Brevity in experimental Italian theatre is not merely an expressive dimension of scenic creation, but a forma mentis, a conceptual vocation of young companies. The 2000s produced a minor theatre in Italy – first because of the reduced stage size, and second because of the brevity of works such as installation pieces. Moving from the linguistic disintegration of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, this theatre is especially inspired by the visual arts, even though its historical roots remain fragmented and art is still seen in the synthetic language of modern dance and Futurist variety. Short forms actually become a tool for crossing artistic genres and languages. Starting from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophical concept of minor literature, in this article Silvia Mei explores and analyzes work by such Italian contemporary companies as gruppo nanou, Città di Ebla, Anagoor, Opera, ErosAntEros, and Teatro Sotterraneo – all representative of what can be called installation theatre, a new theatrical wave that crosses the boundaries and specificities of artistic language, leading to the deterritorialization of theatre itself, a rethinking of the artistic work as well as its relationship with the audience. Silvia Mei is Adjunct Professor of the History of Theatre Directing and Theatre Iconography at the University of Bologna, having been a Research Fellow at the University of Turin. Her recent publications include ‘La terza avanguardia: ortografie dell’ultima scena italiana’, in Culture Teatrali, No. 14 (2015), and Displace Altofest (Valletta: Malta 2018 Foundation).

Between 1986 and 1989, Michael Bogdanov directed The Wars of the Roses (an ambitious seven-play Shakespeare cycle that won him the Olivier Award for Best Director in 1990), introducing an accessible and pertinent Shakespeare to 1980s audiences and paving the way for later politicized versions of Shakespeare’s plays – such as, recently, the New York Public Theater’s 2017 production of Julius Caesar. Following Bogdanov’s death in 2017, the time seems right for a new appraisal of his work as a radical, political director. The collection of Bogdanov’s personal papers at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the director’s mind. The papers include annotated scripts, production records, prompt books, reviews, programmes, unpublished manuscripts, and two volumes of The Director’s Cut – documents spanning Bogdanov’s entire theatrical career. In this article Darren Freebury-Jones engages with these materials, as well as the influences of theoretical movements such as cultural materialism on the director’s approach, in order to shed light on the ways in which Bogdanov stimulated and inspired new readings of Shakespeare’s history plays.

In this article Swati Arora analyzes a contemporary Indian feminist performance, Thoda Dhyaan Se (A Little Carefully, 2013), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of Delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of India. It highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges of caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, and at the same time explores the heterogeneous nature of the country's feminist movement through an intersectional perspective. Swati Arora argues that the concerns raised by Thoda Dhyaan Se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper-caste women and overlook the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower-class, and lower-caste backgrounds. With conversations around gender focused through campaigns like #MeToo and #TImesUp, it is important to contextualize the voices that are articulated and those that are excluded. Swati Arora is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her work exists at the intersections of theatre and performance, feminist theory, critical urban studies, post/de-colonial theory, and visual cultures. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter and is a coconvenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research.

In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. Here Adrian Curtin investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab. He aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of these collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner. Adrian Curtin is a senior lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019), and principal investigator of the AHRC research network ‘Representing “Classical Music” in the Twenty-First Century’.

In this essay Andrew Anderson proposes that all Lorca’s plays share certain commonalities: his protagonists invariably find themselves in some kind of predicament or dilemma, and it always turns out that there is no favourable solution to the position in which they find themselves. A number of diverse and, on the face of it, conflicting factors play into creating these dramatic situations: family, society, gender, psychology, as well as more metaphysical elements that suggest aspects of existentialism. Here, the characters and plots of four of Lorca’s best-known plays from the 1930s are analyzed to demonstrate the various ways in which these disparate factors combine to produce what are usually tragic outcomes. Andrew Anderson is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. He has published extensively on the work of García Lorca and the Spanish historical avant-garde, most recently La recepción de las vanguardias extranjeras en España: cubismo, futurismo, dadá. Estudio y ensayo de bibliografía (Seville: Renacimiento, 2018).

In this article Alexander Golovlev offers a comparative examination of the theatre policies of Fascist Italy and Stalinist Soviet Union. He argues that, although the two regimes shared parallel time frames and gravitated around similar institutional solutions, Italian Fascism was fundamentally different in its reluctance to destroy the privately based theatre structure in favour of a state theatre and to impose a unified style, while Stalin carried out an ambitious and violent campaign to instil Socialist Realism through continuous disciplining, repression, and institutional supervision. In pursuing a nearly identical goal of achieving full obedience, the regimes used different means, and obtained similarly mixed results. While the Italian experience ended with the defeat of Fascism, Soviet theatres underwent de-Stalinization in the post-war decades, indicating the potential for sluggish stability in such frameworks of cultural-political control. Alexander Golovlev is Research Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, National Research University, Higher School of Economics / Fondation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and ATLAS Fellow, Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines/ Université Paris-Saclay. His most recent publications include ‘Sounds of Music from across the Sea: Musical Transnationality in Early Post-World-War-II Austria’, in Yearbook of Transnational History 1 (2018) and ‘Von der Seine an die Salzach: die Teilnahme vom Straßburger Domchor an den Salzburger Festspielen und die französische Musikdiplom atie in Österreich während der alliierten Besatzungs zeit’, Journal of Austrian Studies (2018). He is currently working on the political economy of the Bolshoi theatre under Stalinism.

In this article Patricia Lufkin examines the work of Margaret Macnamara, a remarkable feminist playwright whose work has fallen into obscurity but who deserves attention as an important female participant in the Independent Theatre Movement and the Fabian Society. Macnamara’s associations and collaborations with key figures of the time, including George Bernard Shaw, are explored, and her progressive thought and participation in key organizations demonstrated. Importantly, Lufkin analyzes Macnamara’s play The Gates of the Morning (1908), highlighting its feminist critique of religion and its patriarchal influence. The critical response to her work was mixed, yet both positive and hostile reviews acknowledged that the play was a competent and stirring example of the new drama of progressive ideas, and helped to bring the ‘woman question’ to the forefront of people’s minds. Patricia Lufkin received her PhD from Louisiana State University, and is now teaching at Arkansas State University Mid-South. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century British theatre, most significantly on the life and work of Macnamara and Samuel Beckett.

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.

In this article David Barnett documents a practice-as-research project that employed Brechtian approaches to stage dramatic material. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a realist text in which the protagonist, John Proctor, redeems himself for the sin of adultery by taking a heroic stand against the Salem witch-hunts. Existing scholarship has revealed a series of gendered biases in the form and content of the play, yet these findings have never been systematically realized in performance. While appearing to defend democratic values, the play’s dramaturgical strategies coerce agreement, and this represents a fundamental contradiction. Brecht offers a method that preserves the written dialogue, but interprets it critically onstage, deploying a range of devices derived from a materialist and dialectical interpretation. The aim of the production was to re-present a play with a familiar production history and problematize the political bases on which it conventionally rested. The article discusses the rationale for the theory and practice of contemporary Brechtian theatre and offers the production as a model for future critical realizations of other realist plays. David Barnett is Professor of Theatre at the University of York. His publications include A History of the Berliner Ensemble (CUP, 2015), Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014), amd Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (CUP, 2005).

In this article, Alex Mangold identifies failure as a defining element of tragedy and argues that traditional understandings of the genre have been too narrow. Here, he asserts that tragic failure contributes to a tragic ‘mode’ that transcends genre definitions and, instead, extends to all kinds of contemporary theatre and performance. Examining a wide range of performance examples, including work from Sophocles to Sarah Kane, Forced Entertainment, Sasha Waltz, and Orlan, he argues that tragic failure, as it has come to be realized in examples of postdramatic writing and in site-specific or dance-based performance, is presented as an option, a dramatic choice, an outcome or part of an overall denial of dramatic form. The true power of the new tragic consequently lies in its ability to foster social change and a more ethical stance toward social dystopias. Alex Mangold lectures in the Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is co-editor (with Broderick Chow) of Žižek and Performance (Palgrave, 2014) and has published articles and chapters on the work of Sarah Kane and Howard Barker.

Natalism constitutes one of the main values of Israeli society, to the extent that the state’s explicit policy is to encourage and heavily finance childbearing. Whatever the reasons for this pronatalist ideology may be – religious, cultural, or politico-demographic – the fact is that, in twenty-first century Israel, motherhood is still considered a biological imperative; and a Jewish-Israeli woman’s reproductive body is implicitly mobilized for national needs. Against the backdrop of this persistent pro-birth agenda, in this study Dror Harari and Gillit Kroul discuss a noteworthy number of recently staged one-woman shows that critically debate the Israeli ‘fertility religion’ and the physical and emotional distress that it causes for the infertile and childfree woman. These autobiographical performances of infertility are seen as a sub-genre of Israeli critical disability performance, in that they manifest the idea that what defines the infertile as disabled is not (only) the woman’s biological deficiency but, rather, her inability to fulfil her national gendered role. Dror Harari is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. His Self-Performance: Performance Art and the Representation of Self was published in Hebrew by Resling Publications (2014), and his current research, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, focuses on the historiography of performance art in Israel from its origins in the 1960s and through the 1970s. Gillit Kroul has an MA in Theatre Studies from Tel Aviv University. Her book of poetry When the Sea Seeds its Hopes is published by Sa’ar Publications, and her short semi-autobiographical play in Hebrew Shnayim (Two), based on her experience of fertility treatment, is available at <http://pregbirthanthology.wixsite.com/anthology>.

In this article Lin Chen seeks to locate the experimental chuanju production Qingtan (Sighing), directed by and starring Tian Mansha, in its special socio-political context. Based on a detailed performance analysis, she explores the aesthetics of the production and how it interweaves different performance cultures while referring continually to the deep wound of the Cultural Revolution, still felt by a significant number of ordinary people in mainland China. But while the production fully intends to present the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, it barely touches the wound of the past that it evokes. This is so because of the pervading presence of the xiqu idea of beauty, current dualistic political discourse, institutional difficulties, and, most of all, the fact that the collective cultural trauma at issue has not yet been properly articulated in Chinese culture and society. Lin Chen is an assistant professor of the Qingdao Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shandong University. She completed her doctorate at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research interests include the aesthetic ideas of Leibniz and their far-reaching influence, the aesthetics of performativity, interweaving performance cultures and cultural studies.1

Before the October Revolution, political exiles and Jewish refugees spread the image of Russia as a vast prison, riven by violence and corruption. After the Revolution, émigrés who scattered across the globe broadcast their idea of a fabulous, high-spirited Russia. Cabaret – an arena for theatrical innovation, stylistic experimentation, and avant-garde audacity – was a choice medium to dramatize this idea to non-Russian audiences. Throughout the 1920s, émigré cabarets enjoyed great popularity: Nikita Baliev's Chauve- Souris in New York, Jurij Jushnij's Die Blaue Vogel in Berlin, J. Son's Maschere in Italy, among others. Although the acts were polyglot and the compère pattered away in a pidgin version of whichever language was current, the chief attraction was an artificial Russian - ness. Cabarets promulgated a vision of a fairy-tale, toy-box Russia, akin to the pictures on Palekh boxes. This candy-box depiction was then perpetuated by nightclubs staffed by waiters in Cossack blouses and balalaika orchestras. Nostalgic regret for a factitious homeland deepened among the departed. In contrast, Soviet Russia came to look even more hostile and desolate. With time, the distance between the lives they had lived and those portrayed to foreigners increased, and became unmoored from reality. Laurence Senelick's most recent books include Soviet Theater: a Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky), the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015), and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

In this article Tomaž Krpič discusses two specific types of creative theatregoer: the theatre researcher and the theatre reviewer (researcher/reviewer). He stresses the influence of the theatre researcher’s/reviewer’s bodily presence in the theatre on the results of their professional work: the scholarly article and the review. Becoming a researcher or a reviewer involves going through a long complex process of personal embodiment to gain the skills associated with the learning, participative, and writing body to achieve and to maintain specific theatre bodily habitus, the physical and cultural capital necessary for fulfilling the roles of the researcher/reviewer. Tomaž Krpič is a sociologist of the body in performance studies, particularly in the spectator’s body in postdramatic theatre. He has published widely on various social, political, and cultural aspects of theatre and art performance. He is a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Ljubljana University.

In this article Christopher Collins considers how the rural is represented in contemporary Irish theatre through a performance analysis of WillFredd Theatre’s award-winning production of FARM, staged in an industrial Dublin warehouse. Adopting a relational perspective, the article explores how the rural in contemporary Irish culture is a valuable commodity that is produced for urban consumption, and examines how the representation of the rural in FARM offered a critique of economies of capital that obscure the inherent labour of producing the rural. It also highlights how the performance explored the workings of the Irish cultural economy that produces rural nostalgia as an affective practice at the expense of some of the lived realities of rural life that extend beyond labour to loneliness, depression, and gendered essentialism. Consequently, Collins questions what, if anything, has changed from the representation and reception of the rural as nostalgic utopia, and the role nostalgia plays in articulating regional and national identities. Christopher Collins is an Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modern and contemporary Irish theatre, including two monographs on the plays and performances of J. M. Synge. In 2016 he was appointed as Secretary General (Communications) for the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Since her death on 15 October 2018 at the age of 92 many tributes have been paid to Cicely Berry, and no doubt more will follow. Her legacy is assured, however, through the many actors, directors, and young people she encouraged, inspired, and transformed during her long and illustrious career as Director of Voice (and subsequently Advis ory Director) of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and other organizations where she shared her practice internationally, often with the assistance of translators in order to work in the language of the host communities. Moreover, her words and a myriad of examples of exercises on voice and text processes remain in print and on digital media for the benefit of future generations.1 In this article, Nesta Jones focuses on one specific piece of work and moment in time. Cicely Berry had directed a touring production of Hamlet for the Education Department at the National Theatre in 1986, with Tim McInnerny in the title role; then, two years later, came the production appraised in detail here – King Lear for the RSC, first staged at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1988, and at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1989. Nesta Jones recently retired as Professor and Director of Research at Rose Bruford College ot Theatre and Performance, and was previously Reader in Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Yi Sun-shin (1545–98), an admiral of the Joseon dynasty, is a Korean national hero who is admired by both North and South Korea regardless of political ideology. Yet between 1960 and 1970 North and South Korea presented Yi from different perspectives in accordance with their own political interests. In South Korea, Yi was portrayed as a solitary hero who sacrificed himself to save the country despite the blame and entrapment he suffered as a result. Alongside, North Korea presented Yi as an ideal leader with the warmth of a father figure who embraced the people's aspirations to fight against their Japanese enemies. In this article, Seong-kwan Cho and Jae-beom Hong discuss these representations of Yi and survey North Korean theatre of the 1960s, which is rarely examined in theatre scholarship outside the Korean peninsula. Seong-kwan Cho (first author) lectures in the Korean Department of Konkuk University, and published in NTQ136 on South Korean theatre censorship. Jae-beom Hong (corresponding author) is a Professor in the same Department. The pair have recently been researching North Korean realist theatre, and this article is their third on the subject. This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2016.

The legacy of Jerzy Grotowski twenty years after his death still presents a powerful challenge for theatre-makers, not only in experimental theatre, and theoreticians – which is also how it was during his life. This retrospect by Juliusz Tyszka on the Grotowski seminar organized by Robert Findlay and Robert Taylor for the Program in Educational Theatre, at New York University in February 1993, is a testimony to his achievements, offering insights into the opinions and reflections of American artists, critics, and scholars on the importance of Grotowski, and the impact of his theatrical output both on world theatre, and specifically in the US. Tyszka sets their views within the Polish background he shares with Grotowski. The climax of the seminar in a meeting with Grotowski himself, following a film recording of The Constant Prince, is fully described. In 1992/93 Juliusz Tyszka was a Fulbright visiting scholar in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He is an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal. Since 2008 he has been Head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

In this article, David Chandler challenges the often dismissive interpretation of Catherine Johnson’s hugely successful Mamma Mia! (1999) as a sunny, upbeat, lightweight musical. Johnson’s earlier dramatic work was of a more serious cast, and returned repeatedly to scenes of damaging, often exploitative, intergenerational desire. This interest continues in Mamma Mia! though commercial imperatives meant it had to be suppressed and displaced. As Sophie, the heroine, secretly meets the three middle-aged men who could be her father, but who have no idea she may be their daughter, the danger that they may be sexually attracted to her – one of them quickly labels her a ‘minx’ – becomes a subter ranean force shaping the fates of most of the central protagonists and the final surprise irresolution of the paternity plot. Intergenerational relationships blossom in Mamma Mia!, but they are treated differently from the relationships between couples of similar ages. David Chandler is a professor in the English Department at Doshisha Univ er sity, Kyoto. His background is in literary Romanticism, but since 2008 he has also pub lished widely on the history of musical theatre in Britain. He is a director of Retrospect Opera.

Film technology has become an increasingly prominent component of theatre design. In the practice of Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage it may support what has been described as a ‘pizza style’ of presentation, in which disparate techniques and modes of presentation are used to disturb conventional ideas of narrative, context, and textual authority, while in the work of Motionhouse it creates a language of dance as circus. The longstanding collaboration between film designer Ravi Deepres and choreographer Wayne McGregor presents an alternative model, at once highly composed as narrative and based on meticulous research into textual evidence. In this interview with David Roberts, Deepres charts the evolution of his work with McGregor up to their award-winning Woolf Works, showing how a genuinely collaborative artistic process and attention to the graphic possibilities of different film technologies have transformed our understanding of the role of design in devised performance. Ravi Deepres is Professor of Moving Image and Photography at Birmingham City University. For the past nineteen years he has designed shows in collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Their most recent success, Woolf Works, won the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and re-opened at La Scala Milan in April 2019. David Roberts is Professor of English at Birmingham City University. His recent publications include George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed (Bloomsbury, 2018), and he is currently working on a new edition of Congreve's The Way of the World.