In this article Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz investigates the current state of tragedy in the Arab theatre and suggests some of the reasons behind the lack of an authentic Arabic tragedy developed from the Aristotelian tradition. Through analyses of the few translations and adaptations into Arabic of Shakespearean and classical tragedy, he both confirms and questions the claims of non-Arabic scholars that ‘the Arab mind is incapable of producing tragedy’. While the wider theatre community has been introduced to a handful of the Arab world's most prominent dramatists in translation, many are still largely unknown and none has a claim to be a tragedian. Academic studies of Arabic tragedy are insubstantial, while tragedy, in the classical sense, plays a very minor role in Arab drama, the tendency of Arab dramatists being towards comedy or melodrama. Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz is Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at UNRWA University, Amman, Jordan. His research interests include American Literature, Arabic and Middle Eastern literatures, modern and contemporary drama, contemporary poetics, comparative literature, and synchronous and asynchronous instructional technology.

Report on the BITE season at the Barbican, 2010–2011.

In January 2008 the Eritrean capital of Asmara witnessed a theatre production that did not sit easily with the cultural imaginary of the country. Performed by a group of university graduates rather than the well-versed artists in government employ, Beyene Haile's Weg'i Libi, or Heart-to-Heart Talk, caused a stir among the local art-loving community in that it defied common strands of Eritrean theatre arts. Difficult to understand, with no clear plot or clear-cut message, it nonetheless drew crowds during the two weeks of its performance, largely because, as Christine Matzke suggests in this article, it allowed audiences to participate in the intellectual flânerie presented on stage. Basing her article on material collected in autumn 2008 and spring 2010, the author here provides an interpretation of the play and an outline and contextualization of its production process. Christine Matzke has spent well over a decade researching Eritrean theatre arts and cultural production. Her publications include the co-edited African Theatre 8: Diasporas (2009) and Postcolonial Postmortems (2006) on transcultural crime fiction. She teaches at the University of Bayreuth.

The integration into conceptual art of techniques inspired by Fluxus (the international aggregate of artists who saw indeterminacy as imaginatively and linguistically enabling) has, in turn, given rise to a specific line in British playwriting since the mid-1990s, as evidenced in plays by Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and Tim Crouch which gesture towards conceptual art, performance art, and the event score. In this article Emilie Morin brings to light the affinities between this artistic moment in contemporary British theatre and the international avant-garde. She discusses the shared interest of Crimp, Kane, and Crouch in indeterminacy and the fusion between artistic media, paying particular attention to Crouch's redefinition of the status of the modern artwork in his play for galleries England (2007). Critical recognition of the experimental mode in which these playwrights operate has remained subsumed under a non-specific appreciation of their relationship to conceptual art, leaving important questions of form and legacy unaddressed. Here, the proximity between this marginal trend in British playwriting and developments in experimental music and performance art exploring ideas of indeterminacy is highlighted, and the contemporary problematization of performance as event and concept is reconfigured in relation to the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Fluxus. Emilie Morin is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and the author of Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her research interests lie in European modernism and the avant-garde.

Report on the seventh year of the Shakespeare Festival held in Gyula in south-eastern Hungary.

Report on the Fifth Festival Novog Cirkusa, Zagreb, in November 2009.

Report on the twentieth Romanian National Theatre Festival, held in Bucharest from 30 October to 7 November 2010.

Report on the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, 2011.

Report on the Armenian theatre showcase held in Yerevan from 15 to 19 June 2010.

Report on the conference, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Theatre Censorship Around the World’, held in Dublin from 30 September to 2 October 2010.

Lifetime achievement and ‘New Theatre Realities’ celebrated in St Petersburg.