In this essay Michael Dobson considers the evolution of certain habitual cuts to the text of Hamlet between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, identifying in particular a tendency to increase the abruptness with which the play's last act interrupts its otherwise digressive movement. Looking in particular at the fate of Fortinbras, he examines changes to the ways in which these cuts have been indicated to readers, arguing that a decisive separation between the play as read and as acted makes itself felt at the turn of the nineteenth century. He concludes with a discussion of when and why it became desirable to advertise not manageably edited stage versions, but ‘uncut’ marathons. Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. His publications include the co-editorship of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance, Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today, and The Making of the National Poet.

Theodore Komisarjevsky was a prominent figure in the inter-war British theatre until his migration to North America in 1936. While recent studies have foregrounded the various artistic factors that influenced his work and his eventual departure, little attention has been placed on the sociopolitical issues. Most notably, there has been no serious consideration of the impact that his nationality had on the opportunities that were available to him. In this article Philippa Burt examines Komisarjevsky's work in relation to the growing nationalistic and Russophobic attitudes in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses particularly on his series of productions at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and shows the subsequent critical outrage to be rooted in a desire to protect Shakespeare and, by extension, Britain as a whole from the ‘interference’ of a Russian director. Dr Philippa Burt is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has previously published articles on Harley Granville Barker and Joan Littlewood, and is the recent recipient of a Harry Ransom Research Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

An actual dinner party is nearly always characterized by the presence of three central elements: a meal, a table, and a gathering of people, who usually converse. In this article Campion Decent considers the dinner party as a social event and questions how artists draw on its elements to inform artistic representations of dinner. He examines the use of dining events in drama, notably in five texts authored by women between the late 1970s and the present day–Tina Howe's The Art of Dining (1979) and One Shoe Off (1992), Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982), Moira Buffini's Dinner (2002), and Tanya Ronder's Table (2013). These texts share an emphasis on the symbolic idea of food or dining, feature tables with a woman at their centre and offer dialogue allied to the experiences of women. While the dining events that they depict are populated with vastly different characters and distinct conversations, the tables nevertheless function as potent yet ambiguous symbols both of women's oppression and of the potential for creative freedom. This article draws on research in anthropology, sociology, food studies, theatre and performance studies, and women's studies to illustrate the fertile complexity of ideas involved in the symbolic dinner. Campion Decent has recently completed his doctoral studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is an award-winning playwright, with productions at Sydney Theatre Company, the Griffin Theatre, and the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney. He has presented papers at Stanford University, Shanghai Theatre Academy, and Victoria University of Wellington.

Hacking – improving software through a process of trial and error – is a mode of rehearsal. Such is the claim made by Miguel Escobar Varela in this article, which he furthers by exploring the similarities between the ways theatre makers and software programmers speak about their crafts. Understanding software programming as an essentially creative process should be of interest for theatre scholars, who are constantly searching for modes of academic discourse that are sensitive to the specificity of theatre. By offering examples from interface design for the study of Javanese theatre, Escobar argues that creating software, through an iterative process of trial and error, can become part of the methodological palette of theatre scholars. Miguel Escobar Varela is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore, and has worked as a theatre researcher, computer programmer and translator in Mexico, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Singapore. His articles on the intersection of digital technology and theatre studies have been published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Asian Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review and are forthcoming in TDR and Theatre Research International.

Arnold Wesker, who died in April 2016, denied having been an ‘angry young man’ and, though the cliché clung, he declared, ‘But I am an angry old man.’ In this memoir, Simon Trussler, while reflecting on causes for the anger, does not attempt an analysis of the life and works, but recollects the times when their shared interests and intentions brought them into contact, and explores some of the reasons why the youthful climb to a peak of success was followed by a slow decline not in output or activity but in the critical response to a writer perceived as having gone out of fashion. NTQ's former co-editor, the late Clive Barker, was closely involved with Wesker in the early Centre Forty-Two project and its aim to open wider access to the arts, while Trussler helped to initiate Wesker's later involvement in the International Theatre Institute. Other ‘loose connections’ with Wesker's life and career here flesh out the facts and received opinions of the formal obituaries. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the old Theatre Quarterly , as later of New Theatre Quarterly. He conducted two major interviews with Wesker in the original TQ, both later reprinted in book form, and with Glenda Leeming co-authored the first full-length study of Wesker's plays (Gollancz, 1981). Among many other publications, he is author of the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1994).

A report by Maria Shevtsova on the 2016 edition of the biennial Craiova International Shake speare Festival, continuing her coverage of the event in NTQ 112. She pays special attention here to the pièce de résistance of the latest festival – Richard II with the Saitama Arts Theatre, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, whose death occurred barely a month later: this article is also a tribute to a world-renowned man of the theatre. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts in the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Traditionally, the term ‘soubrette’ referred to secondary light-sounding soprano maidservant roles in opera; however, the term now encompasses a broader spectrum of operatic character types. In this article Valerie Lynn Schrader examines the archetype of the ‘soubrette’ in classic and contemporary musical theatre. Because the soubrette is not clearly defined in these forms, in doing so she seeks to establish the varying characteristics of the type, and to analyze musical theatre characters who are representative examples. Using a list of the longest-running Broadway shows from the popular Broadway fan website playbill.com, Valerie Lynn Schrader has conducted a thematic analysis of fifty-eight ‘soubrette’ characters in thirty musicals. By defining and studying the soubrette, she seeks to provide both theatre scholars and practitioners with a tool for character analysis and performance study. Valerie Lynn Schrader is Assistant Professor of Communications at the Schuylkill campus of Pennsylvania State University. As a rhetorical critic, her research focuses on rhetorical messages in musical theatre texts and how these messages are conveyed to audiences through performance. She is a classically trained soubrette soprano and often performs in local theatre productions.

Bernard Ince here surveys insolvency and bankruptcy in the theatres of England and Wales during the period 1830 to 1913. His methodology analyzes failures in absolute and relative terms, using aggregate and disaggregated data. The annual pattern of failure shows a marked volatility in the aggregate, with the absolute number of failures tending to increase towards the 1880s before declining thereafter. When the data are expressed as a rate relative to annual theatre population change, the trend is, however, reversed, failures being much higher in the 1830s and 40s than in the later decades. When annual failures are analyzed alternatively in terms of the number of theatres actually managed or owned by bankrupts, and the data disaggregated between the London and provincial theatres, different patterns of failure emerge, London theatres experiencing higher risk during those early decades, while the provincial Theatres Royal on the other hand are especially vulnerable during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, and other theatres in the provinces are exposed more during the 1860s. From an analysis of over 200 cases it is clear that factors contributing to theatrical failure are diverse and often complex. Rarely is failure the result of a single catastrophic event but is more often caused by a combination of events, or from the cumulative impact of insolvencies carried over from previous years. While a correlation between annual fluctuations in theatrical failures and cycles in the general economy cannot be firmly established, anecdotal evidence suggests that regional or local conditions play a more important role. It is concluded that while the financial situation of many theatres operated on the limits of financial viability, bankruptcy on a significant scale was uncommon, indicative of remarkable resilience in the face of profound economic, social, political, and legislative change. The author is an independent theatre historian.