Although voice work presents itself as a neutral set of tools that can help actors in performing a text, an analysis of the cultural biases behind voice training reveals that both the underlying ideology and the methods of reading and acting it produces limit the possibilities for feminist performances of Shakespeare. By naturalizing the language and rhythms of the text, by focusing attention on the characters' need for the words as opposed to the dramatist's, voice training denies actors ways of questioning the politics of the playscripts. Sarah Werner has just received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation entitled ‘Acting Shakespeare's Women: Toward a Feminist Methodology’. She has presented papers at a number of conferences, including the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Conference on Medieval Studies, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

In response to the conference on political theatre held last April at the University of Lancaster under the title ‘Points of Contact’, Tim Prentki, Course Director of B.A. Drama and TV Studies at King Alfred's College, Winchester, proposes a new yet very old way of achieving contact between a beleaguered political theatre and its community – the use of the ‘traditionally’ inversionary qualities of carnival to pose highly contemporary questions about the power structures of today's society.

Everybody would agree that agitational political theatre has fallen on hard times, but whether this is due to a changed political climate, a changed theatre, or a more politicized relationship between companies and funding bodies remains a matter for debate. Here, Baz Kershaw adopts a lateral approach to the problem, looking not at dramatized forms of protest but at protest as an action which has itself become increasingly theatricalized – in part owing to its own tactics and choices, in part to the ways in which media coverage creates its own version of politics as performance. After looking at the major focuses of protest in two decades after 1968, Baz Kershaw examines the ways in which political and performance theory has and has not addressed the issue. Presently Head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, his previous publications include Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (with Tony Coult, 1983) and the Politics of Performance: Political Theatre as Cultural Intervention (1992).

The explosion of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre that dominated the British stage in the 'nineties has had both vocal champions and detractors. Here, Ken Urban examines the emergence of this kind of theatre within the cultural context of ‘cool Britannia’ and suggests that the plays of writers such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane explore the possibilities of cruelty and nihilism as a means of countering cynicism and challenging mainstream morality's interpretation of the world. Ken Urban is a playwright and director, whose plays The Female Terrorist Project and I [hearts] KANT are currently being produced by the Committee Theatre Company in New York City. His play about the first US Secretary of Defense, The Absence of Weather, will premiere in Los Angeles at Moving Arts Theatre Company, which has named it the winner of its national new play award. At the request of the Sarah Kane Estate, Urban directed the New York premiere of her play Cleansed. He teaches Modern Drama and Creative Writing in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. An early version of this article was first presented at the ‘In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s’ conference at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2002.

Created in an American rehearsal room, exported to an English workshop, and developed in Australia, among other places, ‘headphone verbatim theatre’ – also called ‘recorded delivery’ – is a truly global genre. In this article Caroline Wake focuses on the work of two pioneering practitioners, Briton Alecky Blythe and Australian Roslyn Oades, in order to trace the form's history as well as its methods, genres, and theories. In doing so, she considers how audio technology has evolved over the past decade and how the display or disguise of headphones has affected both the production and reception of the form. She identifies three dominant genres of headphone verbatim theatre (the social crisis play, the social justice play, and the social portrait play, as well as three main performance modes – the epic, the naturalistic, and the mixed. The epic has been the most successful thus far, but the naturalistic and mixed modes are, in turn, begetting new ones. Finally, she suggests that in the same way that headphones have rejuvenated verbatim theatre, they might also reinvigorate the discourse on it by offering the opportunity to go beyond the politics of voice and visibility and to turn, instead, to listening. Caroline Wake is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines cultural responses to and representations of refugees and asylum-seekers as well as the role of testimony in law, performance, and visual culture. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as Text & Performance Quarterly, Modern Drama, and History & Memory. She is the co-editor, with Bryoni Trezise, of Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013).

In previous issues of NTQ. we have begun to explore the complex questions raised by the interaction of the study of theatrical performance with other disciplines – notably, in the various interpretations of ‘theatre anthropology’, in the widely divergent approaches to ‘theatre sociology’, and even in terms of its application to quantum theory. Many of these studies have made necessary assumptions in the area of human biology without, however, fully following through their implications. Jean-Marie Pradier. who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Paris 8, here looks at theatre and other modes of performance as ‘biological events’, exploring their importance in the manifestation (and correction) of the way the human body works – in the process touching on areas as diverse as the bio-dramatic function of dreams, the significance of neo-natal rhythms, and olfactory stimulation as one of the influences upon crowd behaviour. Acknowledging the need for further research in the field. Pradier argues for the importance of the ‘body in performance’ being perceived in its biological context.

When I was asked if I would like to reply to Sarah Werner's article in the August issue of NTQ entitled ‘Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Viewpoint’, my first reaction was that it was so unfounded in the reality of practical voice work that it was not worth the time needed to respond. But then, re-reading it, I became incensed at the notion that voice teachers, through the work of freeing the voice, are after some romantic notion of connecting with an idyllic past – a notion so utterly absurd that I spoke with my friends and colleagues, Kristin Linklater and Patsy Rodenburg, and we agreed that Ms. Werner's assumptions must be challenged. As Edgar's words imply in the last speech of King Lear: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ Words hurt, cost, are ugly and violent: but it is my belief that when we reach the point of articulating our dilemmas – it is then that we become free to take action. That is what my work is about. So, to follow are our answers to, and our questions for Ms. Werner.

There is no scholarly consensus about the precise meaning of the term ‘über-marionette’, as coined by Edward Gordon Craig. Is it a life-size marionette? A masked dancer? Or simply a metaphor for an actor who exerts perfect control over his body and emotions? The present article, based, among other sources, on recently discovered material in the Edward Gordon Craig Collection of the National Library of France, gives a brief overview of several perspectives regarding this issue before proposing another hypothesis – that the über-marionette may actually have been a full-body puppet. Patrick Le Bœuf is a library curator at the National Library of France, and was in charge of the Edward Gordon Craig Collection from 2006 to 2009.

Festivals have become a prominent feature of theatre in South Africa today. More than forty such annual events not only provide employment, but constitute a socio-cultural polysystem that serves to ‘eventify’ the output of theatre practitioners and turn everyday life patterns into a significant cultural occasion. Important for the present argument is the role of the festivals as events that foreground relevant social issues. This is well illustrated by the many linked Afrikaans-language festivals which arose after 1994, and which have become a major factor not only in creating, displaying, and eventifying Afrikaans writing and performance, but also in communicating a particular vision of the Afrikaans-speaking and ‘Afrikaner’ cultural context. Using the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn as a case study, in this article Temple Hauptfleisch discusses the nature, content, and impact of this particular festival as a theatrical event, and goes on to explore the polysystemic nature of the festival phenomenon in general. Temple Hauptfleisch is a former head of the Centre for South African Theatre Research (CESAT) and Chair of the University of Stellenbosch Drama Department. He is currently the director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies at Stellenbosch and editor of the South African Theatre Journal. His recent publications include Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror (1997), a chapter in Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2003), and one on South African theatre in Kreatives Afrika: Schriftstellerlnnen über Literatur, Theater und Gesellschaft (2005).

It is not yet ten years since Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking reached the stage of the Royal Court, during its West End exile in 1996; yet the play has already become, with Sarah Kane's Blasted, identified as central to the emergence of so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. While Mark Ravenhill recognized the influence of such writers as Martin Crimp and David Mamet, it was only recently, during a discussion over coffee about a possible screenplay, that he began to consider the effects of both private and public events of 1993 upon his emergence as a writer – the death of a partner, and the infamous murder of a child by other children. In the following article he identifies recurrent concerns in his first three plays which he now sees as a working-out of his responses to a year which was crucial not only to his own personal narrative, but to others for whom the James Bulger murder epitomized all the worst aspects of a society that the Thatcherites claimed no longer to exist. Among Mark Ravenhill's more recent plays have been Mother Clap's Molly House, which transferred from the National Theatre to the Aldwych in 2002, and Totally Over You, written for the 2003 Shell Connections youth theatre season at the National. This article was first presented as the Marjorie Francis Lecture at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, on 5 May 2004.

In this article, Victoria Hunter explores the concept of the ‘here and now’ in the creation of site-specific dance performance, in response to Doreen Massey's questioning of the fixity of the concept of the ‘here and now’ during the recent RESCEN seminar on ‘Making Space’, in which she challenged the concept of a singular fixed ‘present’, suggesting instead that we exist in a constant production of ‘here and nows’ akin to ‘being in the moment’. Here the concept is applied to an analysis of the author's recent performance work created as part of a PhD investigation into the relationship between the site and the creative process in site-specific dance performance. In this context the notion of the ‘here and now’ is discussed in relation to the concept of dance embodiment informed by the site and the genius loci, or ‘spirit of place’. Victoria Hunter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Leeds, who is currently researching a PhD in site-specific dance performance.

The coinings of ‘verbatim theatre’ and the ‘testimony play’ have added new factors to any consideration of documentary drama. It is a form that has been proliferating recently, whether in enacted judgements of public policy – privatization of the railways in David Hare's The Permanent Way, the invasion of Iraq in Called to Account at the Tricycle – or in exploring the ‘truth’ about more private issues. In the following article, Stuart Young questions whether the form is appropriate to the discovery of such ‘truth’, but finds that two recent works in the genre, Aalst and Taking Care of Baby, have effected a more complex and reflexive intervention by emphasizing the process of writing or reporting, thereby drawing attention to the methods of construction in documentary theatre and to the problematic issues inherent in those methods. Stuart Young is Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Theatre Studies programme at the University of Otago. He has published on Chekhov in performance abroad and rewritings of the plays, New Zealand drama, and gay and queer theatre, and also translates Russian and French drama. He is currently working on a documentary theatre project on family violence in New Zealand.

In this article Caroline Heim explores an avenue for the audience's contribution to the theatrical event that has emerged as increasingly important over the past decade: postperformance discussions. With the exception of theatres that actively encourage argument such as the Staatstheater Stuttgart, most extant audience discussions in Western mainstream theatres privilege the voice of the theatre expert. Caroline Heim presents case studies of post-performance discussions held after performances of Anne of the Thousand Days and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which trialled a new model of audience co-creation. An audience text which informs the theatrical event was created, and a new role, that of audience critic, established in the process. Caroline Heim is a lecturer in Performance Studies at Queensland University of Technology. Her PhD examined the changing role of theatre audiences in recent years.

Western assumptions of unthinking Serbian support for the policies of Slobodan Milošević were upset by the success of popular protest in securing his removal in the autumn of 2000. In fact, just three years after his accession to power in 1989, there had already been massive student protests against the Balkan War, and these were repeated and surpassed in the winter of 1996–97, when Milošević tried to disregard the success of the opposition in the local elections of that November. The student protests quickly took a theatricalized form, and their recurrent modes – graffiti, banners, street processions – were successfully carnivalized, to become popular performative events. This feature provides a chronology of the main developments to complement the more analytical study by Milena Dragićević-Šešić of the nature of this organic but ironic response to an authoritarian regime, which gave old traditions a late twentieth-century voice.

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.

The dramatic upsurge of contemporary new writing on British stages in the past decade, and the emergence of a fresh generation of playwrights led by such talents as Mark Ravenhill, Philip Ridley, Joe Penhall, Phyllis Nagy, Patrick Marber, and the late Sarah Kane, has been variously characterized as the ‘New Brutalism’ or even, in Germany, as the ‘Blood and Sperm Generation’. Here, Aleks Sierz summarizes the argument for ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ as the most pertinent and inclusive description for the phenomenon, listing its salient characteristics and suggesting the areas in which it is most vulnerable to criticism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic of Tribune and writes about theatre for several publications. He is the author of In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber, 2001) and teaches journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the In-Yer-Face Theatre: Sarah Kane and the New British Dramaturgy conference at Stendhal University 3, Grenoble, in May 2001.

In this article, Oliver Double examines the process of turning traumatic personal experience into viable stand-up comedy material by offering a detailed account of the creative process behind his 2015 show Break a Leg. Drawing on Bergson, Brecht, and Noël Carroll, he explores the origins of comic ideas in personal observation, and argues for a two-stage process of joke creation. This is fleshed out in a detailed examination of a particular routine, in which he uses Koestler's concept of bisociation to show how an initial observation was shaped into a series of punchlines. He also discusses authenticating strategies which comedians employ to demonstrate that they are recalling their actual experiences, and ways in which the dialogic qualities of stand-up affect empathy and intimacy. Oliver Double is a former professional comedian who is now a Reader in Drama at the University of Kent. He is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (1997), Britain Had Talent: a History of Variety Theatre (2012), and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (2nd edition, 2014). A film of Break a Leg is available on YouTube, and the related podcast Breaking a Leg is accessible via iTunes.

Video technology has been widely available for the last twenty years, and offers possibilities for the documentation of theatrical performance that no previous generation has possessed. What are we doing with these possibilities? Why is it that we are only now taking some timid first steps towards the establishment of national or regional video archives? This article reports some findings from ten years of experimentation with recording formats and analysis, and urges the need for action by theatre practitioners, funding authorities, and university researchers to ensure that the theatrical output of another generation is not lost. The author, Gay McAuley, teaches in French and Performance Studies and is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research in recent years has focused on the semiotics of performance and, in particular, the ways actors use text in the construction of performance. She is currently writing a book called Space in Performance.

This essay is concerned with the history of wild animal training between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, specifically with circus acts involving ‘big cats’. The author, John Stokes, is sympathetic to the view that such performances are inhumane, degrading to animal and human alike, but rather than simply rehearsing familiar attitudes, he subjects the ‘big cat’ act to a performance analysis based on established criteria, in the belief that, if performance theory is to have the widespread application that its advocates claim, then it should be able to elucidate many different kinds of theatrical event. His primary materials are the myriad biographies and autobiographies of wild animal trainers that were produced during the heyday of their art, and which he finds to be frequently characterized by an unexpected thoughtfulness and breadth of experience, besides being highly informative about performance aesthetics. John Stokes is Professor of Modern British Literature in the Department of English, King's College London. He is a regular theatre reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and co-author, together with Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett, of Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time (Cambridge, 1988) and Three Tragic Actresses (Cambridge, 1996).

Following her survey of site-specific performance companies and their understanding of their work and its circumscriptions in NTQ70, Fiona Wilkie here proposes that places as such can be characterized in terms of differing sets of rules in dialogue with one another. She examines one place in particular in order to suggest some principles for approaching site-specific performance. Various spatial experiences – visual, physical, and mythical – are read through a range of attempts to theorize our relationships with space (including Foucault's heterotopia and de Certeau's pedestrian tactics). Moving away from more mundane examples of site ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’, Fiona Wilkie expands the notion of spatial rules to develop two related concepts – the repertoire and the inner rule – that offer complex ways of imagining and articulating the rule-bound site. Finally, she suggests that site-specific performance meanings emerge out of a process of negotiation between three sets of rules: those of the site, the performance, and the spectators. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD thesis (provisionally entitled Constructing Meaning/Performing Place: Site-Specific Performance in Contemporary Britain) at the University of Surrey, from which article is drawn.