Sarah Daniels is a playwright who has been closely identified with feminist theatre throughout her career. In this article, Carina Bartleet examines Daniels's plays from the early work of the 1980s through to her more recent output by exploring lesbian representation. Emphasis is placed on lesbian/queer representations through renegotiation with feminist theatre and gendered spectatorship. The work argues that Daniels's oftcriticized reluctance to stage lesbian desire can be viewed as a continuation of her feminist intervention into the gendered construction of the gaze in mainstream theatre. Carina Bartleet is a Lecturer in Drama at Oxford Brookes University. She read Biological Sciences at Oxford University, taking her PhD in Drama at Exeter on the intertextual dimension of the plays of Sarah Daniels. Her interests are science, gender, and performance in contemporary theatre. She is currently working on a book on theatre and science, and has published articles in Modern Drama and Studies in Theatre and Performance.

In this article Anselm Heinrich argues for a renewed interest in and critical investigation of theatre in Britain during the Second World War, a period neglected by researchers despite the radical changes in the cultural landscape instigated during the war. Concentrating on CEMA (the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts) and the introduction of subsidies, the author discusses and evaluates the importance and effects of state intervention in the arts, with a particular focus on the demands put on theatre and its role in society in relation to propaganda, nation-building, and education. Anselm Heinrich is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Entertainment, Education, Propaganda: Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945 (2007), and with Kate Newey and Jeffrey Richards has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009). Other research interests include émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe, contemporary German theatre and drama, and national theatres.

Can retro media make us relive the virtual from digital media? Following McLuhan's thesis that the proper characteristics of a medium are revealed through remediation, it could well be that retro media re-enacting digital media can make explicit what the concept ‘virtual’ entails. Two recent works analyzed in this article take as their starting point antique theatrical techniques (the ballet pulley, the panorama) to evoke optical illusions, not to stage another illusion but for other purposes. Both works, which have no actual connection with cyberspace, include non-narrative interplay with antiquated technological installations that generate a challenging experience for the contemporary spectator in a digital era. The performance-installation I / II / III / IIII by Kris Verdonck stages a repetition in time in which the viewer gets trapped. By reviving virtual features into real ones and presenting them in replay-mode, the viewer discovers how a variation of sameness can evoke significant differences, or how identity arises due to a repetition in time. Hans Op de Beeck's installation Location (6) displays an all-round view in a real but generic space that induces the spectator's performative power – like an avatar, able to dwell in the virtuality of personal imagination. Robrecht Vanderbeeken has published on a variety of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics. Formerly a researcher in the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy, he now teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Art at University College Ghent (KASK), and is currently researching the philosophical implications of technological innovations in art and culture.

The television studio play is often perceived as a somewhat compromised, problematic mode in which spatial and technological constraints inhibit the signifying and aesthetic capacity of dramatic texts. Leah Panos examines the function of the studio in the 1970s television dramas of socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths, and argues that the established verbal and visual conventions of the studio play, in its confined and ‘alienated’ space, connect with and reinforce various aspects of Griffiths's particular approach and agenda. As well as suggesting ways in which the idealist, theoretical focus of the intellectual New Left is reflexively replicated within the studio, Panos explores how the ‘intimate’ visual language of the television studio allows Griffiths to create a ‘humanized’ Marxist discourse through which he examines dialectically his dramatic characters' experiences, ideas, morality, and political objectives. Leah Panos recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Dramatizing New Left Contradictions: Television Texts of Ken Loach, Jim Allen, and Trevor Griffiths’, at the University of Reading and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, which runs from July 2010 to March 2014.

Polish student theatre was a unique artistic movement in the Soviet post-war empire, with a liberty of expression unparalleled elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. As in every political system, in any country, its creators and its public were students and young intellectuals. These theatre-makers used the umbrella of the Polish Students' Union – a surprisingly democratic institution in a totalitarian political order – and all attempts at their repression were usually appeased by the activists of the student organization, often the friends and supporters of the theatre-makers. After the creation of the Socialist Union of Polish Students these activists became more dependent on the Communist Party, but the Party establishment decided, in the period of the ‘thaw’ (1954–57), that the student artistic movement would be maintained as a kind of artistic kindergarten for avant-gardists and supporters of artistic and political revolt, to let them manifest their beliefs within the well-guarded, limited territory of student cultural centres. However, the young rebels overcame these restrictions and created a focus of artistic opposition which had a wide social and artistic influence, especially during subsequent periods of political crisis. Juliusz Tyszka was himself an activist in the student theatre movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now an NTQ advisory editor, he is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

In this article, Poonam M. Ganglani investigates how the preserved manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's archives of John Hart's stage version of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1961 reflect the social and theatrical landscape of the times. The notion of the Lord Chamberlain as a custodian of morals, the dangerous power attributed to stage semiotics, and the response to sexual impropriety on stage are among the areas discussed. The Lord Chamberlain's correspondence files offer the only significant glimpse into this theatrical adaptation of Lawrence's novel, as into other unpublished plays of the time; this article also investigates the ways in which the Lord Chamberlain's archives in the British Library, London, serve as a unique and valuable tool for the post-war British theatre historiographer in research related to such unpublished plays. Poonam M. Ganglani is a postgraduate under the Mundus Masters ‘Crossways in European Humanities’ international study programme, having studied in three European universities over two years: the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia in France, the University of Sheffield in England, and the Università degli studi di Bergamo in Italy.

In 1986 professional theatre practitioners working in two underprivileged neighbourhoods in greater Tel Aviv in Israel created in collaboration with the local residents two large-scale productions. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem studies these rare encounters between professional public theatre and amateur, community-based theatre in Israel, employing a method similar to that of the historian who employs micro-history in order to reveal the excluded past of muted groups in a given society. Both productions – including the intentions of their creators and participants, the power struggles, and the results – serve as an historical record rich in information regarding Israeli society; and through the micro-history presented here the social and cultural role of the institutional theatre in general, and in Israel in particular, is also explored. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a senior lecturer, researcher, and practitioner, chair of the Faculty MA Program of Expressivity and Creativity in the Arts, and Head of Community-Based Theatre Studies in the Theatre Department of Tel Aviv University. She is also a community-based theatre facilitator/director and a trained actress who uses her acting experience in her research and teaching. Her recent publications include articles in Theatre Research International, Theory and Criticism, Social Identities, Israeli Sociology, and Research in Drama Education, and the full-length studies, Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (Haifa University Press, 2010) and Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

The Golden Mask Performing Arts Festival, established in 1994, held each spring in venues throughout Moscow, features the best productions of the previous season from all performing arts. Maria Shevtsova reports on the edition of 2010.

The issue of attitudes towards the arts in England is here compared and contrasted with those evident in the rest of Europe today. This article was written in June 2009, following discussions in Wroclaw during the festival ‘The World as a Place of Truth’, part of the Year of Grotowski. Jon Hewitt is Artistic Director of Admiration Theatre Company, based in London. He has directed several productions, the most recent being Romeo and Juliet Docklands, set in the East End of London. In February 2010 his latest production, Tower Hamlet, opens at the Courtyard Theatre.

Michael Gow's celebrated play Away (1986) commences with a tatty school version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Set in the era of anti-Vietnam War protests, Away ironically salutes the iconic performance traditions of the ‘romantic’ Dream. At the Prince's Theatre, Manchester, in 1901–02, actor-manager Robert Courtneidge directed elaborate productions of this play and As You Like It, and under the management of George Musgrove toured them to Australia, where Twelfth Night was added. These productions' ensemble casting was central to Courtneidge's and Musgrove's ambitions for addressing the ‘distinctive geographies’ of regional taste. Veronica Kelly is an Honorary Research Advisor at the University of Queensland. Her book The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama 1890s–1920s is published by Currency House (2010).

The past two decades have seen a remarkable resurgence in documentary theatre in Britain and America, with a growing emphasis on verbatim material. In this article, Derek Paget examines a distinctively twenty-first-century contribution to the tradition of activist theatre grounded in the last century. Using verbatim material, supporting a specific current cause, and often produced in association with an NGO or charitable organization, the ‘rehearsed reading’ apparently offers little in terms of theatricality even if it is clearly worthy and a valuable resource for activists. Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times. In the present conjuncture, work like that of the ‘Actors for Human Rights’ group, analyzed here, seeks to be a force for social change through a focus on single issues and a reliance on verbatim speech. Derek Paget's interest in documentary theatre has featured several times in NTQ and his early intervention on Verbatim Theatre featured in NTQ 12 (November 1987). Research for the article was conducted as part of University of Reading's 2007–2010 ‘Acting with Facts’ project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Derek Paget is Principal Investigator of the project, and Reader in Theatre and Television in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, University of Reading. The second edition of No Other Way To Tell It, his book on screen docudrama, is due for publication this year.

The Shaw Festival, held annually in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, highlights plays from or about Shaw's lifetime. Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin, who teach at York University in Toronto, here report on the 2009 festival.

An overview of an ‘event’ which has become an indispensable element of London's theatre life, with a closer look at productions of 2009–10.

In this article Steve Earnest discusses contemporary approaches to performance training in Germany, comparing the content and methods of selected programmes from the former Federal Republic of Germany to those of the former German Democratic Republic. The Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock and the University of the Arts in Berlin are here utilized as primary sources, while reference is also made to the Bayerische Theater-akademie ‘August Everding’ Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, and Justus Leibig Universität in Giessen. The aim is to provide insight into theatre-training processes in Germany and to explore how these relate to the national characteristics that have emerged since reunification. Steve Earnest is Associate Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His publications include The State Acting Academy of East Berlin (Mellen Press, 1999) and articles in Performer Training (Harwood Publishers, 2001), New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Western European Stages.

As Noah Birksted-Breen, founder of Sputnik Theatre Company ([email protected]), starts planning the second Russian Theatre Festival in mid-2011, he looks back on why he founded the festival, what to look out for in new Russian drama, why he chose this year's plays, and what comes next. The first festival was held at the Soho Theatre, London, 1–4 February 2010.