Eugenio Barba founded Odin Teatret in 1964, since when it has become one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives of the past half-century, and Eugenio Barba one of the most influential figures in world theatre. The following is his speech of thanks to the members of the Academy of Music and Theatre of Estonia for bestowing the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. It was delivered in Tallinn on 27 September 2009.

Hanns Johst's play Schlageter is generally regarded as the most successful piece of Nazi theatre. Following its first performance in the early months of the Third Reich, it dominated German theatrical life throughout 1933 and 1934. This has traditionally been regarded as evidence of the essential conformity of the Third Reich's stage; yet since no other play achieved a similar prominence in the period, Gerwin Strobl finds that line of argument unconvincing, arguing that the success of Schlageter was due to its clever manipulation of its audience's emotions. The play was perfectly suited to the mood of many German theatregoers in 1933, betraying in its plot and characterization considerable psychological insight and a ruthless determination to exploit that insight for Nazi purposes. As such, Schlageter was the prime example of the Third Reich's ‘theatre of inner experience’, the ultimate aim of whose practitioners was to get German audiences to abandon reason and accept the irrational vision of history underlying the Nazis' ideological project. Gerwin Strobl is Lecturer in Modern German History at Cardiff University, specializing in popular perceptions and propaganda. He is the author of Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2000), has published on Shakespeare in the Third Reich in History Today (May 1997) and the Journal of Contemporary History (July 1999), and is currently writing a study of Nazi theatre.

In 1936 Joan Littlewood staged Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century play, Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well); in 1945 Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden; and in 1958 Fernando de Rojas's sixteenth-century La Celestina. There were also plans to produce Lorca's Blood Wedding in 1948. The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each. Gwynne Edwards is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays, have been published by Methuen, and many have been given professional productions. He has recently completed the libretto of an opera on the last days of Dylan Thomas.

In the course of her long career as a director with Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood staged some twenty foreign-language plays, of which three were Spanish: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, while there were also plans to perform Lorca's Blood Wedding. Gwynne Edwards argues in this article that Littlewood's attraction to the Spanish plays was sometimes political but always due to a similarity in performance style which, influenced by the methods of leading European theatre practitioners, sought to integrate the elements of speech, stage design, movement, music, and lighting into a harmonious whole. Indeed, even though Lorca and Littlewood worked independently of each other, their ideas on the nature and function of theatre were very similar, while Lorca's touring company, La Barraca, employed methods very close to those of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop. Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca have been published by Methuen Drama, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays. Many of these have also had professional productions.

It has generally been assumed that the Expressionist movement had little noticeable impact on British theatre. Claire Altree Warden here suggests that in the plays of Ewan MacColl (and in particular his The Other Animals of 1948) there is a discernible challenge to this assumption. In order to advocate a specific political position, MacColl took the conventions of Expressionism and developed a highly engaged, artistically innovative theatrical aesthetic that could tackle socio-political inequalities and the suppression of the dissident voice. Through linguistic experiment, episodic structure, representational characters, and a focus on the individual mind, the playwright challenges the audience to confront class injustice and hegemonic tyranny. Claire Altree Warden is based at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches English Literature. She also teaches Critical Theory and Theatre History at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and is currently preparing a new critical study of Ewan MacColl's plays.

In this article Helen Grime examines the enduring epithet of ethereality and its persistent connection to the career of the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (1891–1992). Most closely associated with her portrayal of Etain in the much revived musical drama The Immortal Hour, ethereality is understood as a signifier of 1920s femininity. The offstage presentation of a domesticated femininity further evidences the apparent conventionality of this actress's self-presentation at a time of particular anxiety about the socio-political position of women. These notions of femininity hint at the prevailing social attitudes that confronted an actress whose on- and offstage appearances were subject to public scrutiny while her private lesbian identity remained obscured. It is suggested, however, that Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies's playful negotiation of her demonstrably fragmented identity evidences an agency and self-possession belied by her public conformity. Helen Grime completed her thesis, A Strange Omission: Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Twentieth-Century Shakespearean Actress, in 2008 and is currently a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Winchester.

For a four-month period in 2010 David Francis Taylor worked as a research consultant with the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds, the only working Regency playhouse in Britain. In this article Taylor reflects upon the experiences and insights he acquired over the course of this collaboration. In particular, he indicates how the theatre's restaging of the neglected repertory of the long eighteenth century within the Georgian space of performance can aid theatre historians in understanding the intricate dynamics of the period's theatre architecture and, crucially, the position and agency of its spectatorships. David Francis Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His book Theatres of Opposition, which concerns the theatricality of politics in the career of the playwright-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan, will be published next year by Oxford University Press. He has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, and the Keats-Shelley Review, and is currently co-editing, with Julia Swindells, the Oxford Handbook to the Georgian Playhouse.

Between 1926 and 1934 the Moscow Kamerny Theatre staged a cycle of six American plays: Eugene O’Neill's The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, and All God's Chillun Got Wings; Sophie Treadwell's Machinal; Rosita, a stage adaptation of a Hollywood film; and John Dos Passos's Fortune Heights. In this article Dassia N. Posner analyzes and contextualizes two of these productions: The Hairy Ape (1926) and Machinal (1933). By the mid-1920s, Kamerny Theatre director Alexander Tairov was under intense pressure to stage work that aligned with the Soviet Union's political goals. A significant portion of the Kamerny's repertoire had long consisted of foreign plays that celebrated the individual's struggle against oppression. The Hairy Ape and Machinal provided Tairov with a unique opportunity to combine artistic, political, and human relevance in a way he had not achieved before, using the artistic language of the theatre's earlier stylistic and acting innovations. Drawing on rich archival sources, Posner illuminates ways in which stylistic juxtaposition allowed these productions to address a specific political context while also reflecting on oppression more broadly as it relates to class, gender, national origin, artistic freedom, and individual thought. Dassia N. Posner is Associate Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Her books include The Director's Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance.

One of the most creative communicative strategies of German twentieth-century political song has been narrative role-play. From the songs of Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring in Weimar cabaret during the 1920s to the dramatic monologues of Franz Josef Degenhardt in the 1960s and beyond, singers have assumed identifiable roles to parody the language, mannerisms, and characteristics of known establishment social types. Role play has also been evident in the narrative identities constructed by singers and performers, either by means of literary association or by association with certain political ideas or stances, as in the case of Ernst Busch embodying the proletarian worker. This article examines different types of role-play, including that of Hans-Eckard Wenzel and Steffen Mensching who, in their 1980s performances, assumed the ironic masks of clowns, with which they projected an alternative ‘carnival’ vision of society in the German Democratic Republic. David Robb is Senior Lecturer in German at Queen's University of Belfast. He is an experienced songwriter and performing musician, the author of Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens: das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (1998) and the editor of Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (2007).

In the many discussions of the different shapes and capacities of the playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean London, insufficient attention has been paid to the impact of differing theatre forms upon the spectators. In this article, Andrew Gurr points out that the first Globe on Bankside, built from the timbers of the Theatre in Shoreditch, and the Fortune, erected for Henslowe's company on the other side of the river, just to the north of the City, were both the work of the same builder, Peter Street. He discusses the differences the shapes of the two playhouses – the Globe polygonal, the Fortune square – had on their construction and the spectators’ reception. Because the audience capacity had to be similar, this meant that spectators at the Fortune, especially latecomers, would need to squeeze into corners of the building, with their ability to see and hear what was happening on stage much restricted. In addition to his many books, among them the now classic study, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (1992), Andrew Gurr was chief academic advisor in the ‘rebuilding’ of Shakespeare's Globe on the South Bank. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading.

Fugard's identity as a playwright was firmly rooted in the struggle against apartheid. What happened to this identity when the post-apartheid ‘New’ South Africa emerged? Black South Africans have followed Nelson Mandela's lead in accomplishing their ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. Why is it so difficult for Fugard to find a role in this new country and put an end to his inner exile? Hilary Burns explores this question in the light of the development of Fugard's whole opus, and the relationship between form and content in plays where the content has tended to overshadow the form. Burns is a professional actor with a career-long commitment to theatre that seeks to challenge or develop issues relevant to today's society. She has worked extensively in small-scale touring theatre, the London fringe, and regional theatre, and has also made appearances in TV and film. In November 2000, she spent a month with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg which inspired her book, The Cultural Precinct, about South African theatre, in particular how the theatres born in the protest era have responded to the challenges of the new society. Her study of the Market Theatre yesterday and today will follow in NTQ72.

Pamela Howard designed Border Warfare and John Brown's Body at the Tramway, Glasgow, for John McGrath, and Wicked Old Man, which he wrote and directed for West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1992. Here, she recalls the highly distinctive visual language of the playwright, and the differences this made in seeing through a design from initial discussion to practical use in performance. Pamela Howard is a scenographer, director, writer, educator, exhibition curator, and international producer who has created theatre events in many countries and languages. She was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in 1999 to write What is Scenography? (published by Routledge in 2001), and as adaptor, director, and scenographer created La Celestina at the Hopkins Center, USA, in February 2002, of which the text is forthcoming from Oberon Books.

While the dialogical relationship between the early twentieth-century British theatre and the rise of socialism is well documented, analysis has tended to focus on the role of the playwright in the dissemination of socialist ideas. As a contrast, in this article Philippa Burt examines the directorial work of Harley Granville Barker, arguing that his plans for a permanent ensemble company were rooted in his position as a member of the Fabian Society. With reference to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Maria Shevtsova's development of it in reference to the theatre, this article identifies a correlation between Barker's political and artistic approaches through extrapolating the central tenets of his theory on ensemble theatre and analyzing them alongside the central tenets of Fabianism. Philippa Burt is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. This article is developed from a paper presented at the conference on ‘Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the University of Lancaster in July 2011.

Dario Fo has developed his own brand of epic theatre by adapting principles and techniques from various forms of popular performance and the oral tradition. He stays detached from the role he plays by frequently shifting in and out of character and by calling attention to the performance as such. This, argues Antonio Scuderi, allows him to emphasize the interpretive frame – the ‘messages’ he establishes in his prologue. His most recent play, The Two-Headed Anomaly, is thus at one level a farcical romp; but a closer look reveals an intricate metatheatrical structure that allows Dario Fo and his fellow-performer Franca Rame to deliver their political satire. Antonio Scuderi is Associate Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and with Joseph Farrell edited Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). His most recent articles on Fo have appeared in Theatre Journal (2003) and Modern Language Review (2004).

Among the least expected (and least examined) aspects of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico was its ‘export’ of a neo-medieval form of religious drama. The devastation wrought by the conquistadores upon an ancient civilization should not, however, blind us to the extreme cruelty involved in Aztec forms of worship; and in the following article, Robert Potter both outlines the ‘dramatic’ qualities of such sacrificial spectacles, and shows how the Spaniards, in their attempts to convert the Aztecs to Christianity, employed their own forms of ‘sacrificial drama’ for the purpose – utilizing, for example. The Sacrifice of Abraham for their didactic ends, while also assimilating some elements from the supplanted cultural forms. Robert Potter, who teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art in the University of California, Santa Barbara, is author of The English Morality Play (1975), and of many articles on medieval and renaissance drama. He prepared the present paper for the colloquium of the Societe Internationale pour I'Etude du Théâtre Médiéval at Perpignan in July 1986.

The early issues of the original Theatre Quarterly carried extensive coverage of the work of Edward Bond – a conscious editorial emphasis, which it became less important to maintain as Bond's work acquired its present international recognition and a corresponding share of critical attention. Yet the very distinctiveness of Bond's dramaturgy demands a no less distinctive approach from its critics – notably, a recognition and evaluation of the many non-literary strands of the ‘text’ as performed, especially when under the author's own direction. Pete Mathers, who teaches in the Film and Drama Division of Bulmershe College, here attempts to assess one of Bond's most recent plays, Summer, in close relationship to its original production by Bond himself, at the National's Cottesloe Theatre in 1982, examining every element through which its audiences experienced that production – including the poster and programme, as well as the more clearly crucial ingredients of design, performance, and the ‘gests’ through which they interconnect.

Eugenio Barba is founder and director of Odin Teatret, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. A longstanding Advisory Editor of NTQ, he is also a prolific writer on the nature of acting and the actor, with a special concern for what is shared by and what divides the traditions and styles of East and West. In the following article he explores the fundamental differences in approaches to the training of the aspirant actor, distinguishing between ‘acculturation’ as the usual point of departure in eastern traditions, and ‘inculturation’ as the dominant western mode. He explores the differing natures of the young actor's apprenticeship which have historically derived from these traditions, and the consequences of new emphases and social movements in the twentieth century which threaten the future of the ‘accultured’ approach, while requiring a new range of responses from the ‘incultured’. This article was first presented at the international symposium ‘Tacit Knowledge – Heritage and Waste’ which was held in Holstebro from 22 to 26 September 1999, on the occasion of Odin Teatret's thirty-fifth anniversary. Eugenio Barba's most recent publications are Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, including a long correspondence from Jerzy Grotowski, and Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, both from Black Mountain Press.

Direct and bloody violence has a long history on stage. In recent years, a different mode of violence can be distinguished in the work of prominent American playwrights – less direct than indirect, more covert than overt, and likely to affect a group rather than individuals. In this article Russell Vandenbroucke applies concepts from Norwegian sociologist and Peace Studies scholar Johan Galtung to examine structural and cultural violence in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) and traces similar representations of violence in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, Ayad Aktar's Disgraced, The Laramie Project by Moisés Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Project, and Tim Robbins's adaptation of Dead Man Walking by Sr Helen Prejean. These writers have in common the status of traditional outsiders – black, female, gay, Muslim – and this informs their engagement in the social and political vitality of the stage. The shift in focus of these plays from direct violence echoes observations in Steven Pinker's recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice, and Conflict Transformation programme. He previously served as Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. His publications include Truths the Hand Can Touch: the Theatre of Athol Fugard and numerous articles on South African theatre.