In this article Pompila Burcică traces the work and legal conditions in which Hungarian theatre professionals – company directors and actors – operated as a national minority of middle-class status in Greater Romania after 1918. Their attempts at representing Hungarian culture in the public space, as revealed in their business correspondence with the Romanian state, placed theatre professionals not at the vanguard of a collective action on behalf of a minority and its cultural life, but at the forefront of civic engagement and individual private initiative that led to economic recovery and development, thus illustrating the array of civic choices and economic opportunities for minorities holding Romanian citizenship in a nation state. The article focuses on two issues: the work environment for minorities that helped them adjust professionally and negotiate and exert a civic identity in the new nation state; and the degree to which a cultural field such as theatre was actually treated as an economic entrerprise, free of political interference. These civic and economic concerns accounted for the success of these theatre entrepreneurs, operating their businesses under the control of a paternalistic state.

In 1882, a critic of the journal Theatre noted that ‘the theatrical life of the present day might be described as a round of glorified strolling. The ‘circuits’ of Bristol, Norwich, and York of the last century are now replaced by those of the United States, South Africa, India, and Australia, and a modern actor thinks as little of a season in Melbourne or New York as his grandfather did of a week’s ‘starring’ in Edinburgh.’ Yet the story of how these Western theatre companies reached audiences in the faraway lands of the British Empire and Asia is still relatively untold. In this article Kaori Kobayashi explores in detail some itineraries around the turn of the twentieth century of these travelling companies, many of them relatively obscure, showing that the companies had a particular and significant impact on the development of Shakespearean performance and interpretation in the East. In essence, it is impossible to understand the rise of ‘Asian Shakespeare’ without also grasping how Western touring companies helped shape the East’s engagement with the West’s most canonical dramatist. Kaori Kobayashi is Professor of English at Nagoya City University, author of The Cultural History of The Taming of The Shrew (in Japanese, 2007), and editor of Shakespeare Performance Studies in Japan (in Japanese, 2010).

Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman dramatizes the interrogation and torture of a horror fiction writer, Katurian, whose stories have been re-enacted in ‘real’ life without his knowledge. The audience gradually finds out that the murders are the crimes of Michal, Katurian's mentally retarded brother, who had been physically tortured by his parents in childhood, until Katurian murdered them. Upon Michal's confession, Katurian has to kill his brother to save him from the suffering and torture to come. Subsequently, it becomes clear that the two interrogators also suffer from the violent childhoods they re-enact with the violence they inflict on their suspects. It appears that all kinds of violence in the play are somehow justified, and treated in such a complex way that it becomes hard to draw boundaries between victims and perpetrators. The depiction of violence can, however, also be examined in dimensions that trigger and shape each other: the violence of the totalitarian state directed against the individual and the artist; domestic violence; the fictional violence found in Katurian's stories. Read through Slavoy Žižek's theory of violence, which also highlights the interconnected nature of its several kinds, The Pillowman can be observed to create a panoramic view of its subject. Mahinur Akşehir-Uygur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Manisa Celal Bayar University in Manisa, Turkey. Her areas of interest are satirical literature, contemporary fiction, and women's literature.

Surveys are used to define an audience in a quantifiable way. Awareness of the typical gender, age, and income of their patrons, along with their rating of a theatre's facilities, help theatre producers to address an audience's needs. However, producers seldom explore the audience response to a specific performance – something that is difficult to quantify. Thus, the audience's interaction with the performance – whether with particular actors, the space configuration, or with fellow spectators – is neglected in favour of such demographics as age, income, and occupation. Christopher Olsen suggests that surveys handed out to audience members might benefit from a more qualitative approach based on semiotic analysis. He asked sixty professional theatres in the USA – ranging from major repertory institutions to small theatres targeting specific audiences – to send examples of recent audience surveys they have conducted. Using the surveys (of which the most extensive is reproduced in full), as a guide, he tabulates the most common questions asked, and offers examples of further survey questions guided by semiotic principles. Chris Olsen is currently an adjunct professor at Montgomery College and Shenandoah University in the Washington, DC, area. Having written his dissertation on the Arts Lab phenomenon in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he is now working on a book about the second wave of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in New York.

Many of Copeau's students and colleagues in the first half of the twentieth century used a specific vocabulary to describe successful performance. The performer was ‘in a trance’, or ‘possessed’, or in an ‘altered state of being’. Decroux spoke of ‘evicting the tenant from the apartment so that God could come to live there’. For Copeau and others, the mask was an important tool in the discovery of this optimum state. In this article, Thomas Leabhart suggests that the ideas of the American theatre theoretician David Cole might help us to explore what this language means in terms of shamanic voyages. Thomas Leabhart is Resident Artist and Professor of Theatre at Pomona College in California, editor of Mime Journal, and author of Modern and Post-Modern Mime (Macmillan, 1999). He is also a member of the artistic staff of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and teaches workshops and performs internationally. Leabhart studied with Etienne Decroux from 1968 to 1972, and served as his teaching assistant and translator.

In his major work on Theatre Games (Methuen, 1987), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end - the development of acting skills through the enrichment of the rehearsal process. In NTQ14 (1988). he described how he came to develop ‘games workshops’ for non-theatrical purposes, and considered the value of games-playing for adults by analogy with the function of the ‘kissing games’ of his own childhood and adolescence. In this article (based on a paper presented in November 1988 at the conference on theatre and education in Mohammédia, Morocco), he considers our changing perception of the relationship between the two senses of ‘play’, and the way in which ‘games’ have been institutionalized to avoid their inherent threat to an organized, work-disciplined society-a trend still being reinforced, as the improvisatory element of drama in schools becomes subject to the rigours of evaluation and examination. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.

Theatre of a kind familiar to western audiences can be found in present-day Tehran – as Clive Barker's contribution to the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section later in this issue testifies. But Iran also has a traditional performing mode little known in the West – the Taziyeh, first performed in Britain at the Islamic Cultural Centre in London, and elsewhere, during April 2000. Taziyeh is a passion play, which like its medieval Christian antecedents remains inextricably linked with its religious purpose – the commemoration of the martyrdom of the third Imam of the Shi'ite Muslims, Ali Hussein, and his family in the desert of Kerbala. This relationship sustains a dramaturgy which diverges significantly from western forms, and seems at times almost contradictory – with actors who clearly know their parts by heart none the less required to read them from their scripts, to sustain both the immediacy and the spiritual truth of the performance. In this account of the origins, development, and present state of the Taziyeh, Reza Ale-Mohammed resolves such contradictions through an analysis of the play's distinctive quality, its performance, and its relationship with the audiences it reaches and the faith it expresses. Reza Ale-Mohammed recently completed his doctorate on the Taziyeh at the University of Warwick.

This study discusses the potentials and challenges of Zoom theatre performances during the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the utilization and applicability of videoconferencing software Zoom, and other streaming software compatible with it, in creating a viable performance option for theatre practitioners and audiences during mandatory social distancing. Such software can be a strategy for social inclusion, alleviating the adverse effects of extended quarantine. The article also discusses the technical and performative aspects of Zoom theatre, pointing out its pros and cons. It uses a critical and analytical approach to performances of two Zoom plays, Pandemic Therapy and Corona Chicken (Part Two), revealing how the playwright, dramaturg, and actors manage to present a live theatrical experience capable of engaging audiences and promoting social interaction. Khaled Mostafa Karam is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Suez University in Egypt and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, USA. He has published eleven articles on the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science and drama. Galal Mohamed Naguib is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Suez University and author of several articles in the fields of demographic analysis and the sociology of art.

Too often, western thinking about the Polish theatre is limited by its ‘exportable’ names – or, more insidiously, by the expectation that it should satisfy our own assumptions about how theatre ‘ought’ to be participating in the national struggle. Zygmunt Hubner is probably more typical of theatre professionals in Poland. As director of the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, he neither supports the government, nor regards himself primarily as a maker of ‘political’ theatre: and here he describes the dilemma of the theatre worker who, while depending on state subsidy, nevertheless wishes to speak to his audiences in ways that matter. It is a dilemma which seems scarcely less conducive to arousing a ‘professional's guilty conscience’ in the theatre of the so-called ‘free world’.

The ways in which we receive and perceive what we taste, hear, touch, and smell all serve as potential resources for our understanding of an artistically mediated event. Though some modes of perception are more usually associated with the visual than the performing arts, the development of forms of Live Art has begun to challenge our understanding of how the conventions of theatricalizing experience can be modulated. Using methodologies drawn from a phenomenological perspective, Stephen Di Benedetto here examines the way in which Robert Wilson's installation, H.G., presented at the Clink, near London Bridge, in 1995, triggered a journey in sensory perception for its spectators, and served as an exemplar of the ways in which the full range of sensory resources can be ‘theatrically’ deployed. Stephen Di Benedetto, having received his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London, for his thesis on Playwriting as a Visual Art, is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at the School of Theatre, University of Houston, and is now actively engaged in research on the body in contemporary Live Art and new Irish and English playwriting.

John Cage (1912–1993) is widely regarded as one of the most pervasively influential figures in the arts in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Although best known as a composer, Cage expanded perceptions of what could constitute theatrical performance, and in this essay Natalie Crohn Schmitt assesses the nature and significance of Cage's intermedia performances and their immediate influence on other such work. Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Northwestern UP, 1990) is an analysis of contemporary theatre based on Cage's aesthetics, and essays of hers on Cage have appeared in other journals and in anthologies devoted to the artist. She has previously written in NTQ on Stanislavski (NTQ 8) and on performance theory in its historic moment (NTQ 23). Schmitt is Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay was originally published in a slightly different form in Japanese in a Cage commemorative issue of the Japanese journal Music Today.

In two earlier articles, Steve Nicholson has explored ways in which the the right-wing theatre of the 1920s both shaped and reflected the prevailing opinions of the establishment – in NTQ29 (February 1992) looking at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed on the stage, and in NTQ30 (May 1992) at the ways in which domestic industrial conflicts were presented. He concludes the series with three case studies of the role of the Lord Chamberlain, on whose collection of unpublished manuscripts now housed in the British Library his researches have been based, in preventing more sympathetic – or even more objective – views of Soviet and related subjects from reaching the stage. His analysis is based on a study of the correspondence over the banning of Geo A. DeGray's The Russian Monk, Hubert Griffith's Red Sunday, and a play in translation by a Soviet dramatist, Sergei Tretiakov's Roar China. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.

In the first of two essays employing academic discourses of cultural exchange to examine the intra-cultural situation in contemporary British society, published in NTQ 61, Barnaby King analyzed the relationship between Asian arts and mainstream arts in Britain on both a professional and a community level. In this second essay he takes a similar approach towards African–Caribbean theatre in Britain, comparing the Black theatre initiatives of the regional theatres with the experiences of theatre workers themselves based in Black communities. He shows how work which relates to a specific ‘other’ culture has to struggle to get funding, while work which brings Black Arts into a mainstream ‘multicultural’ programme has fewer problems. In the process, he specifically qualifies the claim that the West Yorkshire Playhouse provides for Black communities as well as many others, while exploring the alternative, community-based projects of ‘Culturebox’, based in the deprived Chapeltown district of Leeds. Barnaby King is a theatre practitioner based in Leeds, who completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre in 1998. He is now working with theatre companies and small-scale venues – currently the Blah Blah Blah company and the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University – to develop community participation in

In Zimbabwean society, what may not be spoken sometimes becomes acceptable in song – whether to avoid social taboos and enable a wife to complain against her mother-in-law, or in broadening the boundaries of political protest. In this article, Martin Rohmer looks back to the ways in which song enabled forms of protest against forced labour and other aspects of colonial rule – in times of outward compliance as well as of direct struggle – and considers how urban theatre groups in independent Zimbabwe have adapted the tradition to their own, contemporary ends. Martin Rohmer spent almost two years studying Zimbabwean theatre when a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, and completed his doctorate on Theatre and Performance in Zimbabwe at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1997. Since then he has been working in the field of cultural management for the Young Artists' Festival in Bayreuth. The present paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in November 1996.

Report on the seventh year of the Shakespeare Festival held in Gyula in south-eastern Hungary.

Real or imaginary, babies provided the Victorian public with a favourite spectacle, featuring in sensational, domestic, and farcical plays, often at the centre of the plot. Impossible to train, their deployment was not without hazard. Under scrutiny here are the range of their manifestations and the effects they could generate. Warren's baby farce Nita's First (1884) emerges as a precursor to The Importance of Being Earnest; Morton's nameless Children in the Wood (1793) swell into music-hall stars by the time of the Drury Lane pantomime of 1888. The departure of real babies from the stage was dictated by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1889—legislation which had in turn been influenced by the rhetoric of moral reformers which constructed all theatre children as vulnerable, exploited ‘babies’ in need of protection, not applause. The author, Anne Varty, is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Founded in Boston by Stacy Klein in 1982, initially as a women's theatre, Double Edge moved to Ashfield in Massachusetts in 1997 to the rural complex now known as the Farm Center. The Farm comprises rehearsal rooms, living quarters, technical workshops, an ante-room to welcome and dine spectators, a magnificent loft-like performance space, and acres of land with trees and a pond. The whole is set against a soft New England landscape, and the Farm's grounds are the almost idyllic environment for the summer promenade spectacles that, like its more formal productions indoors, provide a focus for locals, sustaining their sense of community and even the myth of community nurtured historically in these parts. In this conversation of 13 and 14 November 2009 (which was extended in August 2010 after The Firebird, the summer spectacle of that year), Stacy Klein discusses how local people support Double Edge and otherwise form a long-term relationship with the company, now visited by spectators as well as practitioners from further afield – Klein's Polish teachers and mentors among them. Double Edge is a devising company, working with improvisation and free association to form strong visual imagery through pronounced physical movement, which also involves circus skills. This, together with a frequently startling use of objects, is the basis of their magical realism (notably in the unPOSSESSED of 2004, after Don Quixote), a style developed by the company in its rural retreat, and subsequently combined with the tonalities of grotesque surrealism. The Republic of Dreams, for instance, inspired by the life and work of Bruno Schulz, enters the world of vivid dreams, powerful memories, and nostalgic echoes, the whole evoking an evanescent past into which its agile, versatile performers – some singing, some dancing – tune in, like ghosts absent and present in one and the same instance. The two productions noted here are part of what Klein calls a ‘Cycle’ – a grouping of works that have evolved over a number of years as separate pieces, some beginning life as a summer show before they grow and link with the other pieces of a given Cycle, which is almost always a trilogy. Gradual, consistent development is key to the company's work, as is its belief in a distinct company ethos, which its trainees are invited to share. Maria Shevtsova, who enjoyed the Farm's hospitality when she talked with Stacy Klein, holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In this article Stephen Barber investigates performances that take the form of last works by their performers and specifically utilize the distinctive medium of last-gasp monologues which intimate imminent death or unconsciousness. He assesses three such final performances, across theatre and dance – by Ko Murobushi, Antonin Artaud, and Patrice Chéreau – arguing that such performances often engage in a combative manner with processes of representation, and are able to articulate strong currents of memory and anger, often in fragmentary form. These performances also appear prescient for theatrical works today which deal with the vocal evocation of forthcoming calamities, whether corporeal or ecological. Stephen Barber is a Research Professor in Visual Culture at the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, Kingston University. He is the author of several books on the work of Antonin Artaud, including Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993), and most recently Muybridge: the Eye in Motion (2012), Performance Projections (2014), and Berlin Bodies (forthcoming, 2017).

In this article, Gwynne Edwards examines recent London productions of Lorca's Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, two great Spanish plays which, in comparison with the works of Ibsen and Chekhov, are performed relatively rarely in the United Kingdom. He argues that, because these plays are among Lorca's rural tragedies and are deeply rooted in the soil and traditions of southern Spain, their performance and translation require a sound knowledge both of that background and of Lorca's dramatic style. In this context, the two productions at the Almeida and the National Theatre are seen to be a useful guide to the pitfalls of staging Lorca's plays in a cultural environment which is very different from his own. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a specialist in Spanish theatre. Ten of his translations of Lorca's plays have been published by Methuen, and most of these have had professional productions. A number of his translations of Golden Age and South American plays have also been published and performed.