I shared some memories of Clive and paid my personal tribute in NTQ 83, the issue that immediately followed his death; so in this brief introduction to our special issue celebrating his life and work I want rather to look at the contributions we have included, and how these connect with Clive's legacy.

This article offers an historical analysis of the emergence and development of Asian magicians on the British stage. Sarah Dadswell charts the trajectory of this phenomenon from the arrival of the first recorded Indian magicians in the UK in the early nineteenth century to the internationally renowned figure of P. C. Sorcar in the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, she illustrates the dialogue that took place between East and West, recording the ways in which both sides recognized and adopted the other's modes of performance and marketing strategies to suit their needs and satisfy public demand. Sarah Dadswell is Research Fellow to the AHRC-funded project ‘British Asian Theatre’ at the University of Exeter. This article forms part of the project's investigation into the history and development of modes of performance by Asian theatre practitioners in the UK.

Eugenio Barba here discusses the desires and ideas driving his early years as a practitioner, some of the creative, social, and ethical principles underlying the work of the Odin Teatret, which he founded in 1964, and the group's most recent, new-style ‘barter’ events with and within local communities. His public dialogue with NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova and members of the audience provides fresh insight into the workings of one of the most influential figures, and one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives, of the late twentieth century. The conversation took place on 31 October 2005 at Goldsmiths College, University of London, during the Odin's UK tour (as documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ 86), and included questions from the audience and concluding words from Odin performer Iben Nagel Rasmussen, who had performed White as Jasmin earlier in the evening. The transcript of this conversation, inaugurating a series of such public conversations at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, was edited for publication with the full and warm collaboration of Eugenio Barba.

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.

In this article Jane Turner explores the trilogy of works titled Re-placing Texts, together with Epilogue, devised and performed by the innovative group Plane Performance, now in its tenth year. The trilogy – Three Degrees of Frost, SET and Round-about – are rewritings of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, David Lean's film Brief Encounter, and Rogers and Hammerstein's film musical, Carousel. The article examines the strategies adopted by the company as acts of ‘creative vandalism’, both in terms of current understandings of theatre practice and in terms of their treatment of the original texts. Jane Turner argues that the dramatic texts have become ossified by cultural usage and that the radical stance taken by the company allows for a counter-cultural position to re-emerge. The author is a Principal Lecturer in Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has recently published work on Eugenio Barba and applied theatre practice.

Point against point, note against note: the counterpoint, in music, is not just simple difference and contrast. It creates dialogue and density. It is distinguishable from harmony because it increases the firmness and the complexity of the composition by continuously keeping a distance. Different melodic lines intertwine and collaborate without melting together, each developing its own difference.

Critical opinion over the role of popular culture in relation to ethnic and cultural identity is deeply divided. In this essay, Elizabeth Jacobs explores the dynamics of this relationship in the works of two leading Mexican American playwrights. Luis Valdez was a founding member of El Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers' Theatre) in California during the 1960s. Originally formed as a resistance theatre, its purpose was to support the Farmworkers' Union in its unionization struggle. By the early 1970s Valdez and the Teatro Campesino were moving in a different direction, and with Zoot Suit (1974) he offered a critique of the race riots that erupted in East Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, the subsequent lack of reasonable judicial process, and the media misrepresentation of events. Valdez used setting, music, slang, and dress code among other devices to construct a sense of identity and ethnic solidarity. This provided a strong voice for the Chicano group, but at the same time a particular gendered hierarchy also distinguished his aesthetic. Cherríe Moraga's work provides a balanced opposition to that of Valdez. Giving up the Ghost (1984) helped to change the direction of Chicano theatre both in terms of its performativity and its strategies of representation. Elizabeth Jacobs explores how Moraga redefines both the culturally determined characterization of identity presented by Valdez and the media representation of women. She also utilizes theatrical space as a platform for a reassertion of ethnicity, allowing for the innovation of a split subjectivity and radical lesbian desire. Giving up the Ghost, Jacobs argues, provides a trenchant critique of communal and popular culture discourses as well as a redefinition of existing identity politics.

This article considers the origins of Stanislavski's system and his insistence that the actor's skills, like the musician's, must be honed through daily exercises. Such practice must become the actor's ‘second nature’, as Stanislavski terms it. Rose Whyman here compares what Stanislavski has to say about skill acquisition with the psychologist William James's discussion of the role of habit in learning. This raises some problems in theorizing the system today, as it was rooted in the science of more than a century ago, when much less was known about the mechanisms of memory and learning. Rose Whyman worked previously in community and experimental theatre and is now a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Her book The Stanislavski System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance is to be published by CUP later this year.

The title of Benjamin Lloyd's article reflects the apparent dissociation between, on the one hand, a spiritual religion distinguished by its lack of dogmatism and by non-liturgical forms of worship and, on the other, a mode of entertainment long divorced from the ritual religious forms in which it may well have had its roots, yet which continues to depend on preserving authenticity despite the rote of repeated performance. The author suggests that a communal seeking after inward enlightenment occurs no less in the approach of some of the most influential of modern theatre teachers – notably Stanislavsky and Grotowski – than at a meeting of the Society of Friends; and that the nature of Quaker worship may not, after all, be far removed from a striving for theatrical truth. In the series of ‘meetings together’ here described and analyzed, Benjamin Lloyd brought together friends and practitioners to investigate the nature and possible value of the relationship. The author has acted and directed in New York, Edinburgh, and Prague, and taught at Villanova and Princeton Universities. He presently teaches acting at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and his book, The Actor's Way: a Journey of Self-Discovery in Letters, was published by Allworth Press in 2006. He is a member of Haverford Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

I was born in Middlesbrough in 1931, and it's been uphill all the way since then. To a certain extent my life has been a process of being sold a dream which has never been realized, along with many other people in my generation, from Henry Livings and Harold Pinter through Wesker and Arden to John McGrath. We were the wartime generation, the last generation to remember what life was like before the war and during it.

The well-known ‘banishment’ of the popular comic figure Hanswurst from the German stage by Gottsched and the Neuber acting troupe in the early eighteenth century is usually read as part of the historical movement from improvised folk theatre to bourgeois literary theatre. In this article Karen Jürs-Munby goes beyond that received wisdom to discuss what kind of acting, what kind of body, and what kind of relationship between stage and audience were censored by banishing Hanswurst. Considering this censorship as part of the larger historical relationship between discourses on acting and the emergence of a modern self in the Enlightenment, she argues that the osmotic body and stage that Hanswurst stood for prevented the aesthetic mirroring relationship sought by eighteenth-century stage reformers in an increasing need for bourgeois self-representation. The Hanswurst banishment can be theorized with reference to Julia Kristeva as an abjection of grotesque acting – a form of acting whose political power to question the autonomous bourgeois subject was to be rediscovered by practitioners in the twentieth century. Karen Jürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University; she has published articles on theories and discourses of acting in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and recently translated Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre.

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).

The issue of globalization has recently been exercising many minds in the field of theatre studies as elsewhere, resulting in various calls for approaches to theatre history that are less nationalistic or eurocentric. Yet of all art forms theatre appears to be, by its nature, the most parochial, tied to the needs of distinct social, ethnic, or other interests within constituencies limited by the economics of touring. Here Jo Robinson places arguments about globalization and theatre in a broader context of the current debate within the social sciences, and argues that exploring the ways in which performing cultures are truly interconnected may best be achieved by an exploration of neglected local histories. The author is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Nottingham, and is currently leading the AHRC-funded three-year project, ‘Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857–67’, which is exploring the use of maps and mapping to recuperate performance history within the area. She is also Co-convenor of TaPRA's Theatre History and Historiography Working Group.

In this article Christian M. Billing considers the relationship between female lament and acts of vengeance in fifth-century Athenian society and its theatre, with particular emphasis on the Hekabe of Euripides. He uses historical evidence to argue that female mourning was held to be a powerfully transgressive force in the classical period; that considerable social tensions existed as a result of the suppression of female roles in traditional funerary practices (social control arising from the move towards democracy and the development of forensic processes as a means of social redress); and that as a piece of transvestite theatre, authored and performed by men to an audience made up largely, if not entirely, of that sex, Euripides' Hekabe demonstrates significant gender-related anxiety regarding the supposedly horrific consequences of allowing women to speak at burials, or to engage in lament as part of uncontrolled funerary ritual. Christian M. Billing is an academic and theatre practitioner working in the fields of ancient Athenian and early modern English and European drama. He has worked extensively as a director and actor and has also taught at a number of universities in the United Kingdom and the USA. He is currently Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull.

In the course of her long career as a director with Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood staged some twenty foreign-language plays, of which three were Spanish: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, while there were also plans to perform Lorca's Blood Wedding. Gwynne Edwards argues in this article that Littlewood's attraction to the Spanish plays was sometimes political but always due to a similarity in performance style which, influenced by the methods of leading European theatre practitioners, sought to integrate the elements of speech, stage design, movement, music, and lighting into a harmonious whole. Indeed, even though Lorca and Littlewood worked independently of each other, their ideas on the nature and function of theatre were very similar, while Lorca's touring company, La Barraca, employed methods very close to those of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop. Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca have been published by Methuen Drama, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays. Many of these have also had professional productions.

British pantomime between 1985 and 2005 has undergone an evolutionary reconstruction based on practices of branding. Within this broad field, Martina Lipton distinguishes two competing pantomime models, investigating the contrasting ideological and cultural positioning of dominant representations of modern pantomime by a major production group, Qdos Entertainment, and the Nottingham Playhouse and York Theatre Royal repertory companies. She reads these models as identifying collective experiences and taste communities after the categories identified by Pierre Bourdieu as conferring ‘distinction’. While these companies both offer a somewhat similar mediatized product, they successfully co-exist within a dynamic and competitive marketplace by branding their pantomimes as respectively embracing and resisting the influence of mass-media popular culture. Both branding practices have succeeded in restoring the genre to high visibility and economic success. Martina Lipton is working on a PhD at the University of Queensland.

Ann-Christin Rommen began to work with Robert Wilson in 1983 with The CIVIL warS. Her long collaboration with him since then has included more than thirty productions, most recently her co-direction of Dreamplay (Stockholm, 1998), Woyzeck (Copenhagen, 2000), Peer Gynt (Oslo, 2005), and The Winter's Tale (Berlin, 2005). She also has her own company in Germany, Codanza, which combines contemporary dance and early music, and whose work has been seen in Europe, Asia, and Australia. In this interview with Maria Shevtsova, which began in Oslo on 7 February 2005, Ann-Christin Rommen offers insights into Wilson's working methods, with particular reference to his Oslo Peer Gynt. Maria Shevtsova, Co-Editor of NTQ, is the author of Robert Wilson for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series (forthcoming 2007).

In this article, Beliz Güçbilmez argues that ‘offstage’ is not a place but an idea, a world minus a stage. It is ‘anywhere but here’, and its time is time-minus-now, making it impossible to determine its scale. It is a foreign tongue – a language with an unknown grammar carrying us to the borders of the uncanny. Güçbilmez rereads the offstage as the unconscious of the stage, looking at its more conventional use in the realistic and naturalistic plays of the nineteenth century and after, but also looking forward to the work of Samuel Beckett. Borrowing from Blanchot's interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, she characterizes the Beckettian struggle to represent the unrepresentable as the act of bringing Eurydice into daylight – the invisible content of the offstage onto the stage, which is by definition the space of the gaze. Beliz Güçbilmez is an author, playwright, and translator, currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department of Ankara University in Turkey. She is the author of Irony and Drama from Sophocles to Stoppard (Ankara: Deniz, 2005) and Time, Space and Appearance: the Form of Miniature in the Turkish Realist Theatre (Ankara: Deniz, 2006). A shorter version of this article was presented at the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR) at its 2005 meeting in Krakow.

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith was a member of the repertory company formed by artistic director Nicolas Kent for the 2005–2006 African-American season at the Tricycle Theatre in north London. That company also included Jenny Jules, Joseph Marcell, Lucian Msamati, Carmen Munroe, and Nathan Osgood. In Walk Hard – Talk Loud by Abram Hill, a play originally produced in 1944 and set in New York in the late 1930s, Holdbrook-Smith played a young boxer who faces racism. In Lynn Nottage's contemporary satire Fabulation, he took on dual roles – the heroine's husband who absconds with her wealth, and the gentle ex-junkie who offers her love. And in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, set in Pittsburgh in 1904, his Citizen Barlow seeks purification from the 285-year-old spiritual adviser Aunt Ester and is taken on a symbolic rite of passage. The Ghanaian-born Holdbrook-Smith also appeared at the Tricycle in 2004–2005 in Mustapha Matura's Playboy of the West Indies. Terry Stoller, who teaches at Baruch College in New York City and is working on a book project about the Tricycle Theatre, spoke with Holdbrook-Smith in June 2006 in Covent Garden, London.

It has generally been assumed that the Expressionist movement had little noticeable impact on British theatre. Claire Altree Warden here suggests that in the plays of Ewan MacColl (and in particular his The Other Animals of 1948) there is a discernible challenge to this assumption. In order to advocate a specific political position, MacColl took the conventions of Expressionism and developed a highly engaged, artistically innovative theatrical aesthetic that could tackle socio-political inequalities and the suppression of the dissident voice. Through linguistic experiment, episodic structure, representational characters, and a focus on the individual mind, the playwright challenges the audience to confront class injustice and hegemonic tyranny. Claire Altree Warden is based at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches English Literature. She also teaches Critical Theory and Theatre History at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and is currently preparing a new critical study of Ewan MacColl's plays.