Augusto Boal is one of the best-known contemporary practitioners and teachers in the use of drama as a means of challenging the status quo. Starting as a self-proclaimed revolutionary, challenging the artistic theories of Aristotle and seeking to supersede those of Brecht, he developed his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ working with the poor of Brazil. Now he is perhaps best known for his work in ‘Forum Theatre’ and ‘Image Theatre’. In this article, David Davis and Carmel O'Sullivan argue that not only have Boal's methods been far from revolutionary for many years, but that they are now focused on individual needs, enabling the individual to survive a little longer within an oppressive social structure. They propose that this is not a case of Marxist revolutionary ideology becoming diluted over time, but that the roots of the change are to be found in a lack of grounding in Marxist theory and philosophy from the beginning. David Davis is Director of the International Centre for Studies in Drama in Education and Professor of Drama in Education at the University of Central England, teaching on the MA programme as well as supervising PhD research. He has presented workshops in many parts of the world, and published widely. Carmel O'Sullivan lectures in the Education Department at Trinity College, Dublin, and is currently completing her doctoral thesis critiquing the theory and practice of Boal at the University of Central England.

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

Recent feminist criticism has led to a reassessment of women's roles in the Elizabethan drama, especially in such ‘difficult’ plays as The Taming of the Shrew or Shakespeare's problem comedies. Yet this has often been with an implicit belief in the appropriateness of ‘psychological’ or ‘interpretive’ approaches to character and gender quite alien to the period in which the plays were first performed. In the following article. Kathleen McLuskie. who teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Kent, looks at the different, often conflicting approaches to the sexuality of performance in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, at how these were reflected both in theatrical conventions and in contemporary attitudes to the plays and the ‘boy actresses’ – and at some possible implications for modern productions.

In NTQ47 (August 1996), Sarah Werner argued that contemporary voice training did not provide a neutral set of tools to help actors perform classical texts, and that it was needful to reveal the cultural biases and underlying ideology of voice work in order to clarify a feminist understanding of acting and speaking Shakespeare. The three leading voice practitioners who came under Ms Werner's fire – Cicely Berry, Kristin Linklater, and Patsy Rodenburg – mounted a sturdy defence of their methods in NTQ49 (February 1997), to which Sarah Werner responded in the following issue. Now Jane Boston takes a fresh view of all sides in the argument, putting these into a broader historical context which embraces the culture of our own times as much as of Shakespeare's, and calls for an understanding and reconciliation of mutual misconceptions between the academy and the conservatoire. Jane Boston was a founding member of the feminist Siren Theatre in the ‘eighties, and has subsequently taught at the National Youth Theatre, the Poor School, and at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was Head of Voice for the BA in Acting, which she helped to create. She now combines a pedagogical and practical role at Central as supervisor and trainer on the Postgraduate Diploma in Voice Studies, and has recently presented papers on acting and stress at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Whether described as adaptations, documentations, translations, or transcriptions, the video cassettes which allow us to see performances on video are proliferating. Not always easily available for begging, borrowing, or buying, not always willingly turned over by the theatre companies who hold them for in-house use, often lost or erased by television channels, and always beleaguered with copyright problems, these electronic arts ‘documents’ are none the less causing a revolution in teaching, rehearsal methods, and research. In what constitutes a first detailed mapping of the territory, Annabelle Melzer's two-part article deals with the theoretical and aesthetic questions surrounding performance documentation, with some of the hands-on issues of such filming – and with her own journey to seek out the documents themselves. Annabelle Melzer, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, is completing ten years of research on the adaptation and documentation of theatre through moving image documents. Shakespeare on Screen, the first volume of her multi-volume filmography, Theatre on Screen, appeared in 1991, receiving the Choice and American Library Association awards as outstanding reference book of 1991. Her articles on avant-garde performance have appeared in Artforum, Theatre Research International, and Comparative Drama, and her Hazan Prize-winning book Dada and Surrealist Performance has just been reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is at present writing a book on the theatricality of war.

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Sarah Kane was born on 3 February 1971 and committed suicide on 20 February 1999. She achieved reluctant notoriety with Blasted at the Royal Court in 1995, which, like many plays later recognised as dramatic landmarks, was villified at the time by the critics but passionately defended by many theatre practitioners. Dan Rebellato mourns the death and celebrates the life of the writer, and assesses her plays and their lasting significance.

The emergence of new performance paradigms in the second half of the twentieth century is only now being recognized as a fresh phase in human history. The creation of the new discipline, or, as some would call it, the anti-discipline of performance studies in universities is just a small chapter in a ubiquitous story. Everywhere performance is becoming a key quality of endeavour, whether in science and technology, commerce and industry, government and civics, or humanities and the arts. We are experiencing the creation of what Baz Kershaw here calls the ‘performative society’ – a society in which the human is crucially constituted through performance. But in such a society, what happens to the traditional notions and practices of drama and theatre? In this inaugural lecture, Kershaw looks for signs and portents of the future of drama and theatre in the performative society, finds mostly dissolution and deep panic, and tentatively suggests the need for a radical turn that will embrace the promiscuity of performance. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, trained and worked as a design engineer before reading English and Philosophy at Manchester University. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and with the Devon-based group Medium Fair, where he founded the first reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. His latest book is The Radical in Performance (Routledge, 1999). More recently he wrote about the ecologies of performance in NTQ 62.

With a rich mix of theatrical material to bring to the table, the climate-change debate playing out in the public domain would seem well adapted to the stage, and has often been presented in docu-dramatic form, as in Al Gore's well-known film An Inconvenient Truth. But until relatively recently climate change and the science relating to it have been conspicuous by their absence from the stage. Early movers on the climate-change theatre scene included Caryl Churchill's 2006 climate-change libretto for the London Proms, We Turned on the Light, and John Godber's 2007 play Crown Prince. Since then, interest has steadily increased. In 2009 came Steve Waters's double bill The Contingency Plan (On the Beach and Resilience). This was quickly followed by Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett in 2010, and by three further plays in the spring of 2011: Greenland, the collaborative work of Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne; The Heretic by Richard Bean; and Wastwater by Simon Stephens. In this article Julie Hudson focuses on three of these works to explore how the plays engage with the debate through the medium of climate-change science. As her article suggests, these British climate-change plays make an important and occasionally subversive contribution to the long-running discourse on the relationship between science, the ecosystem, and human beings. In performance, they succeed in turning a subject that has been overplayed for effect in the public domain into compelling theatre. Julie Hudson is currently a visiting fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University.

The international circulation of commercial theatre in the early twentieth century was driven not only from the centres of Great Britain and the USA, but by the specific enterprise and habitus of managers in ‘complementary’ production sites such as Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The activity of this period suggests a de-centred competitive trade in theatrical commodities – whether performers, scripts, or productions – wherein the perceived entertainment preferences and geographies of non-metropolitan centres were formative of international enterprise. The major producers were linked in complex bonds of partnerships, family, or common experience which crossed the globe. The fractures and commonalities displayed in the partnerships of James Cassius Williamson and George Musgrove, which came to dominate and shape the fortunes of the Australian industry for much of the century, indicate the contradictory commercial and artistic pressures bearing upon entrepreneurs seeking to provide high-quality entertainment and form advantageous combinations in competition with other local and international managements. Clarke, Meynell and Gunn mounted just such spirited competition from 1906 to 1911, and their story demonstrates both the opportunities and the centralizing logic bearing upon local managements shopping and dealing in a global market. The author, Veronica Kelly, works at the University of Queensland. She is presently undertaking a study of commercial stars and managements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, with a focus on the star performer as model of history, gender, and nation.

Rustom Bharucha's Theatre of the World (Routledge, 1993), sections of which first appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, was a major intervention in the debate about the nature and ethics of interculturalism – an unfortunate side-effect being that he has, by his own wry admission, now been ‘academicized as Peter Brook's Other’, a category he finds both offensive and redundant. The following article extends his explorations by developing a careful and pertinent distinction between interculturalism and intraculturalism – a distinction derived from practice rather than theory, specifically from his experience directing an Indian production of Peer Gynt, performed in Kannada as Gundegowdana Charitre. Rustom Bharucha explores the implications of ‘translating’ such a classic text across and within cultures as well as languages – and the further paradox of this being, as for most of us, a process of transmission through English rather than Norwegian. He sums up the nature of the challenge as ‘to negotiate different selves, cultures, histories, and languages through the labyrinth of multiple Others’.

By the mid 'eighties, the Thatcher government's public funding restrictions had taken a firm hold, leading to a now familiar position of crisis theatre management. In 1985, under pressure from the profession, the Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned an independent enquiry, the first for sixteen years, to evaluate the needs of the publicly funded theatre and to determine funding priorities. Although the resulting Cork Enquiry was seen by many at the time as a cost-cutting exercise, eight months intensive research and evidence-taking led to a carefully constructed case for a funding increase against an estimated shortfall of up to £13.4 million – and also produced a broad vision of the nature of theatre in England. It is now ten years since the Cork Enquiry delivered its report, with the aim of ensuring the healthy development of an art form placed under severe financial constraint. Here lan Brown and Rob Brannen, Secretary and Assistant Secretary to the Enquiry, provide insight into the Enquiry's setting-up, its process, and formulation of recommendations. In the light of recent consultation exercises, they examine the nature and function of such reports alongside the long-term impact of the Cork Enquiry. lan Brown was Drama Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1986 to 1994, and is now Professor and Head of the Drama Department at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford.

When, back in 1971, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6, 1972) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner, Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966). As this article bears witness, the debate still rages, and here its leading historian, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – explores some of the ways in which myth has contributed as much as analysis to the argument. He goes back to contemporary documentation to explore the nature of the BBC's own sometimes timorous attitude to the creature it had spawned, its context within the developing aesthetics and technology of television drama, the reactions of politicians and local government agencies – and the way in which repeat transmissions were (and were not) hedged about with paranoia.

The ‘theatre of the world’, or Theatrum Mundi, offered a pervasive emblematic view of the relationship between God, as playwright and audience, and his terrestrial creation. Although this became peculiarly appropriate during the Renaissance period, views of the theatre as microcosmic of the larger world have persisted – whether in the consciously wrought imagery of modern sociology or the unconscious colloquial useage of theatrical terms to describe everyday behaviour. In the article which follows, David E. R. George suggests that the ‘view’ of the subatomic world presented by quantum theory makes for a paradigm which is no less compelling, according to which the sense of theatrical ‘potentiality’ which characterizen much contemporary experimental theatre is illuminated and paralleled by the refusal of scientific certainty that quantum theory confronts and accommodates. David George. whose ‘Letter to a Poor Actor’ appeared in NTQ 8 (1986), taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Gottingen, Malaysia, and Peking before taking up his present post at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His books include studies of Ibsen. German tragic theory, and Indian ritual dance–drama.

The past two decades have seen a remarkable resurgence in documentary theatre in Britain and America, with a growing emphasis on verbatim material. In this article, Derek Paget examines a distinctively twenty-first-century contribution to the tradition of activist theatre grounded in the last century. Using verbatim material, supporting a specific current cause, and often produced in association with an NGO or charitable organization, the ‘rehearsed reading’ apparently offers little in terms of theatricality even if it is clearly worthy and a valuable resource for activists. Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times. In the present conjuncture, work like that of the ‘Actors for Human Rights’ group, analyzed here, seeks to be a force for social change through a focus on single issues and a reliance on verbatim speech. Derek Paget's interest in documentary theatre has featured several times in NTQ and his early intervention on Verbatim Theatre featured in NTQ 12 (November 1987). Research for the article was conducted as part of University of Reading's 2007–2010 ‘Acting with Facts’ project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Derek Paget is Principal Investigator of the project, and Reader in Theatre and Television in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, University of Reading. The second edition of No Other Way To Tell It, his book on screen docudrama, is due for publication this year.

In 2003, Graeme Miller was commissioned by the Museum of London to produce a sitespecific artwork for its oral history collection. Miller responded by creating Linked, a performance which bears witness to the disastrous impact the M11 link road has had on his local neighbourhood since its construction in the 1990s. Helped by a team of researchers, Miller interviewed local citizens and road protesters and broadcast their testimonies from twenty transmitters that line the route of the link road. In order to activate the work, the participant borrows a headset from a local library and is invited to follow the link road from Hackney to Wanstead, a distance of roughly four miles. This article explores the politics of Linked from a number of different theoretical perspectives: contemporary ethnography, everyday life studies, urban theory, and Situationism. The objective is to show that Linked offers an alternative paradigm for political performance – a paradigm which also necessitates an idiosyncratic and subjective form of writing. The article is followed by an interview in which Miller speaks about the processes involved in making Linked. Carl Lavery teaches performance and theatre at Loughborough University.

Christmas pantomime, that peculiarly English form whose uncertain origins go back to the early eighteenth century, has evolved its own distinctive typology of cross-dressed characters, with a Principal Boy who is a girl, a Dame who is indisputably male, and even those humanoid visitors from the animal kingdom known as ‘skin parts’. David Mayer explored ‘The Sexuality of English Pantomime’ in the seminal ‘People's Theatre’ issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (TQ4, 1974), and twenty years on Peter Holland takes up the debate in the light of recent developments in sexual politics, critical approaches to gender – and, not least, the continuing and not always expected evolution of what remains a very live form indeed. Peter Holland is about to move from his present post as Judith E. Wilson Reader in Drama and Theatre in the Faculty of English at Cambridge to become the new Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. An earlier version of his present article was presented as a paper at the conference on ‘Eros e commedia sulla scena inglese’, at the Terza Università in Rome in December 1995.

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy – as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with Ian Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers – including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys – to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience–performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the company's achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndham's Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the author's doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.

In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might teach us about ourselves, about the traumatized other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts. Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. A practising director, he has also taught extensively in the UK and Ireland as well as in Germany and the United States. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-edited Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatres (Intellect, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Performance Research ‘On Trauma’ (Taylor and Francis, 2011).