The Futurist movement was not only an artistic but also a social and political force for innovation, conceived as a total and permanent revolution encompassing all aspects of human life. One such aspect was food. Banquets had been a highly developed performative art in the Italian Renaissance and were again placed in a theatrical framework by the Futurists after the First World War. They founded three night clubs, where food and drinks were served in Futurist fashion, and opened several restaurants dedicated to a renewal of Italian culinary habits. In the 1930s, the Futurists focused on the creation of a new lifestyle called aerovita, which included cooking and dining as paratheatrical arts. Many of the recipes (or rather scenarios) in the Futurist cookbook La cucina futurista of 1932 derived from banquets that Marinetti, the driving force of Futurism, had organized as a kind of savoury-olfactory-tactile theatre accompanied by music and poetry recitations. The highly imaginative table scenery and food sculptures were complemented by inventive lighting effects and an amazing mise en scéne of interior decor, furniture, and waiters' garb. This essay describes and analyzes some of the Futurist experiments with culinary theatre, the manifestos dedicated to Futurist cuisine, and some of the Futurist concepts of dining as a performative art. Günter Berghaus is Reader in Theatre History and Performance Studies at the Drama Department, University of Bristol, and has published a dozen books and a large number of articles on theatre anthropology, Renaissance and Baroque theatre, dance history, and avant-garde performance. Directing a number of Futurist shows led to the publication of The Genesis of Futurism (1995), Futurism and Politics (1996), Italian Futurist Theatre (1998), and International Futurism in the Arts and Literature (2000).

The theatre shelves of secondhand bookshops testify to the sometime popularity and prolific output of the theatre publicist and would-be historian Walter Macqueen-Pope. Yet even by the time Macqueen-Pope was publishing his later volumes in the 1950s, the rise of academic theatre scholarship was questioning such anecdotally based and unverified accounts of the theatre and its past. Today, we can look at Macqueen-Pope, and at the period immediately before the First World War which was so often the focus of his attention, not so much for evidence of flawed scholarship as for his revealing attitude towards his subject and its social context. For anecdotage and nostalgia have inevitably to be taken into account in any historical approach to so ephemeral an art as the theatre, and, as the authors here conclude, while Macqueen-Pope may not tell us the whole truth about his many subjects, such a ‘wistful remembrancer’ remains significant to any investigation of a theatrical past ‘that must always be a melting pot of imperfect recognitions and unattainable desires’. Jim Davis is Associate Professor of Theatre and Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance at the University of New South Wales. victor Emelijanow is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both have written extensively on nineteenth-century British theatre and are the joint authors of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880, which has just been published by the University of lowa Press.

In 1974 Dario Fo and ‘The Commune’ theatre collective were forced to engaged in a political battle to secure control of the ‘Palazzina Liberty’, a nondescript building once a market canteen, set in the middle of a park in a south-eastern suburb of Milan. Here, Tom Behan describes how mass support, derived from a revolutionary ideology, secured The Commune's control over the building for several years. The relationship between this political movement and the political content of the shows performed at the Palazzina is then discussed with reference to Can't Pay? Won't Pay!, Fanfani Kidnapped, and Mum's Marijuana is the Best. Tom Behan, is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His article began life as part of the research for his Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre (Pluto Press, 2000), and forms a companion piece to ‘The Megaphone of the Movement: Dario Fo and the Working Class, 1968–79’, published in The Journal of European Studies, XXX (September 2000).

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

In this response to John F. Deeney's article, ‘Censoring the Uncensored: the Case of Children in Uniform’, which appeared in NTQ 63 (August 2000), Helen Freshwater enters the growing debate over our reclamation of historical depictions of homosexuality. She questions Deeney's contention that our contemporary critical prejudices obscure the circulation of dramatic images of lesbianism during the 1930s, proposing that the Lord Chamberlain's difficulties in identifying lesbianism demonstrate the impossibility of dispensing with the theoretical structure that informs our understanding of this identity. Her archival research also reveals that there were in fact many efforts to put the lesbian on the stage during this period, but that these were effectively suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain, who refused to contemplate the performative enactment of lesbianism, no matter how indistinct or conventionalized in form. Her article addresses the challenges faced when addressing these dramatic inscriptions of lesbian desire, which are often homophobic, prurient, and unquestioning in their affirmation of the heterosexual norm. Helen Freshwater has recently completed her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh, and now lectures in drama and performance at the University of Nottingham. Her ‘The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite's Mnemonic’ appeared in NTQ67. She is also a contributor to the Edinburgh Review and to the anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

Actors' feet are accepted as part of their expressive equipment – but doubts are often expressed that this has always been so. The evidence of early English theatre history is adduced to suggest otherwise, while recent treatments of the peripatetic in literary studies argue that the ‘visible walk’ attains prominence only in the Romantic period. But David Roberts argues that, from the emergence of permanent theatres, walking offered a metonymy for performance which persisted throughout the seventeenth century. Cross-dressing highlighted the expressive potential of the feet, while close examination of play-texts implies evolving styles of the peripatetic in performance, and the scenic theatres of the Restoration frequently portrayed walking as a cultural activity bound up with the status of both actors and scenery in post-revolutionary London. David Roberts teaches English and Drama at University College Worcester, and has published widely on theatre and literature from 1550 to 1789. He leads an AHRB-funded project on theatre criticism.

Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

This is not only the story of an actor whose character began as Clytemnestra and became Daedalus, but of how the slow and arduous discovery of that character helped to form and transform the Odin Teatret production of Mythos – a collage of characters and places, their relationships rooted not in cause and effect but in action and reaction – and of how that production itself emerged by following both actual and metaphysical threads through the Cretan labyrinth. The search takes the form of a funeral wake which is interrupted by the arrival of Oedipus, Cassandra, Daedalus, Odysseus, Medea, Orpheus, and Sisyphus, who introduce the last revolutionary of the twentieth century to the immortality of myth. The author, Julia Varley, who herself took the role of Daedalus, has been with Odin Teatret since 1976. The production of Mythos, based on poems by Henrik Norbrandt and directed by Eugenio Barba, is at present on tour, and expected to be presented at the Salisbury Festival in June 2001.

The Malta of this feature is not an island surrounded by sea but a lake surrounded by land – the artificial lake created near the Polish city of Poznań for the World Kayak Championships of 1990. However, since that event, and the momentous political changes with which it coincided, the lake has become the annual focus for a quite different event: a festival of theatre that has earned a reputation for both hosting and initiating important experimental work which is none the less rooted in the need to maintain close contact with its ever larger and more enthusiastic audiences. A range of illustrations of some of the oustanding productions accompanies retrospects by two regular members of those audiences – Juliusz Tyszka, who outlines the origins and development of MALTA, and Ewa Obrębowska-Piasecka, who offers a personal response to the achievements of the festival and to the philosophy of theatre underlying them.

The National Council for Drama Training represents the drama sector of the British performing arts industry and is responsible for the accreditation of the standard and content of the courses at vocational drama schools for professional actors and stage managers, to ensure their relevance to the industry. The Council has three wings: the employers (Society of London Theatre, Theatrical Management Association, the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, and ITV), the trades union (Equity), and the leading professional training providers. The purpose of the report which follows was to provide as objective as possible an assessment of the workings of the government's new Dance and Drama Awards scheme, to assist the industry in discussions with Government on improvements to the scheme. Its author, Graham Marchant, is an arts consultant with an exceptional breadth of knowledge and experience, particularly as theatre administrator, senior Arts Council officer, and principal of a vocational school for professional dancers. The NCDT was enabled to commission the Report through the generous provision of funds from the Mackintosh Foundation and the Society of London Theatre.

All major cities are now competing with each other to attract cultural tourists: yet Prague, since the Velvet Revolution, has been distinctive in using the city itself as a cultural icon, also capitalizing on the artists associated with it – notably Mozart, Gluck, Kafka, and Arcimboldo – to create performances that present an idealized and imagined Prague, the city as its own persona. Since tourists might hesitate to go to Czech-language drama, theatrical entrepreneurs instead offer puppet opera, Black Theatre, and Laterna Magika – forms closely associated with Prague, and which circumvent the language problem. Thus, during the summer, when the regular theatres close, Prague theatricalizes itself for tourist consumption. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre in Taiwan, where she also dances and directs. A regular contributor to NTQ, she has written several books, including Sringara Tales, short stories about Asian performers, and Madmen and Fools: Taiwan Theatre 1988–1998.

The year 2000 prompted a review of the past millennium that took various forms – and lent a special significance to revivals of the medieval mystery plays for the celebrations in Coventry and York. Margaret Rogerson here argues that, no less than their local medieval counterparts, revivals can function as both community theatre and religious celebration – their appeal in a secular modern world raising fewer questions than versions of the Christian story adapted for the commercial or institutional theatre. She demonstrates how special efforts were made in the millennium revivals to reach out to the community; both local and global, and how through associated educational programmes and the inclusion of a wide range of participants, they introduced innovations into local traditions and built on the past to contribute to a continuing theatrical heritage. Margaret Rogerson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney who is currently researching the mystery play revival traditions in York from 1951 to 2000.

Many partisans of Alfred Jarry's work have discovered Ubu roi and the ‘science’ of pataphysics via a study of the Parisian avant-garde, and the play has been discussed for a hundred years in this context. Kimberly Jannarone also assesses Jarry in the context of the world of rural puppetry – for, like many other avant-garde artists at the fin de siècle, Jarry came to Paris from a small town, and brought with him such formative experiences as the makeshift puppet shows he saw as a child. Bringing the rural puppet into focus in a discussion of the Ubu cycle, Kimberly Jannarone exposes Père Ubu's identity as a class hybrid, whose maddening and elusive nature stems from the fusion of popular and elite forms. Further, she reveals that Jarry's use of puppet forms is radically different from that of the Symbolists, who conceived puppets as theoretical figures within a fully formed aesthetic doctrine. By contrast, Jarry used puppets for their very incompleteness – their makeshift nature making them ideal catalysts for the audience's imaginations. She sees Pataphysics as a model of the avant-garde itself: a system that focuses less on products than on effects. Kimberly Jannarone has taught at the University of Washington School of Drama, and is about to take up an appointment as Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, where her dissertation examined the historical avant-garde through the works of Jarry and Antonin Artaud.

The classical theatres of southern Asia are variously treated with the reverence thought due to sacrosanct and immutable forms – or as rich sources for plunder by western theatre-makers in search of intra-cultural building-blocks. The rights and wrongs of this latter approach have been much debated, not least in the pages of NTQ; less so the intrinsic desirability of leaving well alone. At the symposium on Classical Sanskrit Theatre, hosted in Dhaka by the Centre for Asian Theatre in December 1999, an unexpected consensus sought ways in which classical theatre forms might best meet contemporary needs, not only by drawing upon their unique qualities – but also by respecting the injunction in the Natyasastra that the actor must combine discipline with a readiness for improvisation. John Russell Brown here supports the conclusions of the symposium that the qualities of Asian theatre which differentiate it from western forms – of a quest for transformation rather than representation, a concern with emotional truth rather than ideological ‘meaning’ – can best be pursued by such an approach, restoring to the theatre ‘its enabling and necessary role in society’. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and subsequently Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, and is now Visiting Professor of Performing Arts at Middlesex University. The most recent of his numerous books is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999).

THE MALTA FESTIVAL was born at a very specific moment of transition in Poland and for Poles. At the beginning of the 1990s we were still hungrily swallowing our newly acquired freedom. We were impassioned by the television coverage of parliament (where members expressed exactly what they thought in grammatically correct Polish), we read papers from front to back (a world, formerly known to us only through autopsy, but now related without resort to the official mumbo-jumbo of our former epoch). We strongly believed that life could be beautiful, truly ours.

The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltès's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltès asserted in 1986 that ‘I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life’; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltès translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer. Maria Delgado is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and David Fancy is a freelance director based in Canada who is currently completing a PhD on Koltès's work.

In this article, David Wiles and Chris Vervain stake out the ground for a substantial programme of continuing research. Chris Vervain, coming from a background in visual and performance art, is in the first instance a maker of masks. She is also now writing a thesis on the masks of classical tragedy and their possibilities in modern performance, and, in association with the University of Glasgow, working on an AHRB research programme that involves testing the effect of Greek New Comedy masks in performance. David Wiles, Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, has published books on the masks of Greek New Comedy and on Greek performance space, and lectured on Greek masks. Most recently, his Greek Theatre Performance: an Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2000) included an investigation of the classical mask and insights provided by the work of Lecoq. He is now planning a book on the classical Greek mask. Wiles and Vervain are both committed to the idea that the mask was the determining convention which gave Greek tragedy its identity in the ancient world, and is a valuable point of departure for modern practitioners engaging with the form. They anticipate that their research will in the near future incorporate a symposium and a further report on work-in-progress.

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.

A few of the plays written in support of the movement for women's suffrage in Britain before the First World War have recently been recovered and published, but most of these were intended for some kind of professional or at least conventional production. Susan Carlson is here concerned to look also at some of the pieces which saw print only in the ephemeral suffrage press, and production (if at all) only as part of meetings or demonstrations. Breaking down traditional distinctions between social, political, and theatrical spaces, she argues that all were part both of the dramatization of the struggle, and also of a broader reclamation of public spaces for women, whether of a public venue such as the Albert Hall, outdoor spaces such as Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square – or the humbler and lonelier space of the street corners on which women sold the suffrage newspapers that contained the plays – some of them about women on street corners selling suffrage newspapers.…Susan Carlson is Professor of English and Associate Provost at Iowa State University. Her books include Women and Comedy (University of Michigan Press), and she has recently published essays on Aphra Behn, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Shakespeare, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women playwrights. This essay is part of a longer study of British suffrage theatre and its connections to Edwardian productions of Shakespeare's works.

Theatre of a kind familiar to western audiences can be found in present-day Tehran – as Clive Barker's contribution to the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section later in this issue testifies. But Iran also has a traditional performing mode little known in the West – the Taziyeh, first performed in Britain at the Islamic Cultural Centre in London, and elsewhere, during April 2000. Taziyeh is a passion play, which like its medieval Christian antecedents remains inextricably linked with its religious purpose – the commemoration of the martyrdom of the third Imam of the Shi'ite Muslims, Ali Hussein, and his family in the desert of Kerbala. This relationship sustains a dramaturgy which diverges significantly from western forms, and seems at times almost contradictory – with actors who clearly know their parts by heart none the less required to read them from their scripts, to sustain both the immediacy and the spiritual truth of the performance. In this account of the origins, development, and present state of the Taziyeh, Reza Ale-Mohammed resolves such contradictions through an analysis of the play's distinctive quality, its performance, and its relationship with the audiences it reaches and the faith it expresses. Reza Ale-Mohammed recently completed his doctorate on the Taziyeh at the University of Warwick.