In July, 1975, the Pip Simmons Theatre Group performed for the first time in London since disbanding in April, 1973. As with previous works by this group, some critics and spectators were offended. The last two plays Simmons had created in England were Do It!, based on Jerry Rubin's book, and The George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show, staged shortly after Jackson had been killed and played by white performers in blackface. By affecting a fashion of dress and a vocabulary of four-letter words without actually being involved, these productions affronted those English liberals who romanticized the American Yippie and Black movements. Nazi concentration camps are the subject of the latest production, which appropriately opened in the The Netherlands of Anne Frank in the spring of 1975. The play commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the closing of the camps.

During the first World War, in Paris Jacques Copeau developed the idea of a severe and simple form of theatre, neither classical nor topical, but versatile through the economy of its means. In 1919 he remodelled the stage of the Vieux-Columbier in accordance with his new ideas, and over the next two years he founded a school for the training of actors, the École du Vieux Columbier. Both in design and in acting, Copeau wanted to make large statements with simple gestures. The pursuit of simplicity made him eliminate distractions, to create the still ground against which a movement or a form could be seen. His bare architectural stage was meant to magnify the evanescent statements of the drama. “I want the stage to be naked and neutral,” he wrote, “in order that every delicacy may appear there, in order that every fault may stand out; in order that the dramatic work may have a chance in this neutral atmosphere to fashion that individual garment which it knows how to put on.”

If too many murders or atrocities are committed in the theatre, if violence is staged with a taste for shocking detail, or if too much blood spills, the name “Grand Guignol” is usually evoked. The image of Grand Guignol as a theatre of horror is just, but the exact nature and magnitude of the violence and horror are not usually understood. By the same token, the history and stage practices of this theatre are not generally known either. Despite a long existence of more than six decades, the Théâtre du Grand Guignol has been disregarded by historians and theoreticians as an insignificant form of entertainment. However, the fact that Grand Guignol represents a highly theatrical and specialized genre, which involved innovative mise en scène techniques and a unique performer-audience relationship, makes it interesting and relevant.

Stanislavski and Freud share many common features, not the least of which is that each is supported by violent partisans, is attacked by violent antagonists, and is the object of unproductive discussion. Whatever the ultimate fate of their doctrines, we shall never go back to our pre-Stanislavskian naivete about acting in the theatre or our pre-Freudian naivete about living in the world. It must be born in mind in the following discussion that each is a great man, and if either is subjected to less than favorable comparisons it should not obscure the fact that each is pre-eminent in his field. The problem will be to estimate in some judicious and productive manner the nature and importance of their contributions in the light of the problems of the theatre.

“An object of art is artistic only insofar as it is not real,” Ortega y Gasset once wrote, and meant something much broader than an attack upon naturalism. Until we are able to think of drama, for all its physical contingencies and aesthetic impurities, as existing in a different realm from the “real”—the way we are mostly able to think of poetry, painting, music—we will go on disputing over everything that is peripheral and secondary in the work of a playwright like Arden, in the effort to establish its “validity,” unconscious that this validity has already been established by the play's own internal processes and conquests.

There is something dispiriting about Arden's own vacillations between apology and peevish resentment. The prefaces to his plays are full of protests against his critics, but also of weakly enunciated and what can only be called supererogatory statements of his dramatic intentions.

Throughout the first decade of its existence, Soviet theatre sought inspiration and new directions in the popular arts. In the period after the Revolution, the most innovative Russian directors and writers, by turning to the clowning and novelty acts of circus and music hall attempted a complete break with the traditions of bourgeois drama—its plotting, psychology, and domestic themes—in order to create a vital new political and propagandistic theatre with, they hoped, broad appeal to the masses.

The painter Yuri Annenkov, in his version of Tolstoy's The First Distiller at the Hermitage Theatre, Petrograd, in 1919, added clowns and variety acts, made hell into a circus, and turned the devils into acrobats. Vladimir Mayakovsky collaborated with the professional clown Vitaly Lazarenko in staging his circus scenario The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle (See T-57) at the Second State Circus in Moscow.

Critics show more toleration than enthusiasm for Marlowe as a dramatic artist. They praise his thought, his poetry, his psychology, but they offer excuses for his stagecraft. This is a pity, for there is no need to excuse it. Marlowe handles his medium with imagination and subtlety.

The root of the difficulty lies in mistaking a drama of spectacle for a drama of character. Marlowe was writing in a period of transition, when an abstract theatre was fast becoming a narrative one, and the development entailed an important shift of emphasis. Narrative throws stress on the characters of men and the motives that lead to the actions portrayed, while the abstract world of the morality play uses the stage action as a projection of an inward and spiritual action of the soul. A drama in which action is image was changing to a drama in which action is fact.

Since we weren't casting any particular play and therefore weren't on the lookout for any types, and since our main concern was to find actors who were open, adaptable, and ready to rush in where rigid pros fear to tread, it was necessary to devise a completely new audition technique. I decided to do away with those murky soliloquies where a single actor pulsating with suppressed but crippling hysteria gets up and reels off the same speech he has been carting around since drama school.

Director and playwright Stan Lai premiered his marathon play Ago in Shanghai at the end of 2019. Staged in his signature “lotus pond” theatre-in-the-surround, Ago is fueled by Lai’s cross-cultural sensibilities and Buddhist philosophy. If theatre is an art of illusion-making and life is like a dream, Lai turns theatre-going into a ritual of self-encounter and self-reflection, where an illusion mirrors a dream.

Danton's Death is the first play of a twenty-one year old German revolutionary who died before he had lived another three years. Written in secrecy during five weeks of 1835, it may well be the most remarkable first play ever composed. It breaks through prevailing patterns of dramaturgy to a new form, creates the first passive hero in the history of tragedy, and strikingly foreshadows surrealism, expressionism and naturalism. Its author, a youth who short weeks previously had barely escaped arrest for his own revolutionary writings and organizational activities, proceeded to concentrate, in this study of the decline of the French Revolution during Danton's last days, on the antinomy of his passionate desire for social change and his calm knowledge that revolution could not succeed in Germany in his time.

The Spanish theatre in the forties was in a far from promising condition. Garcia Lorca and Casona, who had revitalized the drama in the thirties, had disappeared from the scene. Benavente was still active, but his best work had been done before the Civil War, and his recent plays had little new to offer. The principal writers for the theatre were a group of playwrights who were already well established in the thirties, capable craftsmen such as Jardiel Poncela, Neville, Mihura, López Rubio, and Ruiz Iriarte, who wrote largely teatro de evasión—escapist literature. They sought to entertain the audience rather than to treat the anguishing problems of postwar Spain.

From the very beginning of the Futurist movement in Italy in 1909, Russian artists, poets, and critics were well informed about the movement's manifestos and general development. Strong schools of Futurist poetry and painting quickly came into being. By 1913, Russian Futurism was already in full force. In that year, on December 2 and 3, the first Futurist theatre productions took place: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Kruchenykh's Victory Over the Sun (T52). However, Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh were not familiar with the first Futurist manifesto devoted to theatre: the Variety Theatre Manifesto (September 29, 1913). Their plays and productions were influenced by general Futurist principles, rather than a specific theatrical theory.