The playwright Simon Gray died of lung cancer on 7 August 2008 at the age of seventy-one. He also found success later in life as a diarist, at first in wryly comic records of the disaster-prone productions of his plays – but with tragic irony most recently in The Smoking Diaries, reflecting on his lifelong addiction to cigarettes (and much else besides). Here, his friend the actor and writer Simon Callow pays a personal tribute.

Jatinder Verma founded Tara Arts in 1977 as a British-Asian company, the first of its kind in Britain. Its use of ‘Binglish’, a term coined by Verma to define the English of speakers belonging to the diaspora of the Indian subcontinent, is an integral part of Tara's identity, as he discussed in his commentary in NTQ52 (1997). This new interview, conducted in July 2008 and February 2009, focuses on issues to do with multiculturalism, engaging Verma in an in-depth discussion of this problematic and increasingly contested area and leading him to outline the artistic pursuits of his company. Special attention is given to the working processes of the Journey to the West trilogy (2002) and to the aesthetic principles driving it, which extend to other productions he has directed for Tara Arts, not least to his more recent transpositions of Ibsen and Shakespeare. A complete chronology of productions can be found on the Tara Arts webpage, www.tara-arts.com. The first part of this interview was published in Maria Shevtsova's Sociology of Theatre and Performance (Verona: QuiEdit, 2009), p. 359–71. She is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

The death of Harold Pinter on 24 December 2008, at the age of seventy-eight, has prompted an inevitable slew of respectful obituaries, and the facts about his life and opinions are available in plenty. Here, we print two personal recollections of Pinter's early years – from Charles Marowitz, who, as an editor of Encore magazine, saw The Birthday Party into print in 1959 while the play was still enduring critical scorn, and Simon Trussler, co-editor of NTQ, who published one of the first studies of Pinter's plays, and, with Marowitz, edited Theatre at Work (Methuen, 1967), which included the earliest lengthy interview with the playwright.

Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance, representing an Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British, and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social, and cultural), their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John's case is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry, and prose. Like Britain's most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics to represent universal themes and to centralize black women's experiences. With subject matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing, and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets, including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lennie James, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams. She is the editor of Hidden Gems (London: Oberon Books, 2008), a collection of plays by black British dramatists.

Philip Ridley is one of the most imaginative and sensational playwrights working in Britain today. Born in 1964, he began by studying painting at St Martin's School of Art in London and wrote the highly acclaimed screenplay for The Krays (1990). He made his theatre debut at the Bush Theatre in 1991 with The Pitchfork Disney. Since then, other plays have included The Fastest Clock in the Universe (Hampstead, 1992), Ghost from a Perfect Place (Hampstead, 1994), Vincent River (Hampstead, 2000; Trafalgar Studios, 2007), and the highly controversial Mercury Fur (Paines Plough/Plymouth, 2005). This was followed by Leaves of Glass (Soho, 2007) and Piranah Heights (Soho, 2008). He's also written five plays for young people and many books for children, as well as directing two films from his own screenplays, The Reflecting Skin (1990) and The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995). Ridley continues to divide opinion: depending on your point of view, he's either Britain's sickest playwright or a singular, prolific, and amazingly visionary genius. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz talking to Philip Ridley in one of the ‘Theatre Conversations’ series at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London, on 25 October 2007. Aleks Sierz, a Contributing Editor of NTQ, is theatre critic of Tribune and author of the seminal study In-Yer-Face Theatre (Faber, 2001).

The co-editors of New Theatre Quarterly take time out here to reflect on the milestone of the journal reaching its hundredth consecutive issue, in succession to the forty of the original Theatre Quarterly. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the ‘old’ Theatre Quarterly in 1971. He is the author of numerous books on drama and theatre, including New Theatre Voices of the Seventies (1981), Shakespearean Concepts (1989), the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1993), The Faber Guide to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2006), and Will's Will (2007). Formerly Reader in Drama in the University of London, he is now Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College. Maria Shevtsova, who has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since 2003, is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts and Director of Graduate Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of more than one hundred articles and chapters in collected volumes, her books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (co-edited with Shomit Mitter, 2005), Robert Wilson (2007), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (with Christopher Innes, 2009), and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009).

Comedy, argues Laurence Senelick, is the form most indigenous to the Russian stage; so while its great players may still vie to make Hamlet their own, it is the comic figure of Khlestakov in Gogol's Government Inspector (Revizor) who most fully absorbs and enacts the concerns of the times in which the role is recreated. Here, while tracing the history of the role during the nineteenth century, Laurence Senelick is chiefly concerned with its performance by Mikhail Chekhov in Stanislavsky's first post-Revolutionary production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1921. Stanislavsky's earlier revival in 1908 had placed Khlestakov amidst a ‘community of fools’; now – reflecting the view of Gogol's anti-hero given by Dmitry Merezhkovsky in his influential essay of 1906, ‘Gogol and the Devil’ – Chekhov accomplished the challenging task of embodying a nullity, an ‘empty vessel’, the odd one out in a ‘normal’ society which he manages briefly to plunge into delirium. Laurence Senelick is Distinguished Professor at Tufts University, and has published widely in the fields of Russian theatre, the history of popular entertainments, sex and gender and performance, and theatre iconography. His most recent works include A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (Scarecrow Press, 2007), The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov as translator and editor (Norton, 2005), and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (Routledge, 2000).

The Sogo bò, primarily an animal masquerade, can be distinguished from Western theatre through its use of a fluid space with shifting boundaries between spectator and performer. An oral tradition dictates the characterization, scenario, and content. The resemblance to ritual can be found in structural elements such as its repetitive nature and the use of non-realistic performance objects and motions. As in ritual, there is a clear sense of order, an evocative presentational style, and a strong collective dimension. The functional resemblance lies in the complex metaphorical expression through which relationships and values are symbolized, objectified, and embodied in a highly artistic way. Marie Kruger is an associate professor and the Chair of the Department of Drama at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where puppetry is offered as a performance and research option. Her research is focused on masquerades in Africa and the various contemporary applications of puppetry in sub-Saharan Africa.

Charles Marowitz's Silent Partners, based on Eric Bentley's book The Brecht Memoir (1989) and on the author's subsequent interviews with Bentley, premiered under Marowitz's own direction at the Scena Theatre in Washington, DC, in 2006. Here, he describes the genesis of the play and the working relationship with Bentley which in turn explored Bentley's working relationship with Brecht. Charles Marowitz was a close collaborator with Peter Brook in the RSC's experimental work in the 1960s, and was founder and director of the Open Space Theatre in London, but now works permanently as a writer, director, and critic in the USA.

Histories of mime largely overlook one of the most remarkable theatrical phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the ballet-pantomime. In contrast, it is widely discussed in dance history circles, as if there were a tacit understanding that only one half of this hyphenated art mattered: the ballet rather than the pantomime. This article explores the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices. Through the works of Noverre particularly (since Decroux declares himself an admirer), but with reference also to other famous and less famous eighteenth-century choreographers and dancers, Edward Nye discusses five aspects of mime: use of the body, mime and dance, mime and language, objective and subjective mime, and pedagogy. He finds differences as well as similarities between modern and eighteenth-century mime, but overall argues that there is no reason to exclude the ballet-pantomime from histories of mime. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000), and of dance, in Danse et littérature; sur quel pied danser? (ed., Rodopi, 2003).

Augusto Boal died on 2 May 2009 at the age of seventy-eight. The following tribute is by Adrian Jackson, who knew Boal not only as translator into English of five of his books and collaborator on many of his workshops, but as a leading practitioner deploying Boal's techniques, notably as founder in 1991 and Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens, the UK's only homeless people's professional theatre company, for whom he has directed more than twenty productions, including two in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company – Pericles, played in a disused warehouse off the Old Kent Road, and Timon of Athens, which toured Stratford and the Belfast Festival. The company's most recent production was Mincemeat, a Second World War epic based on the story of the Man Who Never Was.

By 1909 the French actor, playwright, and director Max Linder was probably the most popular male film star of his time, and his success as an innovative writer-actor of variety and revue continued until the outbreak of the First World War. But this followed five years of frustration in stage-ornament roles on the professional, ‘legitimate’ stage, and only after success in the cinema did his playlets, integrating filmed and live action, further enhance his fame in variety venues across Europe. After the war, and Linder's stints in Hollywood, his long descent into bouts of manic depression tragically began. But his theatrical spirit survives in the cine-stage works of the Prague theatre, Laterna Magika, and Frank Bren also discusses here his possible influence on the work of Erwin Piscator, and more surely on the spectacular Paris music-hall production, Jour de fête à l'Olympia, created by and starring Jacques Tati in 1961. This was plainly modelled on Linder's cinema-theatre creations of 1910–1914, with Tati and Pierre Etaix the outstanding successors to Max in French film comedy. Australian actor-author Frank Bren is currently writing a biography of Pierre Etaix, whose classic film comedies of the sixties are now being restored for international re-release – two of them paying discreet homage to Max Linder. Bren has written or co-written histories of Polish and Chinese cinema and theatre as well as articles for diverse international periodicals.

In 1946, Eric Bentley published The Playwright as Thinker, a revolutionary study of modern drama that helped to create the intellectual climate in which serious American theatre would thrive in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1964 Robert Brustein published an equally influential study of modern drama entitled The Theatre of Revolt. And in 1966, Stanley Kauffmann began a brief, combative stint as first-string theatre critic for the New York Times. Kauffmann's short-lived tenure at the Times dramatized the enormous gap that had arisen between mainstream taste and the alternative vision of the theatre that he shared with Bentley and Brustein. Collectively, these three critics championed the European modern dramatists, like Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Genet, whose plays were rarely if ever performed on Broadway. They also embraced the early work of performance groups such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater when they were either ignored or deplored by most mainstream reviewers. Above all, they challenged the time-honoured idea that the primary goal of the theatre is to provide the audience with an emotional catharsis achieved by realistically identifying with the dramatic protagonist. By contrast, Bentley, Brustein, and Kauffmann championed a theatre that emphasized poetic stylization, intellectual seriousness, and social engagement. The discussion which follows, held on 27 October 2007 at the Philoctetes Center, New York, examines the legacy of these leading American theatre critics of the past fifty years. Bert Cardullo, who transcribed and edited the discussion, was Stanley Kauffmann's student at the Yale School of Drama and is the author, editor, or translator of many books, among them Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1889–1950, What Is Dramaturgy?, and American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings.

One of Russia's foremost theatre directors, Valery Fokin graduated from the Shchukin School at the Vakhtangov theatre in Moscow. At the Sovremennik and Yermolova theatres, of which he was the artistic director, he staged a wide repertoire that included contemporary writers (Mikhail Roshchin, Aleksandr Vampilov, Viktor Rozov), Soviet classics (Gorky), Russian classics (Gogol, Dostoevsky), and, from the international arena, Nabokov and Albee. He taught at the renowned school GITIS from 1975 to 1979 and in Krakow and Tokyo in 1993 and 1994. He has increasingly directed abroad, including Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea. In this article Maria Shevtsova focuses on his most recent productions at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, where he has become a St Petersburg director while maintaining his professional links at the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow, which he founded in 1991 – aptly, since it is with Meyerhold that Fokin's name is most closely connected. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and author of Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004).

The familiarity bred by the notoriety in its own times of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi has been accompanied by neglect for his other work, especially that which seems of peripheral interest to the theatre practitioner. In this article, Kimberly Jannarone argues that his earlier Caesar Antichrist falls into the unusual category of ‘a piece of theatre not intended for the stage’ – apparently unstageable, yet not a closet drama since, in Jarry's scrupulous care for its published form, he created his own ‘theatre of the book’, anticipating the later modernist use of collage while also demonstrating in words and pictures his ‘pataphysical’ interest in the dialectics of opposites. Kimberly Jannarone received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, and is currently teaching in the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote on ‘Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle’, in NTQ67 (2001).

In 1936 Joan Littlewood staged Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century play, Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well); in 1945 Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden; and in 1958 Fernando de Rojas's sixteenth-century La Celestina. There were also plans to produce Lorca's Blood Wedding in 1948. The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each. Gwynne Edwards is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays, have been published by Methuen, and many have been given professional productions. He has recently completed the libretto of an opera on the last days of Dylan Thomas.

By the 1990s, the feminist contention that gender norms inform the production and reception of art had become widely accepted in academia. Many theatre journalists, however, continued to insist on the possibility of writing about performance from an apolitical, gender-neutral position. This article examines the gendered history of this insistence from the early 1700s to the present, its effects on the production and reception of plays by women, and its implications for theatre scholarship. Focusing on Carolee Schneemann's critique of a masculine bias in art criticism in her performance Interior Scroll and the Guerrilla Girls' actions against gender discrimination in the art world, this article examines strategies adopted by female and feminist journalists in Britain and the US to counter women's inequitable status in art journalism and playwriting. By engaging with the gendered binaries mind–body and text–performance, Schneemann and the Guerrilla Girls help clarify how reviewing practices have informed critical thinking about femininity and performance. In doing so, these artists anticipate poststructuralist feminist critiques of visibility and the performing body. Stefka Mihaylova holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on performance theory, especially gender and racial aspects of spectatorship in contemporary American and British feminist and radical theatre and performance art.

Anatoli Vassiliev must be ranked with the most prominent of the internationally acclaimed directors of the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first; and history will surely place him among the great director-researcher-pedagogues of the Russian and world theatre, starting with Stanislavsky and including Meyerhold and Vakhtangov. In this conversation, Vassiliev discusses the unique situation of theatre activity in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, where the studio, or laboratory, was integral to the very life of the theatre as a specific, collaborative, and ensemble practice and a comprehensive artistic institution. He situates the School of Dramatic Art, which he founded in 1987, in this context, extending the latter's reach to Maria Knebel and Andrey Popov, who were his teachers on the directing course at GITIS in Moscow (State Institute of Theatre Art, now known as the Russian Academy of Theatre Art). He graduated from GITIS in 1973. Vassa Zheleznova, referred to in this interview, was the acme of Vassiliev's explorations of psychological realism, after which he developed forms of what he calls ‘play structures’ (or ‘ludic structures’). Actors working in these structures project externally in clearly articulated ways rather than go inwards, towards and within emotional states of being, as is typical of psychological-realist performance in the Russian tradition. Vassiliev's reversal of established performance modes led to his current preoccupation with ‘verbal structures’, which are underpinned by his understanding of words as ideas oriented to symbolic and metaphysical sense rather than to psycho-emotional interpretation. The spatial and luminary dimensions of play, together with movement, music, and song that is formal, operatic, rather than in any other kind of vein, defines such later works as Mozart and Salieri (2000) and Onegin's Journey (2003). They have won him great acclaim in Russia and abroad for their innovative approach outside the parameters not only of realism but also of a range of other familiar aesthetic configurations. Vassiliev has directed productions in various countries in Europe, and has also conducted prolonged research workshops as well as working demonstrations there. In this conversation, which took place in June 2009, Vassiliev refers to several underlying principles of his work and reflects upon the importance to him of Grotowski, his last mentor.

When Lev Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre travelled to Britain in 1988, performing Stars in the Morning Sky at the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), it was their first tour abroad. Since then, this repertory ensemble has had an enormous impact on audiences across the world because of its powerful artistry, sustained by the unique training methods, emotional and philosophical as much as technical, developed by Dodin and his collaborators. This article is an account of the three productions directed by Dodin since King Lear (St Petersburg, March 2006, and performed at the Barbican in London in October that year). They are Life and Fate (2007) after the novel by Vasily Grossman, Long Day's Journey into Night (2008) by Eugene O'Neill, and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (2008, its premiere in April preceding that of Long Day's Journey in December). Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.