Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

In 2015 the concept of live performance as having efficacy to instigate political change is contested, yet some politically motivated performance has demonstrably facilitated change, and critical frameworks have been developed that account for performances that hold clear political stances. However, even where arguments exist for the enduring relevance of political performance, certain models of practice tend to be represented as more efficacious and sophisticated than others. In this article, inspired by her recent experiences of making political theatre, Rebecca Hillman asks to what extent prevalent discourses may nurture or repress histories and futures of political theatre. She re-evaluates the contemporary relevance of agitprop theatre made in British contexts in the 1960s and 1970s by comparing academic analyses of the work with less well-documented critiques by the practitioners and audiences. She documents also the fluctuation and transformation, rather than the dissipation, of political activism in the final decades of the twentieth century. Rebecca Hillman is a director and playwright, and is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter..

Reports in The Stage of an ‘American invasion in the theatre’ and the New Statesman writing of ‘our Americanized theatre’ expressed widely shared fears that transatlantic values were adversely affecting the British theatre in the wake of the First World War. In this article, Paul Marshall examines the strategies employed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office as it carried out its duties of censorship in dealing with plays from or about the United States. The Censor perceived it as his duty to defend public morals from elements that would threaten and challenge the values associated with ‘Englishness’, and, drawing on the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence now available in the British Library, Paul Marshall explores how the Lord Chamberlain of the time, Lord Cromer, his readers, and his advisory board viewed the threat of the American ‘invasion’ – their shared values, sometimes disputed verdicts, and the formal and informal influences that could be brought to bear upon them. Five ‘case studies’ look at their attitudes to particular plays about and from the USA. Paul Marshall presently teaches history at Bromley High School, Kent, having studied for an MA in Text and Performance Studies at King's College and RADA.

In the following article Benjamin Lloyd uses the work of the noted Swiss psychologist Alice Miller to propose a new archetype – ‘the wounded actor’, a person in the throes of a narcissistic disorder, as defined by Miller in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child. He suggests that conventional actor training will not help the wounded actor, but that the re-introduction of spirituality into the acting-class curriculum may do so. In this light he looks at Stanislavsky's writings about spirituality, focusing on the chapter in An Actor Prepares called ‘Communion’. Linking Stanislavsky's spirituality to the writings and thought of Leo Tolstoy, he explores the reasons why the spiritual nature of Stanislavsky's work has not been generally explored in the West, and suggests some ways in which acting teachers may introduce spiritual concerns into their curricula. Benjamin Lloyd teaches at Villanova University. His The Actor's Way: a Journal of Self-Discovery in Letters is due for publication later this year by Allworth Press, New York, and he is currently facilitating a workshop on possible intersections between Quaker spiritual practice and theatre-making called ‘Revival: Meetings for Theatre’.

By the early 1870s, the term ‘filth’ had become Wagner’s shorthand for Offenbach. He attacked his fellow composer both publicly and privately and sought to establish a polarity between the two, confining Offenbach to the realm of frivolous and materialistic popular folk culture while casting his own work as exemplary of the new German spirit. Laurence Senelick’s close analysis of Wagner’s writings, including his notorious 1869 essay ‘Jewishness in Music’, shows this critique to be fuelled by jealousy, cultural imperialism, and his growing anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is included here as a counterpoint, challenging his former mentor and celebrating Offenbach as the exemplar of Jewish genius. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent books include Soviet Theater: A Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky) and the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015). This article is taken from his forthcoming The Offenbach Century: His Influence on Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press).

In this article, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow examine the ways in which performing arts companies and arts policy institutions perceive the needs of children as audiences. Historically, children have been promoted as arts audiences. Some of these represent an attempt to fashion the adults of the future – as audiences, citizens of a nation, or members of a specific community. Other rationales focus on the needs or rights of the child, such as educational goals or the provision of an antidote to the perceived corrupting effect of electronic entertainment. Drawing on interviews with performing arts practitioners, the authors explore some of these themes through case studies of three children's theatre companies, identifying the development of policy rationales for the support of practices directed at children which are primarily based on pedagogical principles. The case studies reveal a shift away from educational goals for children's theatre, and identify a new emphasis on the importance of valuing children's aesthetic choices, examining how these trends are enacted within the case-study organizations, and the implications of these trends for company programming. Hilary Glow is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Arts Management Program at Deakin University, Victoria. She has published articles on cultural policy and the audience experience in various journals, and in a monograph on Australian political theatre (2007). Katya Johanson lectures and researches in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She has published on Australian cultural policy and on the relationship between art, politics and national identity. With Glow she is the author of a monograph on Australian indigenous performing arts (2009).

A recent study of single-ticket buyers and subscribers at a major regional theatre – Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky – focused on measuring quantitatively the psychological benefits of engaging with theatre and gathering qualitatively observations by focus groups. Both confirmed the hypothesis that regular attendance promotes flourishing and meaningful social interaction, psychological stimulation, and positive emotions. The study also affirms that attending theatre contributes to a shared sense of community, this at a time when such community appears starkly diminished in the United States. In addition, focus groups wished that audiences better reflected the demographic diversity outside the auditorium. Evident disparities include urban vs. rural, prosperous vs. not, more education vs. less, black vs. white – reflecting those that splinter national politics. One microcosm of one theatre's audience provokes suggestions to foster a more democratic audience and plural istic culture that endeavours to cross rather than ignore the divides. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice & Con flict Transformation programme. He was previously Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. Suzanne Meeks is Professor and Chair of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, University of Louisville. Her research focuses on mental health in later life.

This essay is offered as a tribute to Jan Kott in appreciation of all he has done to stimulate international enthusiasm for Shakespeare's plays.

The critical concept of ‘montage’ has been familiar in film studies ever since Eisenstein. But the fixed focus and apparently continuous flow of live theatrical performance seemingly makes it an inappropriate tool for dramatic analysis. Franco Ruffini argues, however, that actors and audiences find their own ways of ‘selecting’ from and emphasizing aspects of the full theatrical vocabulary and its many means of expression, which make live performance no less subject to creative self-assembly and juxtaposition than film. Ruffini develops the distinction between ‘horizontal’ montage in time, and ‘vertical’ montage as a sort of cross-section of performance; and examines ways in which the ‘audience's performance’ can, both fruitfully and otherwise, differ from the ‘director's performance’. Franco Ruffini is Professor of Theatre Semiotics in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Bologna.

In this article Catherine Diamond examines the flows of transcultural hybridity occurring in dance between Spanish flamencos, Japanese exponents of flamenco, and Indian dancers interacting with flamenco within their classical dance forms. Japan and India represent two distinct Asian reactions to the phenomenon of global flamenco: the Japanese have adopted it wholesale and compete with the Spanish on their own ground; the Indians claim that as the Roma (gypsy) people originated in India, the country is also the home of flamenco. Despite their differing attitudes, flamenco dance offers women in both cultures a pathway toward participating in an internal androgyny, a wider spectrum of gender representation than either the Asian traditional dance or contemporary Asian society normally allows. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre and environmental literature. She is Director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia, and the director/choreographer of Red Shoes Dance Theatre in Taiwan.

The functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is, as Gordon Armstrong argues in this article, among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to physical science. According to this view, the theatre, as a substrate of consciousness, was part of the package that defined modern man as a reflective species: whereas for the first four million years of human existence man was silent about a probable inner life, the dawn of empathy some 200,000 years ago saw a neural explosion – the enlargement of the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere of the brain, unlocking a new kind of reflective consciousness. In isolation, this aberrant neurological connection proved so advantageous for hunting and for communication that members of a tribe who possessed this aberration prospered: and adaptation to the ice ages that began 200,000 years ago was a motivating factor in stimulating the emergence of what we can recognize as art. Gordon Armstrong is immediate past Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research, and Review Editor for Theatre Research International. He has taught at UCLA, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Rhode Island, and has designed and directed productions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. His full-length works include the revised Golden Ages of the Theatre and Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words.

Mark O'Rowe's work marks a shift in Irish theatrical form and practice, positing his stories in urban landscapes that defy modernist dramatic frames and established linguistic styles. Here, angels and demons roam the earth with lost human souls and, though mythical creatures and influences are frequently made manifest, the connection to the other world does not remove the presence of popular culture – karate movies and salty snacks in particular. But perhaps the most viscerally striking aspect of O'Rowe's dramaturgy stems from the sense of pain, isolation, and trauma his characters embody and enact. His dramatized communities are either in crisis or no longer visible, thereby situating the scope for human connection or reconnection as the prize sought from their struggle – while comedy is not lost, and the ‘skullduggerous’ tone so applauded in Howie the Rookie accompanies these later works alongside an evolved dramatic voice and sense of theatrical form. Miriam Haughton is currently in the second year of her doctoral work on postmodern Irish drama in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Her research interests include drama studies, Irish studies, anthropology, and sociology.

The importance of Granville Barker’s association with J. E. Vedrenne in the seminal Court seasons of 1904-1907 is one of the ‘givens’ of twentieth-century theatre history, as are Barker’s later, groundbreaking productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy. Yet these and much of his intervening work were also in many ways collaborative achievements, now in association with his wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy – their later divorce helping to rewrite the history of their partnership. Lillah McCarthy was also a prominent suffragist, and Granville Barker allied himself with many other men and women who were working actively in support of the extended franchise. Susan Carlson argues that many of Granville Barker’s productions should be seen, in part, as artistic extensions of suffrage activism, and in this article she explores the ways in which his support for the suffragists manifested itself on as well as off the stage. Susan Carlson, Associate Provost and Professor of English at Iowa State University, has most recently published essays on suffrage theatre, focusing on its political use of comedy and its connections to productions of Shakespeare.

Postgraduate programmes in performance studies are playing an increasingly important role within drama departments in the British university sector, and require that both staff and students confront with greater rigour than at undergraduate level the relationship between theory and practice – more precisely, how that theoretical relationship should and can be related to practical aspects of the programme. Taking her own cue from bedside-reading ranging from Foucault to the latest titles from Routledge to the influential article on ‘Geographies of Learning’ contributed to Theatre Journal in 1993 by Jill Dolan, Susan Melrose here debates the dilemma, and in particular the problems posed to actors by challenging their approach to their work at precisely the moments when they may most need to fall back on old strategies and securities. Susan Melrose recently took up the post of Head of Graduate Studies and Research Development at Rose Bruford College, London. She presented an earlier draft of this article at the SCUDD Conference at the University of Glasgow in March 1998, which was concerned with issues relating to the teaching of theatre and drama studies in the university.

The original Theatre Quarterly devoted a large portion of one issue-TQ28 (1977—78) to the theatre of South Africa. It is, of course, important to relate new developments in the theatre of that troubled nation to the context of its changing political situation – considering, for example, how far a reflection of the realities of the urban black experience is now more typical than the ‘acceptable’ face represented by the once-popular ‘tribal musicals’. Here. David Graver and Loren Kruger contrast two approaches to the theatre of anti-apartheid. The internationally known (and now relatively stable) Market Theatre of Johannesburg, they argue, today largely reaches an educated, liberal, and elite audience, and sustains what is essentially a European literary tradition: but other plays written and directed by blacks — notably since the Soweto uprising of 1976 — have developed a more appropriately African style. Often, these, have emerged from the theatre companies within the black townships, such as the Bachaki Theatre Company - whose Top Down is here the focus of analysis. David Graver is currently Mellon Fellow in Drama at Stanford University: his articles have appeared in Theatre Journal and in NTQ, and he is now completing a book on the theory and practice of the avant-garde. Loren Kruger teaches in the University of Chicago, has published in Theatre Journal and the Brecht Yearbook, and is working on a study of theatres with national aspirations in Europe and the USA.

Almost in its death throes at the turn of the present century, sensational melodrama threw up a curious mutation at the hands of the prolific playwrights and managers, the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville. In numerous of their plays performed in the decade or so before the First World War, the ‘New Woman’, whose rights and rebellions were simultaneously the focus of debate in so-called ‘problem’ plays, took on a new and threatening aspect – as the eponymously ‘dangerous’ central character of The Worst Woman in London, A Disgrace to Her Sex, The Girl Who Wrecked His Home, and a score or so of similar titles. In the following article Elaine Aston and lan Clarke explore the nature of these ‘strong’ female roles, both as acting vehicles and as embodiments of male fears and fantasies, in a theatre which existed in large part to serve such needs and which, through such characters, at once fictionalized and affirmed the fears of ‘respectable’ society about the moral stature of the actress. The authors both teach in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, where lan Clarke is Director of Drama, having previously published his own study of Edwardian Drama in 1989.

As Alice Reyner's paper on Stanislavski and Bradley in NTQ 4 illustrated, Stanislavski remained very much a man of his own time, however enduring his approach to acting has proved. Here, Natalie Crohn Schmitt examines one of the concepts most crucial to ‘the system’ – a concept which is in its essentials, however, derived from nineteenth-century ideas, now being challenged, about the relationship between creativity and the unconscious. Pointing out that Stanislavski himself believed that his ‘system’ was simply the application of natural laws to acting technique, the author shows Stanislavski's indebtedness to the psychological theories of Théodule Armand Ribot, which interpreted all human behaviour in terms of ‘an aim towards fixed ends’. One of the reasons for the decline in influence of Stanislavski's system thus reflects, she argues, the growing belief that creativity is ‘process’, its ends ‘continually redefined by the actions, and vice-versa’ – and the author suggests examples of such a non-Stanislavskian approach among contemporary theatre companies. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is associate professor of theatre in the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her earlier essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, and she has just completed a full-length study, Actors on the Stage of Life. The present paper was written under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Robert Lepage, the innovative French-Canadian director whose production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year joined the repertoire of the National Theatre, developed his working methods out of the resource-based technique of improvisation and creation devised by Anna and Lawrence Halprin at the San Francisco Dance Workshop. His devised shows, widely acclaimed for their arresting visual imagery, include The Dragons' Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, and Opium and Needles. Here he discusses in interview his ideas on interculturalism and how these influence his approach to Shakespeare. He was interviewed at the National Theatre in London by Christie Carson, a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow, who is working on a dissertation which compares the approach taken to intercultural projects by the theatre communities of Scotland and Canada. A graduate of Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Toronto, Christie Carson has also recently been a contributor to a commemorative publication analyzing the work performed as part of the C. P. Taylor retrospective at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival.

Unlike Avignon, still active after more than forty years, the once notorious Nancy Festival has slipped unobtrusively into history. David Looseley sets out here to trace this itinerary. After reviewing the festival's origins and its importance for the experimental theatre of the 1960s, he examines what became of it in the bleaker decades which followed, and assesses the meaning of its decline. David Looseley, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Bradford, is currently engaged in research funded by the Leverhulme Trust into the politics of culture in contemporary France. His published work includes a book on the theatre of the twentieth-century French dramatist Armand Salacrou.

In this article, David Wiles and Chris Vervain stake out the ground for a substantial programme of continuing research. Chris Vervain, coming from a background in visual and performance art, is in the first instance a maker of masks. She is also now writing a thesis on the masks of classical tragedy and their possibilities in modern performance, and, in association with the University of Glasgow, working on an AHRB research programme that involves testing the effect of Greek New Comedy masks in performance. David Wiles, Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, has published books on the masks of Greek New Comedy and on Greek performance space, and lectured on Greek masks. Most recently, his Greek Theatre Performance: an Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2000) included an investigation of the classical mask and insights provided by the work of Lecoq. He is now planning a book on the classical Greek mask. Wiles and Vervain are both committed to the idea that the mask was the determining convention which gave Greek tragedy its identity in the ancient world, and is a valuable point of departure for modern practitioners engaging with the form. They anticipate that their research will in the near future incorporate a symposium and a further report on work-in-progress.