American vaudeville welcomed a host of important stage actors into its midst during the generation between the mid-1890s and the end of the First World War, and in 1912, following appearances in British music halls, Sarah Bernhardt became vaudeville's centrepiece in its own war with the legitimate theatre for audience and status. By way of exchange, she received the highest salary ever paid to a ‘headlined’ vaudeville act, while performing a repertoire from which she was able to exclude the sort of light entertainment which had previously typified the medium. Both vaudeville and Bernhardt profited, in very different ways, from this wedding of high culture to low – and in the process a cultural standing seems to have attached itself to exhibitions of pain which legitimised the lot of the morally deviant women she both portrayed and exemplified. Leigh Woods, Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the ways in which the great actress thus maintained a demand for her services well after the eclipse of her legendary beauty and matchless movement.

Playwrights, directors, and theatre teachers interested in understanding the theatrical possibilities and functions of monologue soon discover that critical analysis in this area is limited alike in extent and depth. In the following analysis of contemporary dramatic monologue, Paul C. Castagno therefore begins by exploring its more expected or traditional uses, and proceeds to examine its present expanded function with particular reference to the plays of two contemporary American playwrights, Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman – both multiple Obie Award-winning writers, whose dramaturgic techniques have been highly influential yet who remain largely overlooked in the critical arena. He concludes that monologue in the new dramaturgy is actually moving in various and often complex ways back towards a kind of dialogism. Paul C. Castagno, who is himself a practising playwright, is director and dramaturg of the New Playwrights' Program at the University of Alabama, where he has developed a number of new playscripts for award-winning productions. He has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Text and Presentation, Theatre History Studies, and Theatre Topics, among others, and will shortly be taking on the editorship of the journal Theatre Symposium. His study The Early Commedia dell'Arte, 1550–1621: the Mannerist Context is due for publication by Peter Lang in 1993, and he is is currently preparing a playwriting text that explores elements of the new dramaturgy.

Report on the circus events during the International Cultural Festival accompanying the Melbourne Commonwealth Games from 15 to 26 March 2006

This article examines the meaning of the ‘impolitical’ regarding cases of impolitical theatre and associated critical discourse, with reference to Rodolfo Usigli and Raymond Williams, among others. It is argued that ‘impolitical’ theatre represents social relations from the standpoint of the ideal of culture. The analysis starts with Richard Schechner’s critique of the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and discusses this play, segueing into The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69. The author indicates the differences of theatre practice between the examples chosen, and shows that these theatres nevertheless participate in the same form of theatrical representation as they broach similar social questions of moment in the Unites States in the 1960s. John Yves Pinder has recently received his PhD from the University of Leeds. He is currently teaching at Leuphana University of Lüneberg.

Robert Armin, one of the ‘principal actors’ of Shakespeare’s plays named in the First Folio, probably joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 to take the place of Will Kempe as the company’s clown; and it was for him that Shakespeare wrote the parts of Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool in King Lear. Received wisdom, in part extrapolated from the nature of Armin’s roles, sees him as a more serious, even morose character than his predecessor, and he took his clowning seriously enough to write a book on ‘natural’ fools, Foole Upon Foole (1600), in addition to some minor verse, and a play, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, whence the only known illustration of him in performance derives. Although virtually disregarded by critics as little more than a jest book, Foole Upon Foole was also, argues Peter Cockett, a serious attempt to survey the variety of qualities and conditions of natural folly. It not only reveals much about Armin’s likely approach to his roles, but questions the conventional distinctions between the natural and the artificial fool. With close reference to Armin’s description of one of his subjects, Lean Leanard, Peter Cockett compares what this tells us about Armin’s possible approach to the role of Touchstone with the problems faced by the actor, David Tennant, in the RSC As You Like It of 1996. The author is a professional actor who emigrated to Canada in 1994. He now teaches acting and directing at McMaster University, Ontario, and is working with the University of Toronto’s medieval and renaissance players on a two-year project on the work and repertoire of the Queen’s Men.

The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltès's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltès asserted in 1986 that ‘I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life’; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltès translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer. Maria Delgado is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and David Fancy is a freelance director based in Canada who is currently completing a PhD on Koltès's work.

Europe’s colonial presence on the African continent from 1885 to the 1960s produced complex discourses about race and its representation. Whereas the Europeans constructed their putative images of Africans as inferior beings through radio, television, film, and print, for a predominantly literate sector, Africans deployed a more complex and mixed set of literacies. As well as conventional forms of literature, Africans used iconographic, kinaesthetic, proxemic, sonic, linguistic, tactile, calligraphic and sartorial literacies in their indigenous festivals and ritual theatres to resist, historicize, and domesticate colonial whiteness from the nineteenth century to the present day. In this article, Esiaba Irobi offers a detailed response to Bell Hooks’s observation (in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992) that in the work of postcolonial critics ‘there is a continued fascination with the way white minds, particularly the colonial imperialist traveller, perceive blackness, and very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black imagination’. Esiaba Irobi is an Associate Professor of International Theatre at Ohio University, Athens. Born in the Republic of Biafra, he has lived in exile in Nigeria, Britain, and the USA. His African Festival and Ritual Theatre: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1492 is due for publication by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.

Jatinder Verma founded Tara Arts in 1977 as a British-Asian company, the first of its kind in Britain. Its use of ‘Binglish’, a term coined by Verma to define the English of speakers belonging to the diaspora of the Indian subcontinent, is an integral part of Tara's identity, as he discussed in his commentary in NTQ52 (1997). This new interview, conducted in July 2008 and February 2009, focuses on issues to do with multiculturalism, engaging Verma in an in-depth discussion of this problematic and increasingly contested area and leading him to outline the artistic pursuits of his company. Special attention is given to the working processes of the Journey to the West trilogy (2002) and to the aesthetic principles driving it, which extend to other productions he has directed for Tara Arts, not least to his more recent transpositions of Ibsen and Shakespeare. A complete chronology of productions can be found on the Tara Arts webpage, www.tara-arts.com. The first part of this interview was published in Maria Shevtsova's Sociology of Theatre and Performance (Verona: QuiEdit, 2009), p. 359–71. She is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Twenty-first-century Russian theatre artists have increasingly taken to using material from real-life events to explore the intricacies of injustice in the civic sphere and its connection to the country's past. In a fifteen-year time span documentary forms have come to the forefront of Russia's theatrical avant-garde. In this article Molly Flynn offers a close reading of one of the most politically charged productions to have emerged from Moscow's booming documentary theatre – One Hour Eighteen: the Trial that Wasn't but Should Have Been (2010). The play uses verbatim texts from the prison and medical staff directly involved in the final days before the murder of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitskii in 2009. Setting the piece in a theatrical courtroom, the creators of One Hour Eighteen place their work in the context of Russia's judicial history in the previous century, during which the resemblance of trials to theatre has often been uncomfortably close. Molly Flynn is a doctoral candidate in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the history and significance of documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia.

In this article Maiya Murphy uses the enactive paradigm of cognition to take a fresh look at Edward Gordon Craig’s experiments in the theatre. By focusing on his obsession with movement, Maiya Murphy argues that an autopoietic conception of life can recategorize his problems with, ideas about, and experiments in the theatre as a coherent but multifaceted effort to create a very particular kind of cognitive engagement. She explores how enaction’s concept of the continuity of life and mind can map out a meaningful logic embedded in Craig’s intuitions about the connections between cognition, aesthetic experience, epistemology, and ontology. She also considers how the many media in which he worked and his interest in Asian arts – along with his major concepts such as the übermarionette and the kinetic stage – can be seen as attempts to think through theatre as an embodied and emergent event that is at once concrete, aesthetic, cognitive, and metaphysical. Finally, she traces the philosophical heritages that gave Craig his frameworks for understanding movement, arguing that his limitations and frustrations were fundamentally philosophical. Maiya Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her movementbased collective, Autopoetics. She is author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and of essays in Theatre Survey and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, among others.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has spawned several unauthorized sequel plays, which see Godot arrive on stage in 1960s Yugoslavia, 1980s Ireland, 1990s North America, and early 2000s Japan. The sequel play is a largely ignored phenomenon in literary scholarship, with the sequel form itself routinely dismissed as a derivative and inevitably disappointing text. Yet the sequel also re-situates and re-evaluates the original text, and its reiterative nature aptly parallels the paradox of non-ending in Beckett’s original Waiting for Godot. Focusing on four unauthorized stage sequels to Beckett’s play – Miodrag Bulatović’s Godo je došao (Godot Has Arrived, 1966), Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives, 1987), Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (1999), and Minoru Betsuyaku’s Yattekita Godot (Godot Has Come, 2007) – this article examines how these sequels rework the cultural logic of Godot’s arrival to their own critical and political ends. These playwrights draw on the very recursive, even frustrating, nature of the sequel form itself as an exegetic framework, reproducing the trope of non-ending that characterizes Beckett’s own work. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently working on two forthcoming Beckett-related monographs: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Post-War Francophone Theatre and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance.

In this article, Katie Normington outlines the increasing interest in Meyerhold's work and assesses previous applications of his methods to contemporary production work. She goes on to consider how working as movement director for Red Shift Theatre Company's adaptation of Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, enabled research into the application of Meyerhold's system of Biomechanics. Rehearsals for Bartleby combined actor-training and text rehearsals so that the Stanislavskian-trained actors gained ownership of biomechanical principles and could apply aspects to their independent exploration. This article analyzes the results of the work, and concludes that Meyerholdian techniques developed a physical architecture for the performance which, even during an arduous tour, maintained the clear shape and rhythm of the production. The use of principles such as rakurs, often neglected within present-day experimentation, proved to be essential in providing actors with a sense of composition and an awareness of their bodies in space. However, aspects such as facial expression and emotional excitability require further investigation. Katie Normington is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Following his analysis in NTQ 4 of the origins and effects of the ‘philosophy’ of drama-in-education which prevails in most schools. David Hornbrook here complements his critique with specific proposals for a positive future approach – building upon existing teaching strengths, but also giving the subject a greater curricular authority in the present educational climate, while correcting the ‘romantic fallacies’ from which current practice is too often derived. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

New Theatre Quarterly has provided extensive coverage of the work of Odin Teatret, based since 1966 at Holstebro in Denmark, as also of the approach and ideas of its director, Eugenio Barba, who first wrote for us on ‘The Nature of Dramaturgy’ in NTQ1 (1985). Most recently, we documented Odin's twelfth production, Talabot, through David Shoemaker's analysis in NTQ24 (1990). Here, we offer an actor's experience of the creation of a one-person production – uniting personal circumstances, experiences in training, and exploratory research in the process which led towards the creation of Judith, based on the apocryphal story of the woman who seduced an enemy general in order to murder him. Its performer, Roberta Carreri, joined Odin Teatret in 1974, since when she has also performed in The Book of Dance (1974–80), Come! and the Day Will Be Ours (1976–80), Anabasis (1977–84), The Million (1978–84), Brecht's Ashes (1980–84), and The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus (1985–87). Her evocation here of the process which led to the creation of Judith is based on an interview with Exe Christoffersen, who also provides a detailed scenario of the production in performance. This feature forms part of Exe Christoffersen's Skuespillerens Vandring, published in Denmark by Klim in 1989. It has been excerpted and translated for NTQ by Gordi Roberts.

Richard Schechner has recently come full circle back to the editorship of The Drama Review, which he earlier transformed from a quietly respected academic journal into the voice of American avant-garde theatre between 1962 and 1969. By this time, he had also joined the Drama faculty of New York University, where he still teaches, and created the Performance Group, for whom his productions included Dionysus in '69, Makbeth. The Tooth of Crime. Oedipus, and The Balcony. His early advocacy of environmental theatre, celebrated in his book of that name in 1973, developed into his present concern with theatre anthropology, the focus of his recent study. Between Theatre and Anthropology, discussed by Eugenio Barba in NTQ10 (1987). In October 1988 Schechner contributed to the Leicester conference ‘Points of Contact: Theatre. Anthropology, and Theatre Anthropology’, and there Nick Kaye discussed with him the relationship between his practical and theoretical work, its evolution, and the influences upon it–also looking in more detail at his most recent production, a performance combining Don Juan and Don Giovanni.