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

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 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.

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.

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 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’.

Back in 1977, Alan Plater contributed an article to TQ25 celebrating twenty-five years as a writer for stage and television. But his first play for television was not screened until 1962 – hence the different anniversary which here provides the occasion for his reflections on changes in the medium and its treatment of drama (and dramatists) over the succeeding four decades. As a stage writer, he established special relationships with Stoke-on-Trent, Humberside, and the North-East – where his Close the Coalhouse Door played to tremendous local acclaim, but to metropolitan disinterest when it reached the West End. But while his stage work has remained resolutely committed to the parts the critics seldom reach, as a writer for television he has both kept his own entirely distinctive voice, as in the Beiderbecke sequence, and remained an ever-reliable contributor to series from Z Cars in the 'sixties to Midsomer Murders in the new millennium, with excursions into glossy period dramatizations such as the seven-part Fortunes of War. Here, he reflects on the losses of spontaneity and creative freedom which have accompanied technical innovation and increasing bureaucracy, and offers some hopes for changes in direction to restore what was once the glory of British TV drama. This article is based on an inaugural lecture Alan Plater gave at the University of Bath in March 2002.

Before the October Revolution, political exiles and Jewish refugees spread the image of Russia as a vast prison, riven by violence and corruption. After the Revolution, émigrés who scattered across the globe broadcast their idea of a fabulous, high-spirited Russia. Cabaret – an arena for theatrical innovation, stylistic experimentation, and avant-garde audacity – was a choice medium to dramatize this idea to non-Russian audiences. Throughout the 1920s, émigré cabarets enjoyed great popularity: Nikita Baliev's Chauve- Souris in New York, Jurij Jushnij's Die Blaue Vogel in Berlin, J. Son's Maschere in Italy, among others. Although the acts were polyglot and the compère pattered away in a pidgin version of whichever language was current, the chief attraction was an artificial Russian - ness. Cabarets promulgated a vision of a fairy-tale, toy-box Russia, akin to the pictures on Palekh boxes. This candy-box depiction was then perpetuated by nightclubs staffed by waiters in Cossack blouses and balalaika orchestras. Nostalgic regret for a factitious homeland deepened among the departed. In contrast, Soviet Russia came to look even more hostile and desolate. With time, the distance between the lives they had lived and those portrayed to foreigners increased, and became unmoored from reality. Laurence Senelick's most recent books include Soviet Theater: a Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky), the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015), and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk here discuss with Maria Shevtsova The Wooster Group's work with the Royal Shakespeare Company on Troilus and Cressida and the challenges posed for them by this joint venture. The project was initially proposed by Rupert Goold, but was brought to fruition by playwright Mark Ravenhill, his first directing experience. Troilus and Cressida was part of the World Shakespeare Festival, during which all Shakespeare's plays were performed by different companies from countries across the globe. The Festival, four years in the making and spanning eight months, was part of the cultural programme of the Olympic Games held in London in 2012. Troilus and Cressida was first performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 3 to 18 August 2012, and then at the Riverside Studios in London from 24 August to 8 September. This conversation took place at the Riverside Studios on 30 August 2012, and pairs with the discussion of The Wooster Group's Hamlet, the company's first Shakespeare production, published in NTQ 114 (May 2013). Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Her most recent book is the co-authored Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

In 1986 professional theatre practitioners working in two underprivileged neighbourhoods in greater Tel Aviv in Israel created in collaboration with the local residents two large-scale productions. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem studies these rare encounters between professional public theatre and amateur, community-based theatre in Israel, employing a method similar to that of the historian who employs micro-history in order to reveal the excluded past of muted groups in a given society. Both productions – including the intentions of their creators and participants, the power struggles, and the results – serve as an historical record rich in information regarding Israeli society; and through the micro-history presented here the social and cultural role of the institutional theatre in general, and in Israel in particular, is also explored. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a senior lecturer, researcher, and practitioner, chair of the Faculty MA Program of Expressivity and Creativity in the Arts, and Head of Community-Based Theatre Studies in the Theatre Department of Tel Aviv University. She is also a community-based theatre facilitator/director and a trained actress who uses her acting experience in her research and teaching. Her recent publications include articles in Theatre Research International, Theory and Criticism, Social Identities, Israeli Sociology, and Research in Drama Education, and the full-length studies, Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (Haifa University Press, 2010) and Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Comedy, argues Laurence Senelick, is the form most indigenous to the Russian stage; so while its great players may still vie to make Hamlet their own, it is the comic figure of Khlestakov in Gogol's Government Inspector (Revizor) who most fully absorbs and enacts the concerns of the times in which the role is recreated. Here, while tracing the history of the role during the nineteenth century, Laurence Senelick is chiefly concerned with its performance by Mikhail Chekhov in Stanislavsky's first post-Revolutionary production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1921. Stanislavsky's earlier revival in 1908 had placed Khlestakov amidst a ‘community of fools’; now – reflecting the view of Gogol's anti-hero given by Dmitry Merezhkovsky in his influential essay of 1906, ‘Gogol and the Devil’ – Chekhov accomplished the challenging task of embodying a nullity, an ‘empty vessel’, the odd one out in a ‘normal’ society which he manages briefly to plunge into delirium. Laurence Senelick is Distinguished Professor at Tufts University, and has published widely in the fields of Russian theatre, the history of popular entertainments, sex and gender and performance, and theatre iconography. His most recent works include A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (Scarecrow Press, 2007), The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov as translator and editor (Norton, 2005), and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (Routledge, 2000).

You grew up in Chicago? Yes. And then came to New York, to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a school of theatre where I came back later to work as an actor and director, I kind of stumbled upon a career as a playwright. I became a playwright because I was an actor and I started directing because I wasn't a very good actor and I started writing because I was working with very young actors and there was nothing for them to do. I started writing because nothing existed for twelve 23-year-old actors to do.

The foregoing article by Jan Kott explored the nature of gender in As You Like It largely by looking forward to later analogues of androgyny: but here Lesley Soule examines the character of Rosalind in close relationship to traditions of popular theatre and performance on which Shakespeare himself could draw. She points out how our own two-centuries-old love affair with an idealized heroine has, despite some recent feminist modifications of the character-myth, distorted our reading of the play, obscuring the fact that the text describes a performance in which the controlling presence is not a female performer but a male adolescent – a figure whose long theatrical antecedence she explores. This portrayal by a pert boy Roscius of Shakespeare's boy-girl character the author dubs ‘Cocky Ros’ – a figure who first represents and then subverts the feminine fiction of ‘Rosalind’, thus providing a paradigm of character-actor interplay. Only by giving authority to such subversive, gender-free performers, she argues, can we challenge the power wielded by theatrical illusion over our ideas of identity, gender, and love. Lesley Soule, who has taught at the University of British Columbia and at Polytechnic South West, is currently completing a study of theories of the character-actor relationship.

In an earlier issue of New Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.

An earlier version of this paper was written by Harriet Walter in December 1991 for the second Divina Conference in Torino, in response to an invitation to speak from the actress's point of view about playing Shakespeare's women. In the event, she ranged much more widely across the typology of women's roles in the theatre, and the actress's response to their challenges – and limitations. The paper has since been delivered, in roughly the present form at the University of Cambridge Graduate Drama Seminar in February 1992, and in March 1992 was read in extract and discussed on a BBC Radio programme in the Art Works Series for the Open University. Opposite, Lizbeth Goodman sets the paper in the context of Harriet Walter's theatrical career.

The pressures of Thatcherism on theatre funding in the 'eighties were severe, but the early harshness was tempered by several factors. One was the positive influence of the Cork Report, particularly on touring and experimental theatre. Another, the authors believe, was a careful strategy of reallocation of funding to support creativity in English theatre, notably through the touring franchise scheme. Here, they analyze in detail the ways in which the English Arts Council operated the scheme in an attempt to revitalize aspects of English theatre from 1986 onwards, trace the change in the values of ‘political’ theatre over that period, and critically examine some received ideas in the light of the available evidence. Ian Brown is Dean of Arts and Professor of Theatre at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford. Douglas Brown is Assistant Director, Scottish Centre for Cultural Management and Policy, at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.

John McGrath is one of those few writers who, having begun his career in a success-fully orthodox manner, came to prefer working through ‘alternative’ channels – notably, in his formation and continuing work with the two 7:84 Companies, England and Scotland, their names reflecting the persistent fact that 84 per cent of the nation's wealth is owned by seven per cent of the population. Thus, McGrath's early work as one of the creators of the vintage TV series Z Cars, and his major ‘commercial’ success with the film version of his play Events while Guarding the Bofors Gun, has been succeeded by numerous plays and productions less familiar to conventional audiences, but which have made an enormous and often stirring impact in touring venues (frequently of a less expected kind) both north and south of the border. The full range of his work is charted in the ‘NTQ Checklist’ which follows this interview, and its development through to the mid– 'seventies was discussed in the earlier interview with McGrath in TQ19. reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). Here, Tony Mitchell talks with John McGrath about some of his more recent work, and discusses his views on the nature of popular theatre, as set out in his important study of the subject, A Good Night Out (Methuen, 1981).

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).