatic inscriptions of lesbian desire, which are often homophobic, prurient, and unquestioning in their affirmation of the heterosexual norm. Helen Freshwater has recently completed her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh, and now lectures in drama and performance at the University of Nottingham. Her ‘The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite's Mnemonic’ appeared in NTQ67. She is also a contributor to the Edinburgh Review and to the anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

In contemporary culture, an ‘Uncle Tom’ has become so derided a figure of complicity in racism that it is perhaps only with difficulty, and a corrective historicist awareness, that we can come to acknowledge both the good intentions and the undeniable effectiveness of Harriet Beecher Stowe's original – a novel in which, interestingly, women play no less prominent a part than black characters. Indeed, it is likely that the proliferating stage adaptations of Mrs. Stowe's novel were largely responsible for creating the stereotype Uncle Tom in a popular imagination on which such melodramatized accounts had a lasting impact: and it was partly in response to such perversions that Mrs. Stowe herself set out to dramatize her novel. The result, The Christian Slave, has remained relatively unknown not least because of the premature death of its solo performer, Mary Webb – herself a pioneer among black performers who achieved recognition from white audiences. In the following article, Susan F. Clark examines the play in its contemporary context, contrasts it both with other stage versions and with the seminal novel, and examines the relationship between its black performer and her audiences. Susan F. Clark is Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Smith College, Massachusetts, and is currently working on a full-length study of interpretations of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the American stage.

The theatre shelves of secondhand bookshops testify to the sometime popularity and prolific output of the theatre publicist and would-be historian Walter Macqueen-Pope. Yet even by the time Macqueen-Pope was publishing his later volumes in the 1950s, the rise of academic theatre scholarship was questioning such anecdotally based and unverified accounts of the theatre and its past. Today, we can look at Macqueen-Pope, and at the period immediately before the First World War which was so often the focus of his attention, not so much for evidence of flawed scholarship as for his revealing attitude towards his subject and its social context. For anecdotage and nostalgia have inevitably to be taken into account in any historical approach to so ephemeral an art as the theatre, and, as the authors here conclude, while Macqueen-Pope may not tell us the whole truth about his many subjects, such a ‘wistful remembrancer’ remains significant to any investigation of a theatrical past ‘that must always be a melting pot of imperfect recognitions and unattainable desires’. Jim Davis is Associate Professor of Theatre and Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance at the University of New South Wales. victor Emelijanow is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both have written extensively on nineteenth-century British theatre and are the joint authors of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880, which has just been published by the University of lowa Press.

One of the problems of applying semiotic techniques to theatre work has been a vocabulary which too often mystifies rather than clarifies the theatre experience for the non-specialist student. Patrice Pavis, in his work with students at the University of Paris III, has evolved a questionnaire about theatre performance which, while not in itself utilizing semiotic terminology, attempts to direct the respondents' attention to all the aspects of theatrical signification upon which it touches. In the following article, Patrice Pavis, whose major study of theatrical terminology, entitled Dictionnaire du Théâtre, was published by Editions Sociales in 1980, outlines the purpose of the questionnaire, and provides explanatory notes to the individual questions, outlining an approach on which many involved in theatre teaching may wish to comment and build.