A personal introduction by Clive Barker on the place of the Shysters in Midlands theatre: I moved from London to Birmingham around the time the new Birmingham Rep was built. I thought it had all the worst features of a theatre and all the best features of a municipal crematorium. There were serious flaws, too, with the Midlands Art Centre, although my children enjoyed the Saturday morning activities. However, soon a group of idealists founded the Birmingham Arts Lab, whose work was exciting and enjoyable, and brought to the city the best of new experimental theatre. Some years later I moved to Coventry, which I had thought of as a theatrical desert since the death of Brian Bailey, with the Belgrade staggering through a succession of unfortunate managements. But the past ten years have seen a glorious flowering of small companies which display both vision and technical ability. Central to this activity are the Shysters, a group of actors with learning disabilities who have found ways of turning these into their own distinctive theatrical style and language. Since I sit on their board of directors I have felt it difficult to write personally about their work in NTQ, and was delighted when Rachel Karafistan remedied this deficiency by offering us the following article. I love the Shysters: their work entrances me, and I would willingly see their shows once a week if possible. They help to make being sent to Coventry a rich theatrical experience.

Much interest has recently been shown in the contributions of the actor in the performance of Tudor comedy. Lesley Wade Soule's subject is the larger performative framework of such contributions. Focusing on the main action of The Taming of the Shrew, she finds revealing examples of the characteristic presentational structures found in Tudor comedy, including direct audience address, mimesis as a pretext for presentation, a ritual/project structure, the use of stage personae, and a concluding ceremony of celebration. Her essay describes the nature of these structural elements, and offers examples of their functions in the play's performance as bodied forth in the text. Lesley Wade Soule is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, where she teaches directing and the staging of Shakespeare. She has written articles on performance in the medieval and Elizabethan theatres and is the author of Actor as Anti-Character: Dionysus, the Devil, and the Boy Rosalind (Greenwood Press, 2000).

This essay, which is informed by the author's own practice as a playwright working in the medium of radio drama, looks at some effects of the enforced merger of radio with TV drama to create a ‘bi-media’ department at the BBC, and considers the evolution of commissioning policy since the imposition of the internal market under the Director Generalship of John Birt (from 1992 to 2000). Considering radio drama, after Adorno, as a producer in the culture industry, he suggests that the neo-conservatism of the 1980s, as described by Habermas, is a significant factor in understanding current commissioning practices and the dramaturgy of new realism in some radio drama. William Stanton is a Lecturer in Drama at Exeter University, where he teaches and researches writing for performance and intercultural performance practice through a research/practice link with the University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil, where he has an AHRB award for a new project in 2004. He is also a writer of fiction and plays for stage and radio. His most recent play for BBC Radio 4 was Dead Line in 2002, and his Route 23 is forthcoming.

Aeschylus, father of Greek tragedy, was also the first to realize the potential of drama taking place ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – a change from his earlier plays which is quite clear from the Oresteia onwards; and although the Elizabethan theatre was unconcerned with the literal representation of place, exits and entrances were no less crucial to its dramaturgy. Along with the proscenium arch came the stage doors actors fought hard to preserve until the nineteenth century, when first the box set and then the dominance of naturalism required doors to be literalized – as essential for slamming in Ibsen as for the complex avoidance strategies of a Feydeau farce. In the following article, Arnold Aronson discusses the role of the door, actual, assumed, and iconic, in world theatre – and takes a lateral look at its significance in the TV sitcom. The author is Professor of Theatre at Columbia University in New York, and author of American Avant-Garde Theatre: a History (Routledge, 2000), American Set Design (TCG, 1985), and The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (UMI Research Press, 1981). Arnold Aronson served as President of the International Jury for the Prague Quadrennial in 1991 and 1999, and will be Commissioner General of the 2007 Quadrennial. A version of this essay was presented at Brown University at the conference held in 2003 in honour of Don B. Wilmeth.

Lev Dodin has broken numerous boundaries with the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg, the company he has directed since 1983. Their collective devising, explorations, and discoveries for a repertory theatre based on the long-term development of its actors and the change, over time, of its productions make Dodin and the Maly unique on the international stage. Maria Shevtsova, whose recently published book Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004) closely follows the company's work, here details Dodin's direction of opera, which, she argues, is inextricable from his approach to the theatre as such. Her discussion refers to opera productions which feature in her book, but she pays particular attention to Salomé and The Demon which, staged in 2003, could not be included in it. She also indicates Dodin's relation to such directors of opera as Strehler and Sellars. This article is a revised version of her keynote address at the FIRT/IFTR Annual Conference held in May 2004 in St Petersburg on the theme ‘The Director in the Theatre World’. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths' College, University of London.

Dance is often assumed to have universal values and to manifest a spirit of freedom, especially individual freedom. It is also the case that such freedom is perceived to be deeply rooted in the condition of humanity. In this article Gregory Sporton shows how these assumptions can mislead us about the basis on which dance operates. By citing the body as the original manifestation of expression, and linking dance practice to primitive experience, a sentimental picture of ourselves as dancers emerges. Taking dance practice in Taiwan as an example, the author shows how this ‘naturalist argument’ can be exploited by a political culture and in doing so divert questions of identity. For the visiting observer, dance appears to evidence political culture and social aspiration, identities that are fixed in the present rather than the archaic past. Gregory Sporton has had a substantial performing career in ballet, contemporary dance, opera, and performance art. He is Head of the School for Performance and Moving Image at the University of Central England.

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond.

This essay is a reflection on the site-specific performance You are Here, created by Charles Campbell and Steve Epley on the roof of the University of Minnesota Tate Lab of Physics in May 2002. Scott Magelssen treats the production within the context of the previous site-specific work of Campbell and Epley, and their Minneapolis-based theatre company Skewed Visions, exploring the project's themes of knowledge-production and memory, the company's unique use of space, and the actor-object mode of performance. Scott Magelssen is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, where he teaches theatre history and dramaturgy, advises the student-run experimental theatre group, and occasionally directs productions. His current research focuses on the performative and historiographic practices employed by outdoor ‘living history’ museums in Europe and the US.

Celebrating the life of Glynne Wickham, 1922–2004.

Plans for the celebration of Odin's fortieth birthday, September–October 2004

Since his account of the Birmingham Theatre Conference in NTQ51, Aleks Sierz has taken the temperature of British playwriting in articles about ‘Cool Britannia’ (NTQ56) – from which developed his influential book, In Yer Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001) – ‘Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a Critique and a Summation’ (NTQ69), and a report on the Bristol conference (NTQ73). At a time when more new writing is being staged than probably at any period of British theatre history, here he laments the insular social realism which once more characterizes English (as distinct from Irish, Scottish, and American) playwriting, however modishly its characters may now be drawn from the underclass rather than the upper; and he identifies a ‘hunger for ideas’ among British audiences which is ill-satisfied by the dystopian despair of many would-be political dramatists.

The explosion of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre that dominated the British stage in the 'nineties has had both vocal champions and detractors. Here, Ken Urban examines the emergence of this kind of theatre within the cultural context of ‘cool Britannia’ and suggests that the plays of writers such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane explore the possibilities of cruelty and nihilism as a means of countering cynicism and challenging mainstream morality's interpretation of the world. Ken Urban is a playwright and director, whose plays The Female Terrorist Project and I [hearts] KANT are currently being produced by the Committee Theatre Company in New York City. His play about the first US Secretary of Defense, The Absence of Weather, will premiere in Los Angeles at Moving Arts Theatre Company, which has named it the winner of its national new play award. At the request of the Sarah Kane Estate, Urban directed the New York premiere of her play Cleansed. He teaches Modern Drama and Creative Writing in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. An early version of this article was first presented at the ‘In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s’ conference at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2002.

A recent preoccupation with space and place has drawn together theorists and workers in a wide range of disciplines, including human geographers, archaeologists, architects, cartographers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, poets, novelists – and theatre practitioners. There are therefore a range of lenses, a range of vocabularies, through which site-specific theatre and performance can be considered. In this article, Cathy Turner focuses on Mike Pearson's descriptions of site-specific work, particularly his involvement with archaeology, before proposing that we might find a useful, complementary vocabulary within psychoanalytic theories of object relations. She refers to performances by Lone Twin and to her own work with site-specific company Wrights & Sites, who created An Exeter Mis-Guide and A Courtauld Mis-Guide in 2003. Cathy Turner has produced a number of site-specific ‘mis-guided walks’, tours, and performances in her work with Wrights & Sites since 1998. She recently completed a Research Fellowship at Exeter University, investigating writing processes in contemporary performance, including site-specific work. She is now a Teaching Fellow at Exeter University and an Associate Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts.

Report on the eleventh Havana International Theatre Festival, held from 18 to 28 September 2003.

Report on the ‘Political Futures: Alternative Theatre in Britain Today’ conference at the University of Reading, 16–18 April 2004.

Report on the ‘Genet in Performance’ symposium held at the University of East Anglia on 17–18 October 2003

The Russian theatre recognizes achievement at the Golden Mask ceremony in the Bolshoi, April 2004.

Personal memories – and lapses of memory – two months after a unique event arranged by Richard Gough and the Centre for Performance Research for the SCUDD Annual Conference at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, on 3 April 2004.

Report on ‘Learning to Live’, an Intensive Actor Training Workshop for Central American actors, held in Costa Rica from 19 June to 10 July 2003.