Time structures are essential to any analysis of drama or theatre performance, and in this article Jerzy Limon takes the final scene from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia as an example to show that non-semantic systems such as music gain significance in the process of stage semiosis and may denote both space and time. The scene discussed is particularly complex owing to the fact that Stoppard introduces two different time-streams simultaneously in one space. The two couples presented dance to two distinct melodies which are played at two different times, and the author explains how the playwright avoided the confusion and chaos which would have inevitably resulted if the two melodies were played on the stage simultaneously. Jerzy Limon is Professor of English at the English Institute at the University of Gdańsk. His main area of research includes the history of English drama and theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and various theoretical aspects of theatre. His most recent works, published in 2008, include a book on the theory of television theatre, Obroty przestrzeni (Moving Spaces), two chapters in books, and articles in such journals as Theatre Research International, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism, and Cahiers élisabéthains.

Is Broadway necessary? As the focus for new writing and major experimental work in the USA shifts ever further from the old theatre district around Times Square – first to off- and then to off-off-Broadway, more recently to the flourishing regional theatres – many critics have come to regard Broadway either as an economic anachronism, failing to perpetuate past glories, or simply as an irrelevance to ‘real’ theatre. Yet Stanley Kauffmann argues that a focal point for a nation's theatre is more than the sum of sometimes fraying parts, and works on the imagination in ways that cannot be evaluated by the fragmentary assessment of succeeding productions; and here he analyses the ‘organism’ that Broadway remains, and the function it performs. Stanley Kauffmann has been theatre critic for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Saturday Review, while the most recent of his full-length works is Theater Criticisms (1984).

This article continues NTQ's explorations, commenced in NTQ18 (1989) and NTQ23 (1990), of the interactions between theatrical performance and emerging views of nature coming out of the ‘new sciences’. Here, Michael Vanden Heuvel argues that analogies between quantum science and performance are productive mainly in reference to work which investigates the nature of perception, and which foregrounds the spectator's awareness of the ‘event-ness’ of theatrical performance. Models drawn from the new science of ‘chaotics’, on the other hand, appear more applicable to performances which seek to move beyond phenomenology into the sphere of cultural discourse. He offers as an example of this ‘post-quantum’ theatre the work of the renowned New York collective the Wooster Group, whose performances create a dialogics between order and disorder which acts to map dynamic interactions between hegemony and difference in American culture. Michael Vanden Heuvel is Assistant Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Arizona State University. His Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theatre and the Dramatic Text was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1991, and he has written articles and reviews for Theatre Journal and Contemporary Literature.

Poland's Teatr Osmego Dnia – the Theatre of the Eighth Day – has survived for 22 years, with essentially the same personnel since the early seventies, and with a constant commitment to social engagement. The group – which has never included trained actors, because, according to director Lech Raczak, any graduate of a Polish theatre school, ‘cannot act with his whole self’ – was a major voice of protest for the Polish student generation of 1968. Despite constant harassment and frequent arrests, it continues both to inspire and record the work of young oppositional theatres, although in 1985 it was forced to split when six members toured western Europe whilst four others, denied their passports, played in Polish churches. What follows is a collage of two interviews conducted that autumn – in London with Tadeusz Janiszewski, Adam Borowski, and Leszek Sczaniecki, and in Poznan with Lech Raczak and Marcin Keszycki. They discuss the importance of Grotowski for their generation: their working method, based on group improvisation; the function of poetry in physical theatre; their major productions; and the day-to-day survival strategies of a collective dedicated to exploring the expressive and political potential of the actor. The interviews were assembled by Tony Howard, a playwright who also teaches English in the University of Warwick, and who expresses his thanks to the many people who made this feature possible – especially Nick Gardiner, the ‘European’ group's manager, and the translators. Ewa Elandt and Ewa Kraskowska.

Our coverage of Indian theatre in NTQ, as in the original Theatre Quarterly, has been as full as opportunities allowed — notably, including a major four-part assessment by Kenneth Rea in TQ30–34 (1978–79), and a three-part personal casebook by Rustom Bharucha of his production of Kroetz's Request Concert, as adapted to the needs of different Indian cities, in NTQ11–13 (1987–88). The fact that we have never covered the theatre of the state of Manipur, which adjoins Burma and Bangladesh on India's north-eastern border, is all too symptomatic of its more general neglect – at one extreme by central government, and at the other by those who might usefully learn from and contribute to the development of its indigenous theatre. Here, Rustom Bharucha – now based once more in his home city of Calcutta, after a period of work in the United States – explains the background of exploitation and deprivation against which he proceeds to set the indigenous theatre work of the director Kanhailal. Looking in particular at Pebet, a play from the 'seventies based on folk tradition, and at the more recent Memories of Africa, Bharucha attempts to draw some conclusions about the problems and the potential of ‘seeing our cultures from below’ by means of a theatre that springs from and connects with the needs of the people.

The plays of Bernard-Marie Koltès have been phenomenally successful, not just in Europe, but worldwide – his last work before his death in 1989, Roberto Zucco, having been performed in seventeen countries. Despite an early production of Twilight Zone by Pierre Audi at the Almeida Theatre in 1981, English appreciation has been tardy, but now this situation is set to change, with the Royal Court Theatre commissioning Martin Crimp to make a translation of Roberto Zucco, to be directed by James Macdonald, and Methuen bringing out a volume of Koltès's plays. These present a unique fusion of the French classical tradition combined with Shakespeare (he translated The Winter's Tale into French) and modern influences such as Genet and Fugard (he also translated The Blood Knot). After his death, Giles Croft wrote of Koltès: ‘He considered himself an outsider, rootless, and this perception of himself is reflected in his characters, whose tragedy is their inability to connect with one another, often despite their ability to articulate their despair. He created dark, mythic, polyglot worlds where people are dwarfed by or divorced from their surroundings: hotel rooms, construction sites, quaysides.’ Koltès's career was closely linked with that of Patrice Chéreau, who produced all his major plays, and who performed in his own production of In The Solitude of the Cotton Fields at last year's Edinburgh Festival. Here, David Bradby, Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, contributes his own assessments of both men's life and work, to complement full chronological and bibliographical details of Koltès's career.

FROM THE TIME of Sophocles' Antigone, his version of the myth – which relates how Oedipus' daughter buried her brother Polyneices against the decree of Creon and, upon being sentenced to death, died by her own hand – became invariable. It was in modern treatments of the story that changes began to be introduced: these concerned the person or authorities representing the law; the time when the events occur, and their location; the person whom Antigone buries; and why she dies. But a continuing, necessary determinant in such modern incarnations of the myth has been the conflict between the ethos of authority and the ethos of moral belief – this latter being motivated by religion, duty to the family, or love. Without such an opposition, Antigone loses its ground as tragedy.

Overwhelmingly, the British reputation of George Gershwin is as a ‘serious’ composer: but this is liable to obscure not only the contributions he and his brother Ira made to the popular music theatre in Britain, but also, conversely, the British influences upon this seemingly all-American pair. George was profoundly influenced by that pre-eminent American Anglophile of his time, Jerome Kern, while British influences upon the semi-scholarly Ira extended far beyond W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse. After ‘Swanee’ swept Britain in 1920, and George had honed his art and craft by writing the score for the West End revue, The Rainbow (1923), came the musical comedy, Primrose (1924) – its score his first to be published, and including some of his earliest orchestrations. A prototype of the frivolous comedies of the era, Primrose marked the first time the brothers were billed together as the Gershwins, since Ira had earlier written as ‘Arthur Francis’: it was also the immediate precursor of their first great Broadway hit, Lady, Be Good! Finally, in 1928, Ira collaborated, without George, on the London show That's a Good Girl – though Damsel in Distress, the brothers' last film musical, was a valedictory to the British-American musical comedy of the era. James Moore's earlier transatlantic study, of Cole Porter in Britain, appeared in NTQ30 (1992), and his Radio Two programme on the revue producer André Charlot was broadcast in October 1993.

Alan Bennett is one of the most popular mainstream dramatists working in Britain today, his canon now a mainstay of regional and amateur theatre companies. Yet for a writer who was once compared to John Osborne as taking ‘the moral temperature of the nation’, his output is widely regarded as apolitical and, at worst, ‘safe’. In the following article, Richard Scarr suggests that this viewpoint is misleading, and argues that Bennett is not only one of the most politically contentious playwrights in dominant theatre, but that the ideological viewpoints he has supported have changed as his career has progressed. Richard Scarr is an English graduate of the University of North London, and has recently completed an MA in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is currently researching a PhD on the rhetoric of Renaissance comedy, with particular emphasis on the double-entendre.

When we published Barbara Day's introduction to modern theatre in Czechoslovakia in NTQ7 (1986), we could little imagine that by the turn of the decade we would be carrying regular reports from Eastern Europe on the effects of the disintegration of the Soviet empire upon the theatres and theatre people of the former satellite states. In NTQ27 (1991), we included an overview of recent developments in the Polish theatre – following this up in NTQ28 with a detailed feature on the work of a single company in the new era, Gardzienice. Here, we similarly complement Premsyl Rut's report in NTQ27 on ‘The State of the New Czech Theatre’ with a study of the work of one of the directors who, like so many people in the arts, served as a herald to the ‘velvet revolution’ – Blaho Uhlár, whose career began, in the difficult years after the Soviet invasion of 1968, with the Theatre for Children and Youth, and whose most recently completed production with the Divadle Alexandra Duchnovic company, Nono, visited the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff during the city's festival last October.

The flurry of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1960s and 1970s represents a significant yet largely neglected chapter of recent cultural history. This article assesses two of the more enduring adaptations – Edward Bond's Lear (Royal Court Theatre, 1971) and Charles Marowitz's Measure for Measure (Open Space Theatre, 1975) – in order to show how these controversial texts anticipated later mainstream critical approaches which still affect our reception of Shakespeare in the late 1990s. Several parallels between Marowitz and Bond's adaptations and recent materialist readings of their Shakespearean sources suggest that the adaptors anticipated the critics, and that both sought meaning from their Shakespearean originals by focusing on certain aspects of the text and by disregarding others. By demonstrating that whilst Marowitz and Bond's adaptations should best be regarded as a form of stage-centred criticism, Sonia Massai suggests that literary critical approaches inevitably reflect an arbitrary and historically determined appropriation of the Shakespearean original. Sonia Massai is a Lecturer in English Studies at St. Mary's, Strawberry Hill, a College of the University of Surrey. She has published articles on Shakespearean adaptations in Studies in English Literature, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, and in a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy. She is currently collaborating with Jacques Berthoud on the New Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Since 1634 the villagers of Oberammergau have kept their bargain with God to present a Passion Play every ten years in gratitude for their deliverance from the Plague. It is now staged every decennial year, most recently in 1990, and the single performance that long sufficed has now multiplied to almost a hundred – still not enough to meet the demand for tickets for this internationally-renowned event, which is at once a tourist attraction and, for the Christian, an affirmation of faith. Glenn Loney, theatre journalist and teacher from New York, has had an acquaintance with the play since 1958, and here places the event in its historical and present social context, analyzes the most recent production in terms both of its management and its staging, and describes the controversies which continue to surround it, from the practical problems of an uncompromising dramaturgy to the charges of anti-semitism which are still levelled against a play once defended by Hitler himself against the disfavour of his Nazi cohorts.

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the death of Ben Jonson – who, but for the happenstance of Shakespeare, would certainly have been Britain's national playwright, but whose achievement has in fact been overshadowed not only by the genius of his sometime colleague, but by the quite different styles and theatrical assumptions of their respective work. The dramatist Peter Barnes, who acknowledges a debt to Jonson in his own writing, is also a leading director of the playwright's work, with productions of Eastward Ho, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, and The Devil is an Ass already to his credit, and, among other productions planned for this anniversary year, one of TheMagnetic Lady for BBC Radio, in apt juxtaposition to the projected RSC revival of The New Inn. Here, Peter Barnes contributes a personal celebration of the playwright's distinctive and defiantly unquenchable work.

This article explores the revival of Palestinian indigenous performance practices that were part of the Sufi Nabi Musa festival. Focusing on the 2018 and 2019 government-sponsored performances, it examines how the different sociopolitical changes that took place in Palestinian society, following the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948, have led to the marginalization, politicization, and eventual revival of indigenous performance practices, which are an important part of Palestinian theatre history. Exploring Sufi rituals as indigenous performance practices shows that theatre forms not based on appropriations of European-style theatre existed in Palestine in the twentieth century. It also raises important questions as to why many of them have been neglected by Palestinian non-governmental theatre organizations (NGOs). Dia Barghouti is the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Morocco. Her research focuses on indigenous performance traditions in the Levant and North Africa. Her work on theatre and Sufism has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly and Jadaliyya.

For all the lip-service French culture pays to reason and logic, it undergoes periodic eruptions of déraison or unreason. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, ballroom dancing began to be infiltrated by such unbridled popular dances as the cancan and the chahut. Exuberant, even bacchanalian physical display served as a safety-valve in a heavily censored society. In the Second Empire, four working-class amateurs introduced the high-kicking, parodic Clodoche quadrille at the Paris Opéra. A non-verbal equivalent of the Marx Brothers, they became bywords through the Western hemisphere of zany, comic demonstrations of the hysteric convulsions described by the medical establishment. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a contributor to the International Encyclopedia of Dance. His many books include British Music Hall: A Bibliography (1981), The Age and Stage of George L. Fox (1999), and Cabaret Performance 1890–1940 (2001–2005).

Richard Wagner's works have repeatedly been the focus of questions concerning the possibilities, limits, and nature of the director's role in opera productions, especially in Germany, and prominently at the Bayreuther Festspiele. In this article Clemens Risi discusses some recent developments in staging Wagner's operas at the Festspiele, including Katharina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2007), Hans Neuenfels's production of Lohengrin (2010), and Sebastian Baumgarten's production of Tannhäuser (2011). While all these productions could be categorized as ‘director's theatre’, they also marked new steps in the staging practice of Wagner's work, going beyond questions of the interpretation of a single piece and taking it as material for exposure in a setting of experimentation. Here Risi considers how a well-known work emerges under the conditions of a newly established situation, as in a laboratory. Currently acting as interim Chair for Theatre and Media Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Clemens Risi was previously Assistant Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Auf dem Weg zu einem italienischen Musikdrama (Tutzing, 2004), and is currently completing a book on opera in performance and preparing another monograph for the 2005 Parma Verdi Prize on performance practice in mid-nineteenth-century Italian opera.

In this article Liliane Campos links Complicite's Master and Margarita (2011) to the company's previous productions, from The Street of Crocodiles (1992) to Shun-Kin (2008). She develops a close analysis of The Master and Margarita as it was staged at the Avignon Festival in July 2012, arguing that the company's aesthetic is characterized by a tension between narrative fragmentation and visual connections. While Complicite's shows overflow with postmodernist multiplicity and division, the urge to connect these ‘shards of stories’ is a driving force in Simon McBurney's artistic direction. This dynamic is explored here both on a semantic level, as a consequence of Complicite's physical language, and on a narrative level, through the use of framing and frame-breaking devices. The article highlights the company's recurrent themes and the defining traits of its performance style. Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She has published various articles on British drama and performance, and two books about the role of science in contemporary writing and devising for the theatre.

THE LAST Goon Show radio script Spike Milligan wrote, No. 227, dealt with murder, betrayal, starvation, and cannibalism, with a passing reference to the Holocaust.