Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance's engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance – as was Melanie Kloetzel, in the creation of The Sanitastics, a site-specific dance film created in the Calgary Walkway System. In this article, Kloetzel examines how theorists have struggled with space and place in the last four decades and how bringing in the perspective of the body allows us to reassess our assumptions about these terms. As she analyzes her creative process, she discovers the restrictions as well as possibilities in space and place, but she also notes the need for Marc Augé's idea of non-place to clarify her site-specific efforts in the homogenized, corporate landscape of the Walkway System. Kloetzel is an associate professor at the University of Calgary and the artistic director of kloetzel&co, a dance company founded in New York City in 1997 that has presented work across North America. Her site-specific films have been shown in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2009.

In 2001 Split Britches presented a double bill entitled Double Agency, consisting of one new piece, Miss Risqué, and one already in their repertoire, It's a Small House and We've Lived in it Always – both works having been created in collaboration with the Clod Ensemble. In this article, Geraldine Harris re-stages her earlier encounter with Small House, in the light of seeing it again as part of the double bill, as a means of examining a number of issues concerning the work of Split Britches in general and its reception in the academic world. Particular consideration is given to the manner in which Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver's performances have been read in terms of their ‘real’ lives and relationship and the various ways in which this may reflect the preconceptions of the spectator–critic. Focusing on how their work reiterates specific theatrical traditions and conventions, Harris suggests that utopian tendencies in academic feminist criticism may have underplayed the ways in which, like many famous theatrical double acts, Split Britches constantly perform on the border – between tragedy and comedy, optimism and despair, fantasy and the possible, escape and entrapment. Geraldine Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. Her previous publications include a number of articles on female practitioners in nineteenth-century French popular theatre and on gender issues in contemporary performance. Her latest book, Staging Femininities, Performance and Performativity (Manchester University Press, 1999), explored the relationship between feminist performance and a range of postmodern and poststructuralist theories.

The distinctively Korean concept of Han evokes a pervasive sense of sorrow, traditionally in need of shamanistic purging in the spirits of the dead, but also describing the sense of national trauma induced first by the Japanese occupation, then by the post-war division of the country. Han has also become an important feature of modern Korean drama, and in this article Jung-Soon Shim describes how Park Joh-Yeol's play The Toenails of General Oh (1974) revisits the concept, integrating indigenous cultural traditions – notably the shamanic ritual Gut – and how, in the production by Sohn Jin-Chaek, the director utilized a western style of epic theatre to create a ‘distanced’ style of Gut on the proscenium stage. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, and a founding member of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT), of which she is currently President. Her books include the two-volume Globalization and Korean Theatre (2003), which won the Best Book of the Year Award of the Korean Ministry of Culture. She also received the Best Critic Award for 2004 from the Korean Association of Theatre Critics. Her research for this article was supported by Soongsil University.

A report by Maria Shevtsova on the 2016 edition of the biennial Craiova International Shake speare Festival, continuing her coverage of the event in NTQ 112. She pays special attention here to the pièce de résistance of the latest festival – Richard II with the Saitama Arts Theatre, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, whose death occurred barely a month later: this article is also a tribute to a world-renowned man of the theatre. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts in the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London.

The idea of merging western and Indian performing traditions through the performance of King Lear by a Kathakali company promised to be a viable experiment in intercultural practice – yet it proved entirely alien to Indian audiences initiated in Kathakali, and baffling when brought before the cosmopolitan throngs of the Edinburgh Festival. Here, Suresh Awasthi, former chairman of the National School of Drama in Delhi, analyzes the misconceptions which, in his view, fatally flawed the production – setting it within the context of its parent performance tradition, which permits development and change within a framework of basic thematic stability, but is unable to appropriate new texts. When, as in this case, the attempt is made, what results is a mistranslation of performance codes between two cultures. In the course of his argument, Suresh Awasthi provides a useful summary and analysis of traditional Kathakali conventions, and in conclusion describes some productions from the ‘classical avant-garde’ which have successfully explored an intercultural approach without detriment to either of the traditions involved.

Nigerian playwrights face the problem not only of finding ways of communicating with their audiences which address popular concerns in an assimilable manner, but of deciding the appropriate language in which to do so, in a notion which embraces many language groups and cultures. The solution of employing English as a lingua franca poses problems hung over from the colonialist past – and a tendency for plays written in English also to employ an inappropriate western dramaturgy. In the following article, Sam Ukala considers the various objections raised to English-language Nigerian plays, conceding some points and answering others, and proposing the concept of ‘folkism’ as a national aesthetic principle – a way of reconciling the use of a common language with the distinctive and often disparate needs of the Nigerian people.

In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), David Williams presented a conspective overview of the work of Peter Brook at the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. More recently, in NTQ26 (May 1991), Paul B. Cohen analyzed Brook's evolving views on the interaction between performers and audience – the worlds of the imagination and the everyday. Here, Peter Brook himself, in conversation with Jean Kalman, discusses with a characteristically eclectic range of references and comparisons the idea of the theatrical ‘event’ and how it is generated, touching in passing on subjects as diverse as the construction and deconstruction of linear narrative and the significance and nature of improvisation. The interviewer, Jean Kalman, is a lighting designer who has collaborated with Peter Brook on many of his productions in recent years, including The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert! and The Tempest.

The approximately contemporary Jacobean plays, King Lear and Nobody and Somebody, share an ancient British setting, a preoccupation with instability in the state, and an unsettling interest in negation. Peter Womack here suggests that by reading them together we can retrieve some of the theatrical strangeness which the more famous of the two has lost through familiarity and naturalization. The dramatic mode of existence of the character called ‘Nobody’ is paradoxical, denaturing – an early modern visual and verbal Verfremdungseffekt, at once philosophical and clownish. His negativity, which is articulated in dialogue with the companion figure of ‘Somebody’, is matched in King Lear, above all in the role of Edgar, but also by a more diffused state of being (withdrawal, effacement, folly) which the play generates in reaction to its positive events. Ultimately the negation in both plays is social in character: ‘Nobody’ is the dramatic face of the poor and oppressed. Peter Womack teaches literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is English Renaissance Drama (2006), in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series.

The National Theatre of Scotland was constituted in 2003, following a debate in the newly devolved Scottish Parliament. Its first artistic director was appointed in 2004, and its inaugural production was presented in February 2006. Within another year, some twenty productions had been seen in over forty urban and rural locations – a rate of development in marked contrast to the slow crawl over more than half a century towards a National Theatre in London. Personal and political drive apart, a major reason for the speed with which the National Theatre of Scotland has not only established itself but gained respect far beyond national boundaries is the simple fact that it does not possess a theatre building, so that all its work must of necessity tour nationwide – or involve co-productions with building-based companies. Home, the opening event, was in fact a multiplicity of different shows tailored to ten different locations; later work has ranged from the classic Mary Stuart to Anthony Neilson's surrealist Wonderful World of Dissocia, from a reinvention of Macbeth to Gregory Burke's astonishing Black Watch, which interweaves the history of the famous but doomed Scottish regiment with the raw actuality of young soldiers serving in Iraq. In this article, based on a paper presented to the fourth Forum for Arabic Theatre in Sharjah in January 2007, Robert Leach surveys both the brief history of the company and the highlights of its prolific first year's work. Robert Leach lives in Scotland but teaches in England, at Cumbria Institute of the Arts in Carlisle. His latest book is Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre, published by Exeter University Press in 2006.

For two radical theatres formed in the 1930s, taking performances to their audiences was an important dimension of commitment to working-class politics and civic engagement. Separated by distance but joined ideologically, the New Theatre in Australia and Unity Theatre in the United Kingdom engaged in what they described as ‘mobile work’, as well as being ‘stage curtain’ companies. Based on archival research and drawing on mobility literature, Cathy Brigden and Lisa Milner examine in this article the rationale for mobile work, the range of spaces that were used both indoor (workplaces, halls, private homes) and outdoor (parks, street corners beaches), and its decline. Emerging from this analysis are parallels between the two theatres’ motivation for mobile work, their practice in these diverse performance spaces, and the factors leading to the decline. Cathy Brigden is an associate professor in the School of Management and Deputy Director, Centre for Sustainable Organizations and Work at RMIT University, Australia. Her current research interests include the historical experiences of women in trade unions, gender in performing arts industries, and union strategies and regulation. Lisa Milner is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, Australia. Current research interests include a comparative study of workers’ theatre, representations of workers and trade unions on screen, and labour biography.

Arthur Schnitzler's cycle of sexual permutations in fin de siècle Vienna has always been prone to problems of translation – not least of its title, properly in German Reigen, but often miscalled La Ronde, after Max Ophüls's film version of 1950. But its problems for translators also derive from the cultural specificity of its time and place, and in this article Heidi Zojer first examines how its numerous English translators have tried to overcome the difficulties the play presents, illustrating from a cross-section of versions examples of its resistance to easy translation, whether ‘faithful’ or colloquial. She concludes that freer adaptations such as David Hare's The Blue Room (1998) have in fact been truer to the spirit of Schnitzler's play – while perhaps truest of all has been Carlo Gébler's complete rewriting, in Ten Rounds (1999), which ‘translated’ the play to contemporary Belfast during the years of the peace process. Heidi Zojer was awarded her D. Phil. from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in 1999. From 2000 to 2002 she was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and since then has been teaching at University College Dublin.

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.

This article is a comparative examination of the relationship of audience and actors on the one hand, and of a client and his psychotherapist on the other. Peter Elsass argues that in order to describe both relationships as of a healing nature, one also has to identify a ‘healing space’ beyond the consulting room, instead of focusing on the healing relationship itself. Employing an analogy with shamanism, he describes this ‘healing space’ as a ‘pinta’, or vision from an extra-contextual frame. The history of psychoanalysis shows this need for a ‘pinta’ as a driving, rebellious force, and he suggests that without a ‘pinta’ of its own, the theatre also dies. Peter Elsass is a Professor of Health Psychology in the Medical Faculty of Aarhus University, Denmark, and chief psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital, Aarhus. In addition to writing a large number of articles within the medical and psychological fields, he has also worked in the field of cultural anthropology, and in Strategies for Survival: the Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Ethnic Minorities (New York University Press, 1992), he describes his many periods of residence with Indian tribes in Colombia. Peter Elsass has been an associate of Odin Theatre, and has taught at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, directed by Eugenio Barba.

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond.

In what would a postmodern theatrum mundi, or ‘theatre of the world’, consist? In an ironic inversion of the very concept, with the microcosm issuing a unilateral declaration of independence – or of incorporation? Or in a neo-neoplatonic recognition that it is but a cultural construct of an outer world that is itself culturally constructed? In the following article, Baz Kershaw makes connections between the high-imperial Victorian love of glasshouses, which at once created and constrained their ‘theatre of nature’, and the massive 'nineties ecological experiment of ‘Biosphere II’ – ‘a gigantic glass ark the size of an aircraft hangar situated in the Southern Arizona desert’, which embraces all the main types of terrain in the global eco-system. In the Biosphere's ambiguous position between deeply serious scientific experiment and commodified theme park, Kershaw sees an hermetically-sealed system analogous to much contemporary theatre – whose intrinsic opacity is often further blurred by a theorizing no less reductive than that of the obsessive Victorian taxonomists. He offers not answers, but ‘meditations’ on the problem of creating an ecologically meaningful theatre. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, originally trained and worked as a design engineer. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and as co-director of Medium Fair, the first mobile rural community arts group, and of the reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. He is the author of The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992) and The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (Routledge, 1999), and co-author of Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (Methuen, 1990).

In this essay Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret, founder of the International School for Theatre Anthropology, and a Contributing Editor of NTQ, traces his own ‘orphanage’ from a professional family – and his discovery not only of an ‘elder brother’ in Grotowski, but of his two ‘grandfathers’, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. He extends the metaphor to suggest how these two branches of a theatrical family tree, apparently of quite different impulses and temperaments, shared a working language, however differently this translated into their theatre practice. He sums this up as a common concern with ‘showing how thoughts move’, and relates this in particular to the ways in which the theatre lost, preserved, and has slowly rediscovered the work of Meyerhold, and to how the ‘disconnected tradition’ of his work re-emerges in unexpected places. This takes Barba on a journey from the home where Meyerhold received his friends in Moscow, as lovingly restored by his granddaughter, to Mexico and Colombia, where Seki Sano brought to a new continent his own discoveries from the ‘theatre paradise’ he believed he had found in the Soviet Union, in which ‘the discoveries of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were part of the same baggage’, thus passing, ‘through the rigour of the craft, the meaning of a theatre that lives through revolt and a feeling of not belonging’.

The fictionalized account in the recent film The Queen of Tony Blair's coaching of Her Majesty into a more voter-friendly response to the death of Princess Diana, largely through the medium of television, is a pertinent reminder of how the presentation of self on television subtly modifies the presentation of self in everyday life. In this article, Ian Watson considers how the now-ritualized debates between the main contenders in American presidential elections are stage-managed to enhance what their supporters suppose to be their candidate's most sympathetic features – supposedly learning the lessons of the first such debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which displayed Nixon in such an unappealing light. However, what are ostensibly strengths or weaknesses may be read as quite other by an audience attuned to reading signifiers in film or television drama – or simply empathic towards what others perceive as failings, as in the case of reactions to George W. Bush's inarticulacies, awkward mannerisms, and failed jokes, which some read not as signs of ineptness but of an endearing humanity. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Is there a specific lesbian theatre aesthetic? If so, is butch and femme at the heart of it? Or androgyny? Or the freedom-confinement dynamic? Or, on another level, distancing role from ‘essential being’, and ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as social constructs from male and female as biological entities? By focusing on a number of lesbian texts, including her own work, Nina Rapi explores both the theory and practice of an emerging aesthetic that reveals the ‘performance of being’, seeking to ‘shift the axis of categorization’, and so to create a new and exciting theatre language. Nina Rapi is a playwright and translator whose theatre work includes Ithaka (Riverside Studios, June 1989; Link Theatre, staged readings, April 1992; published in Seven Plays by Women, 1991), Critical Moments, a trilogy of shorts (Soho Poly Theatre, June 1990), Johnny Is Dead (First One Person Play Festival, Etcetera Theatre, March 1991), Dreamhouse (Oval House and Chat's Palace, April-May 1991), Dance of Guns (touring production, including King's Head and Jackson's Lane Theatres, April-May 1992), and Dangerous Oasis (Finborough, March 1993).

Drama training in Britain at the present time is replete with horror stories. In the academic sector, intake numbers have been pushed far beyond the strength of the resources – whether of personnel or performing spaces – designed to accommodate them. In the actor training sector, those students who have somehow managed to cope with the heavy fees struggle for subsistence – often by working at full-time jobs during the night and at weekends, while some have even joined the homeless on the streets. In the following article, Clive Barker attempts to disentangle the complex web of factors which have led to this situation, and to suggest how some of the artistic, if not the economic problems might begin to be tackled. Clive Barker, who recently retired from the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Formerly an actor with Theatre Workshop, he is also author of the seminal text, Theatre Games.