In February 1999 Patrick Miles's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov as Sara opened at a prestigious London fringe theatre, the Bridewell – to a review from The Times largely devoted to the omission of Chekhov's name from the programme. Here, Miles, relates the circumstances (not all accidental) which led to that omission, the consequences that flowed from it in terms of poor audiences and company disharmony – and how such an apparently random happening is also representative of a typology of the fringe which warrants more sustained investigation. Patrick Miles was Russian literary consultant at the National Theatre from 1977 to 1980, and has translated Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, Bulgakov, and Vampilov for various theatre companies. He is editor of Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993) and translator of Anatoly Smeliansky's The Russian Theatre after Stalin (Cambridge, 1999).

Jan Kott invited me to conduct this formal ‘final interview’ early in 2001, after I shared with him a draft of the essay ‘Arden and Absolute Milan’ that follows. The essay and the interview were the culmination of over fifteen years of friendship and intermittent writing about Kott, which had extended to the translation of his works. I first met Jan and his wife Lidia at Berkeley in 1986, when they travelled from Los Angeles to see a production of Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage that I had directed and designed there, which proved the start of a long personal and professional relationship. I interviewed Kott at his modest apartment in Santa Monica, California, over the weekend of 31 March to 2 April 2001. Lidia had passed away the summer before, and his own health was extremely frail, requiring twenty-four-hour care by a group of charming and attentive Polish-speaking women. He shared his apartment after Lidia's death with an energetic black-and-white kitten, whose energy and mischief amused him greatly. Born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, he had a cereal box decal of Tony the Tiger stuck next to the name-plate on his apartment door (the name Kott also means ‘cat’ in Polish). He was not able to move about without a nurse and a walking frame, but he nevertheless insisted on inviting me out to dinner in a local Polish restaurant, where he heartily ate a meal of steak tartar and flaczki (Polish tripe soup), accompanied by a shot or two of vodka. His nurse, who was with us, seemed amused but not at all astonished by this performance. Afterwards, he admitted this was his first meal out of the house in months – it was possibly his last. In spite of his physical weakness, Kott's mind remained lucid, and he had clearly rehearsed the interview extensively before our meetings in person. Most of the questions I had prepared proved unnecessary. What is published here is culled from approximately five hours of taped material, which Kott later edited along with myself. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my Philadelphia colleague, Helena Morawska White, for her time and energy in transcribing the taped interviews in Polish, and to Michal Zadara for his careful work in translating the unedited text into English.

Sustaining the long, initially pioneering concern of TQ and NTQ with popular aspects of nineteenth-century theatre. Jim Davis looks here at the men and the methods involved in improving the reputations of the neighbourhood theatres of the East End of London. Usually noticed for its effects on the licensing of theatre buildings, the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 also brought the newly ‘legitimate’ theatres under the direct control of the Lord Chamberlain. Particularly around the mid-century, the Examiner of Plays, William Bodham Donne, responded to public concern (some genuine, some worked-up by interested parties) by commissioning police reports on theatres, and on occasion requiring appropriate action – from the limiting of performances to one per evening, to the erection of public urinals. Here, Jim Davis, who contributed an article on ‘Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama’ to NTQ14 (1988), and is the author of several books and articles in related areas, offers the first documentation of a little-explored subject.

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).

Forkbeard Fantasy is one of Britain's oldest ‘alternative’ performance companies. Founded in 1974 by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton, who have continued to work with the company ever since, Forkbeard's practice may be identified with a peculiarly British variant on performance art, which dates from the mid-sixties. Influenced as much by elements of variety entertainment as by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in the visual arts, it produced a unique form of integrated performance which was often daringly experimental yet refreshingly tongue-in-cheek. In the Spring of 1999, Nicolas Whybrow, then teaching at Lancaster University, observed the company's residency in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, over a period of three weeks. Here, he presents his impressions based on a consideration of Morecambe's identity as a place and the nature of Forkbeard's relationship to that place as residential visitors. His analysis takes into account the activities he observed – including his daily trips into Morecambe by train, media ‘takes’ on the town, informal conversations with contributors to the residency, and a formal interview with the company itself, represented here by interjections into the text. Nicolas Whybrow is now Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.

In this article Gretchen E. Minton describes her adaptation of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play Timon of Athens. This adaptation, called Timon of Anaconda, focuses on the environmental legacy of Butte, Montana, a mining city that grew quickly, flourished, fell into recession, and then found itself labelled the largest Superfund clean-up site in the United States. Timon of Anaconda envisions Timon as a wealthy mining mogul whose loss of fortunes and friends echoes the boom-and-bust economy of Butte. The original play’s language about the poisoning of nature and the troubled relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds is amplified and adjusted in Timon of Anaconda in order to reflect upon ongoing environmental concerns in Montana. Minton explains the ecodramaturgical aims, site-specific locations, and directorial decisions of this adaptation’s performances, which took place in September 2019. Gretchen E. Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University, Bozeman. She has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and Bozeman Actors Theatre, and her directorial projects include A Doll’s House (2019), Timon of Anaconda (2019–20), and Shakespeare’s Walking Story (2020).

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.

Whilst Stanislavsky spent much of his energy trying to simplify the processes of acting and avoiding a (pseudo-) scientific terminology for his acting system, he was nevertheless caught up in Stalin's appropriation of hard science after the Russian Revolution, to be paired with other ‘founding fathers’ of Soviet materialism, including Ivan Pavlov, in the creation of a powerful political orthodoxy. Here, Jonathan Pitches focuses on two of Stanislavsky's key contemporaries, Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, both of whom had worked with the founder of the System at different periods in their career, to pinpoint a significant shift, or turning point, in the development of twentieth-century Russian actor training. Drawing on Fritjof Capra's history of systemic thinking, the article argues that a radical shift of thinking took place in actor training in the 1920s and 1930s, which prefigures the global paradigm crisis Capra has identified at the turn of the last century. Jonathan Pitches is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge, 2003). This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the IFTR 2004 Conference in St Petersburg. Its argument derives from his forthcoming book Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition (Routledge, 2005).

In this article Stephen Wilmer applies Deleuze and Guattari's concept of nomadology to the Fluxus art movement that spread across the world, breaking down barriers between art and life, privileging concrete and conceptual art, and staging unusual events. He traces Rosi Braidotti's development of Deleuze and Guattari's concept into her notion of the nomadic subject in which she favours factors such as geographic movement, transnational identities, common space (in accord with the Deleuzian differentiation between the divisible earth or private property, and nomadic space which belongs to everyone), polylingualism, desubjectivation, becoming minoritarian, and thinking and acting differently. With this as a philosophical and political context, the author investigates some of the artistic practices of specific Fluxus practitioners, especially the shamanistic performances and fat and felt installations of Joseph Beuys that supposedly owed their inspiration to his experience with nomadic Tatars. Stephen Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He co-edited (with Audronė Žukauskaitė) Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016) and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He edited ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’ for Nordic Theatre Studies (2015), and co-edited (with Azadeh Sharifi) ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016).

An acknowledged feature of the late nineteenth-century reinvigoration of theatre is the frequency with which new styles of writing – and, more often, innovative themes – affronted the public, both in print and performance. Yet the turbulent initial audience reactions to taboo- and ground-breaking plays have often been represented as self-evident confrontations between progressive creative artists and philistine theatregoers. By closely examining one apparently typical case of resistance to the new drama – the uproar at the 1889 premiere in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise – Neil Blackadder demonstrates the complex relationship between production and reception in the early modern theatre. He considers the behaviour of one offended spectator in particular, along with the response of the independent theatre society which staged the production, and a court's verdict on the validity of his protests. Beyond marking an important turning-point in the history of German theatre, the premiere of Before Sunrise encapsulates several key facets of the modern theatre during a period when its practitioners were becoming more bold and experimental, while changing norms of conduct were, paradoxically, rendering audiences more restrained. Neil Blackadder is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Drama at Duke University, curently visiting at Knox College. He is writing a book on modern theatre scandals.

Many partisans of Alfred Jarry's work have discovered Ubu roi and the ‘science’ of pataphysics via a study of the Parisian avant-garde, and the play has been discussed for a hundred years in this context. Kimberly Jannarone also assesses Jarry in the context of the world of rural puppetry – for, like many other avant-garde artists at the fin de siècle, Jarry came to Paris from a small town, and brought with him such formative experiences as the makeshift puppet shows he saw as a child. Bringing the rural puppet into focus in a discussion of the Ubu cycle, Kimberly Jannarone exposes Père Ubu's identity as a class hybrid, whose maddening and elusive nature stems from the fusion of popular and elite forms. Further, she reveals that Jarry's use of puppet forms is radically different from that of the Symbolists, who conceived puppets as theoretical figures within a fully formed aesthetic doctrine. By contrast, Jarry used puppets for their very incompleteness – their makeshift nature making them ideal catalysts for the audience's imaginations. She sees Pataphysics as a model of the avant-garde itself: a system that focuses less on products than on effects. Kimberly Jannarone has taught at the University of Washington School of Drama, and is about to take up an appointment as Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, where her dissertation examined the historical avant-garde through the works of Jarry and Antonin Artaud.

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.

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.

Theatre workers in the Third World have largely rejected both the outward trappings and the underlying aesthetic assumptions of the colonial styles they first inherited: but the impulse to evolve or rediscover indigenous forms has often involved the imposition of a would-be ‘popular’ theatre form by an elite of university-educated animateurs. David Kerr has described these as ‘induced’ forms, and here analyzes the process by which one such experiment, in Malawi, was both adopted and assimilated by villagers, for the better understanding of whose social problems it was conceived. From 1974 to 1980 David Kerr was artistic director of the Chikwakwa Theatre project in Zambia (described in the first series of Theatre Quarterly, III, No. 10), since when he has been teaching in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the University of Malawi, and serving as co-ordinator to the Travelling Theatre project there.

In contrast to most studies of cultural nationalism, which tend to focus on literary style, narrative devices, or the static visual arts, in this article Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes the ways that Japanese actors deploy physical and vocal techniques in portraying gender and ethnic ambiguity. Expanding on her recent work on actor-dancer Itō Michio (1893–1961), she uses the concept of J-centrism (Japancentrism) to demonstrate how modern Japanese performing bodies (in both traditional and contemporary genres) imply political meaning – her title being a riff on Susan Sontag's famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. While not suggesting that the artists under consideration promulgate fascism, Sorgenfrei maintains that the Japanese aesthetic preference for gender and ethnic ambiguity fuels the politics of Japanese cultural nationalism, even when the performers or directors adamantly disavow rightist, nationalistic ideologies. Through a focus on analysis of selected performances by Bando Tamasaburō and theoretical writings by Suzuki Tadashi, Sorgenfrei suggests that the performance of ambiguity by a single actor implies the ‘universality’ and cultural superiority of the Japanese body. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin, where she researched the work of Japanese dancer Itō Michio. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition 2015).

The success of Katie Mitchell's production of The Mysteries for the Royal Shakespeare Company has again demonstrated the appeal of the plays for a modern audience. Most revivals trim and otherwise adapt the texts of the original, sprawling cycles: but Mitchell and her dramaturg, Edward Kemp, more calculatedly addressed the problems of updating not only the texts, but also the acting style and attitudes towards the dominant issues – notably those of gender representation. The original cycles often intriguingly juxtaposed religious faith and local politics in an assertion of civic pride which none the less also acknowledged the dominance of the established Church: and in the following article Katie Normington assesses the relevance of Mitchell's production for the secular, depoliticized society of the 'nineties. Katie Normington is a freelance fringe theatre director who is currently researching the role of women in the mystery plays and lecturing in drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

One of the most unusual statistics in the study of performance and war is that aesthetic activity often increases in times of conflict. In this article Michael Balfour extends the consideration of performance and war to aesthetic projects that were located far removed from the centres of conflict, but that deeply connected with the affective impact of war. As an illustration of performative practice, the examples demonstrate the ways in which place making can play with documenting and representing war experiences in different ways. The two examples – This is Camp X-Ray in Manchester (a temporary installation) and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC – were designed in separate contexts for very different purposes; but contribute to understanding the kinds of choices that artists make in representing the affective ‘truths’ of war experience. In both cases, the artists were interested in creating spaces that would make the wars more visible for an audience, and provide a tangible place in which experiences of war could be re-conceived and an affective connection made. Michael Balfour is Professor of Applied Theatre, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. His research expertise is in the social applications of theatre, in particular theatre and war, prison theatre, and arts and health. Major Australian Research Council-funded projects include The Difficult Return, on approaches to artsbased work with returning military personnel, and Captive Audiences, on the impact of performing arts programmes in prisons. His books include Theatre and War 1933–1945 and, most recently, Performance in Place of War, co-authored with James Thompson and Jenny Hughes (Seagull Press, 2010).

Ian Watson and Susana Epstein went to Chile and Argentina in the summer of 1992 in order to interview several leading theatre artists about the differences the political changes in their countries had made to their own work and the work of their colleagues. Although, as the authors stress, they made no attempt to conduct a systematic study of the theatrical implications of the shift from authoritarianism to democracy, their findings suggest some parallels with the situation in Eastern Europe. Ian Watson, who heads the Theatre Division in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University, Newark, is a theatre scholar whose main interests include contemporary Latin American theatre. Susana Epstein, an expatriate Argentine, is a Contributing Editor of The Drama Review.

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.