Ever since Aristotle compared the advantages of the epic and dramatic modes, their varying qualities have been a topic of critical debate – though in western theatre the solo storyteller has long since ceased to serve as performer as well as author of his works. Not so in many African nations – including Sierra Leone, where the itinerant storytelling-Performer Lele Gbomba, who sadly died in September 1989, after this article was written, was in some ways typical of his fellow-Craftsmen, in others markedly his own man. Here, Julius Spencer, lecturer in drama at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, describes and discusses Lele Gbomba's distinctive style. Julius Spencer gained his doctorate from the University of Ibadan, and has been active for many years as a playwright and director in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. He is presently researching the traditional theatre forms of Sierra Leone.

This is the third in a series of interviews with women who are involved in various capacities in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, set out to provide an update of previously published information, and thereby to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. The second interview, with playwright Charlotte Keatley, put forward a new vision of a ‘map’ to women and (play)writing. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by putting forward the responses of one of Britain's strongest young performers, Tilda Swinton, to questions about the challenges and expectations involved in performing gender roles and reversals, or of ‘playing woman’, on film and on stage. Tilda Swinton was born in London in 1960. She studied Social and Political Sciences and English at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1980 to 1983, under the supervision of Margot Heinemann. It was at Cambridge that Swinton first met and worked with director Stephen Unwin, her closest colleague throughout her career. In 1983, she went to Southampton and worked for six months at the Nuffield Theatre, where she earned her Equity card. In 1984–85, she worked with the RSC, but has chosen not to work on the main stages of the nationally subsidized theatres since. Swinton is primarily known for her work in political theatre, based at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, the Almeida (most notably on The Tourist Guide in 1987 and Mozart and Salieri in 1989), and the Royal Court in London, where she starred in the celebrated Man to Man – a transfer from the Traverse – in 1987, and where she assistant-directed Conquest of the South Pole in 1988. Swinton has also worked at the National Theatre Studio, and has just played Nova at the Cottesloe in a production of Peter Handke's The Long Way Round. She has worked in Italian opera (1988), and has collaborated on and been featured in films by John Berger (Play Me Something, 1988) and Derek Jarman (most notably, Caravaggio, 1986; The Last of England, 1987; and War Requiem, 1988): she continues to collaborate with both. Current and future projects include work on a TV series written by John Byme, which began filming in late September 1989, and work with director Sally Potter on a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in which Swinton plays Orlando.

In the autumn of last year, two events took place which marked in very different ways the recognition that feminist thinking has affected theatre more profoundly than through the necessary logistics of job and role redistribution. In August, the first-ever festival of women in experimental theatre, known as Magdalena 86, took place in Cardiff. Then, in the following month, the International School of Theatre Anthropology devoted its congress in Holstebro, Denmark, to the subject of ‘The Female Role’ – a title we borrow for this short feature, in which Susan Bassnett. who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor both to NTQ and its predecessor, analyzes and evaluates these occasions in successive reports. The core paper presented at Holstebro by ISTA director Eugenio Barba, which discusses the balance between the qualities of ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ necessary to the actor's energy, ‘completes’ a feature which, in the questions it raises for further discussion, remains necessarily inconclusive.

The Burmese zat pwe, an exuberant variety show involving almost every kind of performing art, has fascinated foreign visitors to Myanmar for the past hundred years. It continues today as a vibrant amalgam of singing, dancing, acting, and comic improvisation, still performed annually at pagoda festivals. As Burmese scholars have noted, the Burmese performer is primarily a singer and dancer rather than a dramatic actor, and therefore tends to use plays as frameworks for demonstrating virtuosity in these areas. This is reinforced by the training given at the two State Schools of Music and Dance, and while the Drama Department at the University of Culture does acquaint students with dramatic acting, the emphasis remains on music and dance. Moreover, the scripted drama, especially the classical drama, which reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly omitted from the pwe programme, having gradually been displaced by the pop music that is considered necessary to attract young audiences. Despite such changes, which alarm traditionalists, the pwe performance has shown a resilient flexibility to adapt to audience preferences and remains a lively highlight at the festivals. Catherine Diamond – who has previously written for NTQ on Vietnamese and Turkish theatre, and on oriental approaches to classical tragedy – is a dancer and drama professor who is currently directing for the Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

In this, the centenary year of Pirandello's birth, there has been a revival, hopefully more than just circumstantial, of interest in his work in the English-speaking theatre – which has previously tended to acknowledge his influence without often producing his plays. But Pirandello's own theatrical ambitions, which came quite late in his creative life, were initially as a director – indeed, the association with Mussolini which has sometimes cast a pall upon his reputation was largely in the interests of obtaining state patronage for his Teatro d' Arte company, which struggled unsuccessfully for survival between 1925 and 1928. Initially, however, hopes were high, and the inaugural productions both artistically and technically exciting. In the following feature. Susan Bassnett, a Pirandello specialist who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick and is a regular contributor to NTQ, describes the circumstances behind the opening of the company, while Alessandro Tinterri, of the Actors' Museum of Genoa, analyzes the curious encounter in the first major production. The Gods of the Mountain, between Pirandello as director and the now little-remembered Irish cricketer-dramatist. Lord Dunsany.

Joseph Brodsky’s assertion in Watermark (1992) that Venice ‘is the city of the eye’, providing a sense of security and solace to inhabitants and visitors via the sheer aesthetic force of its surroundings, implicitly raises questions, in the context of the twenty-first-century city, about the performative nature of not only modern-day urban aesthetics but also surveillance in public space, both of which, as phenomena, are dependent on forms of visual observation. Taking into account contemporary Venice’s complex make-up in terms of its transient and permanent populations – tourists, economic migrants, and local residents – and the central issue facing the city of the gradual erosion of its historical infrastructure owing to excesses of commercialism and the material effects of flooding, in this article Nicolas Whybrow ponders the continuing role of aesthetics in an urban context. In particular, he considers how both Brodsky’s perception of the effects of the historical environment and contemporary instances of artistic intervention or engagement with the city – official (as part of the globally renowned Biennale) and unofficial (in the form of graffiti writing) – might position users of public space in the light of increased attempts to implement formal controls in the interests of security. Nicolas Whybrow is Associate Professor (Reader) and Head of Department in the School of Theatre, Performance, and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. His most recent books are Art and the City (2011) and, as editor, Performing Cities (2014).

Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Elmina's Kitchen was a landmark in British theatre history as the first drama by an indigenous black writer to be staged in London's commercial West End. The play's success since its premiere at the Royal National Theatre included a national tour and a season at Center Stage, Baltimore, directed by August Wilson's director Marion McClinton. In this interview with Deirdre Osborne, Kwei-Armah testifies to Wilson's considerable influence and the inspiration he derives from Wilson's project to account for the history of black people's experience in every decade of the twentieth century. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams.

In this article Victoria Hunter considers notions of spatial translation, ‘present-ness’, and ‘embodied reflexivity’ within site-specific dance performance. Through a discussion of the author's site-specific dance installation entitled Project 3, she explores choreographic processes that aimed to facilitate, transform, and heighten the lived experience of site by the performer and the audience through phenomenologically informed movement inquiry. Forming part of the author's practice-led PhD investigation into the relationship between the site and the creative process, the performance was the third in a trilogy of site-specific works exploring the potential for site-specific dance performance to ‘reveal’ the site through movement, challenging both performers and audience members to engage with new ways of experiencing the site-world. Victoria Hunter is a practitioner-researcher and lecturer in dance at the University of Leeds. Her research is practice-led and is concerned with the nature of dance-making processes within site-specific choreography. She completed her PhD in site-specific dance performance in December 2009.

This paper evaluates the development of performative theories inspired by practice in the evolution of Lizbeth Goodman's research and SMARTlab's fifteen-year oeuvre. In this piece, Goodman outlines the methodology of ‘performing in the wishing tense’, analyzing the development of her own practice from television to live theatre to broadcast and multimedia to telematics and online learning ‘stages’, to radio, and then to web presence. As the subtitle of the article suggests, Goodman has evolved a methodology for her team that has been influenced by the work of one of her academic mentors, the late Clive Barker, author of Theatre Games, and that has been extended in parallel explorations of play, time, space, and voicing in the work of women, people with disabilities and disadvantaged groups worldwide, here discussed from earliest stages to current collaborations. This work has been extrapolated to show how those with disabilities that prevent free movement and speech can benefit from interactive screenic or telematic performance tools that empower a sense of movement and play: a ‘theatre games’ rubric translated into multimedia performance modes, using technology tools created by the team. She discusses the place of the (damaged or fractured) body of the theorist in relation to the bodies of the people she directs and whose words and movements she choreographs. Written specifically as a ‘response’ to Barker's work, this piece maps the journey of SMARTlab's performances around the globe and through the recent history of multimedia, ending with a postscript describing a collaborative game based on the role-play theories of Barker and on the ‘liveness’ of what Goodman calls ‘the wishing tense’ of lost languages, including body languages. Much of the performance material referred to is available online, and DVD versions can be provided upon request.

In this article Frank Camilleri discusses the historical and professional links between Ingemar Lindh and Jerzy Grotowski, with a specific focus on the nature and implications of their separate work on physical action. Lindh's practice, particularly his research on the ‘disinterested act’, is read in the context of Grotowski's ‘doing’ in Art as Vehicle. The individual work of the two practitioners on vocal and vibration techniques is seen as integral to their research on physical action. Frank Camilleri is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent and Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project (Malta). He served as Academic Coordinator of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta from 2004 to 2008, and in 2007 co-founded Icarus Publishing Enterprise with Odin Teatret and the Grotowski Institute.

In 1897 audiences welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson's new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage, and his sane, intelligent Prince was received as an exciting departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell's own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so warmly greeted, critics describing her playing as ‘curiously weak’ and ‘unconvincing and unimpressive’. Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblematic of the prettiness and pathos exemplified by Ellen Terry, and instead offered a vacant, depressive, ‘beaten’ Ophelia. In this article, Fiona Gregory examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress's own experience of mental illness and the notorious ‘rest cure’. The reception of the performance is read in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness, as well as of responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity in the visual arts. Ultimately, Campbell's performance of Ophelia can be read as a ‘witness account’ of neurasthenia and the ‘rest cure’, to stand alongside texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, and has published work on the career of actress Judith Anderson, Australian cultural history, and Victorian and Edwardian writers. She is currently undertaking a wide-ranging study of actresses and mental illness from the nineteenth century to the present day, drawing on historical examples and literary and cultural representations to consider the intersections of ‘hysteria’ and the ‘histrionic’.

This paper was prepared for the ‘Postmodernism and Spirituality’ conference held at the University of Central Lancashire in April this year, and Ruth Quinn has now reworked the piece in the light of Clive Barker's article in NTQ69, ‘In Search of the Lost Mode: Improvisation and All that Jazz’. Ruth Quinn first studied Theology at Oxford, but has been teaching Drama and Theatre Studies for eleven years, currently at the University of Central Lancashire within the Contemporary Performing Arts Department. Here she outlines some of the key elements of improvisation and how the dynamic between self and other develops in an actor's training.

Once Arnold Daly and Bernard Shaw had got through their baptisms of fire in the transatlantic theatre of the 1890s, the circumstances for their future collaboration must have seemed propitious to them both. However, the Irish-American's inflexibility and the Anglo-Irishman's passion for control led to the fracturing of the relationship within the span of a few years in the first decade of the new century. The exposure of their work – in tandem in American vaudeville and later as competitors on the English variety stage – marked points of their disagreement and quirks in their difficult personalities as they scrambled for audiences who rarely appreciated them as much as both felt they deserved. Leigh Woods, Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the breakdown of a partnership that launched one man on a course to oblivion and the other on a path to greater glory.

In this article Mireia Aragay and Clara Escoda examine James Macdonald's Royal Court Theatre production of Martin Crimp's triptych Fewer Emergencies (2005) in the wake of recent critical assessments of Crimp's work in relation to Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic paradigm. By focusing on light design, the authors suggest that Macdonald's staging of the play productively enhanced the tension inherent in Crimp's text between dramatic and postdramatic elements. Light was conceived in postdramatic terms as a major component of the mise-en-scène, synaesthetically interacting with the linguistic material in a way that necessitated the spectators’ active processing of all onstage signs and, ultimately, their critical examination of their own ethical and political positioning with respect to the late-capitalist social and cultural order. Mireia Aragay is a Senior Lecturer in English drama and theatre at the University of Barcelona. She is co-editor of British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics, and Academics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Clara Escoda has recently completed a PhD thesis on Martin Crimp's theatre at the University of Barcelona, where she lectures in English literature.

In this article David Overend proposes a concept of ‘audience’ that accounts for a complex process of fluctuation between observing or spectating performance as part of a wider group, and becoming part of the aesthetic – forming individual relationships with the artwork and its environment. It is proposed that developing Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ as a model for ‘relational theatre practice’ responds to the continually shifting modes of engagement of those encountering and becoming part of a performance event. Focusing on the Arches arts centre in Glasgow, and drawing on the theory of clubbing, Overend develops a performance for a club night, comparing the experience of the clubbing crowd to that of a theatre audience in order to interrogate the relationship of two cultural practices that remain largely autonomous within the day-to-day operations of the site. Midland Street (September 2009) was a one-off performance for ‘Death Disco’, the monthly electro club night at the Arches. Using cars parked outside the venue, a chaotic poker game, and an array of overtly theatrical characters, including a clown and a pack of urban animals, the performance attempted to move outside the boundaries of the theatre programme as well as the studio theatre space, entering another dynamic relational realm, which is central to the Arches' cultural identity and funding structures. Combining a practical and theoretical approach, this research interrogates Bourriaud's relational aesthetic model through its application to the development of theatre practice within the specific context of an arts venue.

In this article, Angela Butler explores postdigital community through an analysis of Complicité’s The Encounter. All facets of personal and civic life are permeated by the digital to such a degree that we are living through a period termed ‘the postdigital’. Postdigital communities are commonly formed, and nearly always sustained, through online networks. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s utopian performative and Victor Turner’s communitas, the article argues that rather than acting as an ancillary commentary platform, postdigital communities are now a principal component of certain theatrical experiences. With increasingly isolated lives, there is an evident appeal to work that taps into the joy of being alone, together. Angela Butler is an independent scholar based in Dublin who works in the technology sector. Cultural transformation is the central pillar of her ongoing research. With an eye to new and future technologies, her work is concerned with posthumanism, identities in transformation, and affective encounters.

For many, the death of Joan Littlewood on 20 September 2002 at the age of 87 marked the end of a theatrical era – though in practice she had lived an increasingly reclusive life following her move to France and the death of her partner Gerry Raffles in 1975, interrupted only in 1994 by the publication of an autobiography, Joan's Book. Clive Barker, Co-Editor of NTQ, became a member of Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company in 1955, shortly after the change from a touring policy to a building-based company at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, had led to the departure of Ewan MacColl and others of the original group, and subsequently to the displacement of other members as critical success led to West End transfers. What follows is not a dutiful obituary but a highly personal memoir of the years that followed, and provides an ironic contrast between Joan's own published recollections and the experience of one of her ‘slags’ – liable to be called on to do anything and everything. Joan's own recollection of Clive Barker was that ‘You could only do three things. Catatonics, menace, and I forget what the third was.’ Here, with fearful glances over his shoulder for an apparition at the window, Clive Barker reminds her, and adds a few other corrigenda to Joan's Book.

Traditional Chinese theatre seems to appeal to audiences across the world more for its exquisite acting than for its literary qualities. Yet Mei Lanfang, Tang Xianzu and Li Yu all assert that good acting must be firmly rooted in its literary base. What compelled these masters to go out of their way to emphasize the importance of the written text, argues William H. Sun, was precisely the failure of many traditional actors to take it seriously, preferring to rely on superficial virtuosities. From this constant struggle in traditional Chinese theatre between a theoretical respect for textual quality and practical emphasis on performance has emerged the peculiar paradox of acting here explored. The author, William H. Sun, is a Shanghai-born playwright, author, and associate professor of drama at Macalester College. A contributing editor of TDR, he has taught at Tufts University, California State University, Northridge, and the Shanghai Theatre

The received wisdom regarding the composition of the audience for Shakespeare's theatre has shifted in accordance with the social assumptions of the times – from Alfred Harbage's assertion of a popular, homogeneous audience, evolved for the egalitarian 'forties, to Ann Jennalie Cook's argument for a ‘privileged’ audience, put forward in the elitist 'eighties. While Andrew Gurr's Playgoing in Shakespeare's London corrects the worst excesses of both views, it remains dependent upon a great deal of inference from inadequate documentation, often directed to other purposes, and sometimes upon necessary guesswork, however rooted in common-sense. Caroline Gardiner teaches and researches in the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, whence have emerged the most detailed attempts to ‘profile’ the theatregoing populace of contemporary London: and here she suggests that some of the approaches and even the findings of modern audience researchers may shed new light on the controversy. Sometimes the results are surprising – and include the possibility that, relative to the pool of population available, theatre is now actually a more popular activity than in Shakespeare's London. However, she concludes that, overall, the percentage attending the theatre has remained remarkably constant, and constantly low.

David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947, is one of the most talented and eagerly watched young playwrights in America today, whose work has also found a ready response among British audiences. After such plays as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). American Buffalo (1975) and Edmond (1982), his Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), dedicated to Harold Pinter, had its world premiere in London at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, and subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for the best American play in 1984. In the same year, American Buffalo (seen briefly on Broadway in 1977) won an award for best revival, while the London production of Edmond, which opened at the Royal Court in December 1985, was favourably received by English critics in contrast to its mixed reception in New York. In addition to Mamet's work for the stage, he has written the screenplays for the films The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Noteworthy for their sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of American speech, including its unmistakable penchant for banalities and obscenities. Mamet's best plays, as the accompanying essay demonstrates, carry with them an implicit attack on American business values, usually through a confrontation between two individuals, one of whom tries to exploit or dominate the other. The interview which follows was conducted in New York City on 2 January 1986 following a performance of Mamet's latest work, a double bill of one–act plays entitled The Shawl and Prairie du Chien, selected by Mamet's friend and close associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher, to reopen the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.