Our inclusion in NTQ5 of a piece by the priest-playwright Karl Gaspar, recording his experiences of creating drama in a Philippine prison-camp, coincided with the overthrow of the Marcos regime – a revolution in whose preparation and support. Eugène van Erven now argues, the theatre played a significant part. In the following article, he describes the organization and work of the Philippine Educational Theatre Association – PETA for short – from its creation in the early 'seventies, to the fully-established network of companies and activities of the present day, and discusses its future role in a society not yet certain of the success of its revolution. Eugène van Erven is currently involved in a long-term project researching liberation theatre in the Third World, funded at present by his postdoctoral research fellowship in the Drama Studies Programme of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His earlier publications have been in the field of contemporary western European political theatre, on which subject he was awarded his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. Tennessee.

The Market Theatre of Johannesburg opened in 1976, the year of the Soweto Uprising – the beginning of the end for the oppressive apartheid regime. Founded by Barney Simon, Mannie Manim, and a group of white actors, the theatre's policy, in line with the advice to white liberals from the Black Consciousness Movement, was to raise the awareness of its mainly white audiences about the oppression of apartheid and their own social, political, and economic privileges. The theatre went on through the late 'seventies and 'eighties to attract international acclaim for productions developed in collaboration with black artists that reflected the struggle against the incumbent regime, including such classics as The Island, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and Woza Albert! How has the Market fared with the emergence of the new South Africa in the 'nineties? Has it built on the past? Has it reflected the changes? What is happening at the theatre today? Actress, writer, and director Hilary Burns went to Johannesburg in November 2000 to find out. She worked in various departments of the theatre, attended productions, and interviewed theatre artists and members of the audience. This article will form part of her book, The Cultural Precinct, inspired by this experience to explore how the theatres born in the protest era have responded to the challenges of the new society.

On 16 April 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized in the southern region of South Korea: 304 passengers died, including 250 high school students. Despite an international outcry, there has not yet been a comprehensive investigation into what caused the Sewol to sink and why the passengers were not rescued promptly. This article discusses how performance can represent something that defies explanation because we do not know how or why it happened. Yellow Ribbon’s Talent Show, Namsan Arts Centre’s From Pluto, and Camino de Ansan performed the role of the students who died. Taking these three case studies, this article analyzes the ways in which they strive to represent the unrepresentable as they attempt to document the sinking and achieve justice, while memorializing the victims and arguing for the necessity of a more safety-conscious society. Areum Jeong is Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Jeong’s research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean-American film, literature, theatre, and performance. Her current book project explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korean and diasporic communities.

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.

This article provides an illustrated description and analysis of Speaking Stones – a collaborative performance commissioned by Theatre Asou of Graz, Austria, with UK playwright Kaite O'Reilly and director Phillip Zarrilli as a response to the increasingly xenophobic and reactionary realities of the politics of central Europe. The account interrogates the question, the dramaturgical possibilities, and the performative premise which guided the creation of Speaking Stones. Phillip Zarrilli is internationally known for training actors through Asian martial arts and yoga, and as a director. In 2008 he is directing the premiere of Kaite O'Reilly's The Almond and the Seahorse for Sherman-Cymru Theatre and the Korean premiere of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis. He is also Professor of Performance Practice at the University of Exeter.

The plays of the American avant-garde writer and director Richard Foreman present actors with a significant problem: their characters exist in a constant state of flux, detached from the usual narrative moorings, with the result that conventional acting methodologies do not apply. Drawing on interviews with Foreman himself, with the actors who worked with him on his New York production of King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe (2004), and on the rehearsal process of a student group preparing for the UK premiere of Pearls for Pigs (1993), Neal Swettenham investigates in this essay the precise challenges posed by these unusual texts. He argues that Foreman wants to provoke in his actors a sense of being permanently ‘off-balance’, requiring each of the performers in King Cowboy Rufus to develop their own way of navigating the play's contradictory demands. Similarly, the UK actors discovered that the unconventional dialogue, stripped of all contextual clues, must still be delivered with intention and rigour. Certain very specific European films cited by Foreman provide possible pointers to an acting style appropriate to the plays but, in the final analysis, the actor's problem remains. Neal Swettenham lectures in drama at Loughborough University. His ‘Irish Rioters, Latin American Dictators, and Desperate Optimists' Play-boy’ appeared in NTQ83 (August 2005).

In this article Mario Frendo engages with the idea of ancient Greek tragedy as a performance phenomenon, questioning critiques that approach it exclusively via literary–dramatic methodologies. Based on the premise that ancient Greek tragedy developed within the predominantly oral context of fifth-century BCE Greece, he draws on Hans-Thies Lehmann's study of tragedy and its relation to dramatic theatre, where it is argued that the genre is essentially ‘predramatic’. Considered as such, ancient Greek tragedy cannot be fully investigated using dramatic theories developed since early modernity. In view of this, Walter J. Ong's caution with respect to the rational processes produced by generations of literate culture will be acknowledged and alternative critiques sought, including performance criticism and performance-oriented frameworks such as orality, via which Frendo traces possible critical trajectories that would allow contemporary scholarship to deal with ancient tragedy as a performance rather than literary phenomenon. Reference will be made to Aristotle's use of the term ‘poetry’, and how performance criticism may provide new insight into how the Poetics deals with one of the earliest performance phenomena in the West. Mario Frendo is lecturer of theatre and performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is director of CaP, a research group focusing on links between culture and performance. His research interests include musicality in theatre, ancient tragedy, and relations between philosophical thought and performance.

Report of the conference on ‘The Greek Theatre Mask in Ancient and Modern Performance’, held at the Noh Studio at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 20–21 April 2002.

As a complementary piece to her preceding article on the formative significance of The Seagull to Stanislavsky's early thinking, Bella Merlin here looks at the play in the context of Stanislavsky's later work, when he was developing the Method of Physical Actions – an approach to a text which placed improvisation and the physical exploration of a scene at the centre of the actor's rehearsal process. This was in some ways a contravention of what was becoming codified in the West (through limited material being available in translation) as the psychological basis of the system. In 1995, Bella Merlin undertook a ten-month course of actor-training at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where she worked with acting ‘master’, Albert Filozov, who had trained with Mikhail Kedrov, one of the first developers of Stanislavsky's work following his death in 1938. Here, she examines the roots of Filozov's training and the nature of the Method of Physical Actions in theory and in practice. Bella Merlin trained as an actress in Britain and Russia, and has worked extensively in theatre and television. She is currently a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, where her area of research is acting processes and the psycho-physical nature of performance. This article is based on a paper delivered at the ‘Flight of the Seagull’ conference at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in November 1996, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the premiere of The Seagull.

The theoretical writings of Eugenio Barba on the nature and disciplines of acting have been a feature of NTQ since its first issue. These writings emerge, of course, from Barba's work with Odin Teatret, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary from its base in Holstebro, Denmark – and also from his formative association with ISTA. the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Accordingly, when a leading authority recently described Barba, along with Brecht and Grotowski, as one of the three major European influences on contemporary Latin American theatre, he was paying tribute to active participation and cross-fertilization, rather than to textbook discipleship. In the following article, Ian Watson, whose study of ‘Catharsis and the Actor’ appeared in NTQ 16 (1988), looks in detail at the nature and the consequences of Barba's ‘Latin American connection’.

Sustaining his reputation for production work that is both original and challenging, Edward Bond worked closely with the directors of Jackets during its productions at Lancaster and in Leicester and London in 1989–90. After a mixed experience with the RSC directing his War Plays, Bond continued to develop his concept of ‘theatre events’, and to work towards the particular style of acting that is necessary for his work in performance. Ian Stuart, a doctoral candidate in dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzes here how the resulting twin concepts of ‘theatre events’ and ‘theatre acting’ translated into practice, exploring both the workin-progress and its realization through setting, lighting, and critical response. Earlier reconstructions and analyses of Bond's plays in production in TQ and NTQ have included features on Lear in TQ5 (1972) and The Fool in TQ21 (1976), both at the Royal Court, and on his own production at the Cottesloe of Summer in NTQ6 (1986).

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.

Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by which The Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell) Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes and (edited with Michael Booth) The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author of A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.

Among the infinite variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare, relatively little attention has been paid, even by scholars professedly concerned with Shakespeare's language, to the quality and nature of the sound of his words – despite the commonplace assumption that the young Shakespeare, in particular, was in love with language. One consequence is that such a major element of Richard II as its high proportion of rhyming couplets is either briefly (and negatively) dismissed, or ignored. Here, Kenneth C. Bennett, who teaches in the Department of English at Lake Forest College, lllinois, considers in detail the distinctive qualities and ‘sonances’ of language in the play, looking in particular at the couplets, whose use and significance he analyzes and defends.

Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral worked for a number of years with Gardzienice before founding Teatr Pieéń Kozła – Song of the Goat Theatre – in Wrocław in 1996. The conversation that follows took place on 22 June 2009, during Song of the Goat's run of Macbeth, their most recent production. Created in tandem with the Year of Grotowski theatre festival, the ‘World as a Place of Truth’ held in Wrocław on 13–30 June 2009, it was one of a series of meetings, presentations, and performances organized by Joanna Klass of Arden 2 for the US Artists Initiative, a project established in partnership with the Grotowski Institute and the Center for International Theatre Development. Macbeth will be performed at the Barbican Centre in London as part of Song of the Goat's two-month-long British tour of this production in October and November 2010, accompanied by workshops and demonstrations. Its itinerary is Eastleigh (4–9 October), Birmingham (11–15 October), Cambridge (18–23 October), Manchester Metropolitan University (25–30 October), London (3–20 November), and Brighton (21–26 November). This conversation about some of the principles of the company's work was led by Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In this article, Jung-Soon Shim indicates how Han Tae-Sook transforms Lady Macbeth's subconscious into an interculturally emotional space in which the Christian concept of guilt and the Korean ethos of Han intersect. In this way, the director conducts an intercultural dialogue, negotiating the Western world view in Shakespeare's Macbeth together with the traditional Confucian-shamanistic world view to be found in Korea. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, currently President of the Korean Theatre Studies Association (KTSA), and a founding member and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT). Her numerous books include Twenty-First Century Korean Women Theatre Directors (2004).

In this paper Rachel Fensham returns to the writings of Gaston Bachelard in order to examine the poetics of space from a non-European perspective. Spatial metaphors, such as the ‘dead heart’ that might evoke phenomenological and psychic dimensions of space in Australia, also register in historical and geographical imaginaries. However, postcolonial theories of space disturb visual metaphors and cartographic concepts in the mises en scène of theatrical performance. Here, Fensham analyzes two recent performances that radically reimagine the poetics of (Australian) space through the movement trajectories of walking and falling. Rachel Fensham is a Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the University of Surrey. Her book with Denise Varney, The Dolls' Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005), examines the influence of women playwrights on mainstream Australian theatre, and she is currently undertaking research on transnationalism and choreographic practice.

In the following article, Christine Hamilton and Adrienne Scullion review the system of theatre provision and production that exists in the rural areas of Scotland, most especially in the Highlands and Islands, assessing the policy framework that exists in the nation as a whole and in the Highlands and Islands in particular. They highlight the role and responsibilities of volunteers within the distribution of professional theatre in Scotland, challenge the response of locally based theatre-makers and nationally responsible agencies to represent rural Scotland, and raise issues fundamental to the provision of culture nationally. In doing so, they question what we expect theatre policy to deliver in rural areas, and what we expect rural agents to contribute to theatre provision and policy. Finally, they suggest that, in the system of rural arts in Scotland, there are wider lessons for the development of arts in and the arts of other sparsely populated and fragile communities. Christine Hamilton is the director and Adrienne Scullion the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow, where Adrienne teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies.

Against the received wisdom, Mark Howell-Meri argues here for a continuing tradition between Elizabethan and Restoration (or ‘long eighteenth-century’) playhouses. He bases his argument in part on measurements which suggest the common use of traditional building methods and relationships between measurements and spaces based on ad-quadratum geometry, as shared by theatre builders across the centuries; but also on his own experience as a performance-practitioner specializing in an historiographical approach to making sense of eighteenth-century plays for today's audiences in surviving (or reconstructed) eighteenth-century spaces. He was the first director to restore a three-sided stage front to the Georgian Theatre (now Theatre Royal) in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1987 with his hit production of Garrick's Miss in her Teens (1747), and other research productions have included Robert Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), Colman the Younger's Inkle and Yarico (1787), Inchbald's The Midnight Hour (1787), again at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and Lillo's The London Merchant (1731). He is now completing his doctoral thesis, ‘Theatre and Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Play Production on the Three-Sided Stage’.

Between 1975 and 1988, the Korean Public Performance Ethics Committee (KPPEC) censored obscene language, body exposure, and extreme violence, as is common in all forms of theatre censorship. However, the KPPEC focused in particular on depictions of the President of South Korea, and proscribed any work that challenged or even questioned the public image of the President as a strong leader for a nation in crisis. Despite the official abolition of censorship in 1988, it was discovered in 2016 that a blacklist had been in operation that excluded ‘left’ and ‘pro-Pyongyang’ theatre directors and actors from accessing public funding. By exploring the process of censorship, Seong-kwan Cho in this article interrogates the relationship between the theatre and the nation. Seong-kwan Cho is a lecturer at the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University. With Jae-beom Hong, in his current research he has been exploring North Korean performance, and his article on this subject is forthcoming in Asian Theatre Journal.