A young man loves a woman and is not loved in return. What is more, he has a rival. In a costumed cavalcade, the rival causes the young man's horse to slip, and the young man falls, faints, and, when he comes to, is the victim of the delusion that he is the person whose costume he is wearing: the German Emperor Henry IV. His sister converts a villa into a replica of this Emperor's palace so that the young man can live on as Henry IV undisturbed. After twelve years, however, the delusion wears off. Our man, no longer so young, decides not to let anyone know it and to stay on as Emperor, though sane.

After eight more years, his sister dies. But she had visited him shortly before her death and gained the impression that he might now be curable. She tells her nephew this, and soon after her death he brings a psychiatrist to the villa to see what can be done.

What follows is a detailed account of a single performance of topeng pajegan performed by I Nyoman Kakul In the village of Tusan, Ball, on Feb. 6, 1975. Topeng is a popular form of masked theatre in Bali, and topeng pajegan an old and particularly demanding version of that form, in which one man portrays all of the characters—dancing, telling stories, making Jokes, and performing rituals.

When we met in January 1975, Kakul checked a calendar, found it to be a particularly propitious hour to begin study, gave me my first lesson, and invited me to live in his family compound for the next several months while I studied masked dance.

A war of history and memory over the Great Patriotic War (WWII) between the Soviet Union and Germany has been raging in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two decades. Putin’s Kremlin deploys all of the mythmaking machinery at its disposal to correct narratives that demonize the Soviet Union and reflect badly on post-Soviet Russia. Victory Day, celebrated annually on 9 May with parades, concerts, films, theatre, art, and music, plays a crucial role in disseminating the Kremlin’s counter narratives.

The Maids, produced for the first time in 1946 by Louis Jouvet at the Thèâtre de l'Athènèe, marks perhaps the beginning of “anti-theatre” in France. Certainly we are aware for the first time in The Maids of a strange new consciousness of theatre as in the same year Nathalie Sarraute in Portrait of a Man Unknown made us aware of a new concept of the novel. Sartre wrote of Nathalie Sarraute's “anti-novel”: “We live in an age of reflection and the novel is in process of reflecting on itself.” One might say with equal validity of Genet that his plays are theatre reflecting on the nature of theatre. It is this fact that makes his plays difficult to understand in any normal sense of the word. Nor are his plays “theatre within theatre” as Hamlet contains a play within a play.

Artistic creation always manifested itself to me as hunger. I acknowledged it with a certain satisfaction, but during my conscious life I never asked myself what caused this craving. In the last few years the hunger has diminished and been transformed into something else; now I am anxious to find out what the reasons for it were. I have an early childhood memory of my desire to show off achievements: proficiency in drawing, playing ball, the first swimstrokes. I had a strong need to draw the grownups' attention to these signs of my presence in the external world. I never felt that people took enough interest in me. When reality was no longer sufficient, I started to invent things; I entertained my friends with tremendous stories of my secret exploits. They were embarrassing lies, which failed hopelessly when confronted with the level-headed scepticism of the world around me.

“Peking drama with contemporary themes” is an English translation of Ching-ch hsien-tai bsi—a new phenomenon in Communist Chinese theatre which began in 1958 and was fully developed by 1964. In the Western world it has also been called “modern Peking opera” or “new-style Peking drama.” It is difficult to place this form in any of the theatrical genres of China, for it combines the qualities of a number of Chinese dramatic styles, most notably those of the traditional Peking opera and the “spoken drama”—that is, the Western-style drama which appeared in China in the late 1900's; the word “spoken” emphasizes the fact that the new form is essentially conversational while the traditional drama is mainly sung. Many old conventions of the Peking theatre have been kept; for instance, singing and movement patterns are still largely based on traditional Peking drama. As a general principle, however, the conventions are manipulated to achieve something new.

Emil Frantisek Burian. who was to become the leading avant-garde director in the Czech theatre of the 1930s, was born in 1904 (d. 1959), the son of Emil Burian, a leading baritone of Prague's National Theatre Opera, and his wife Vlasta (née Hatláková), a teacher of singing. His uncle was Karel Burian, a concert tenor. The musical environment established by his family was sustained in Burian's musical education: he graduated from the Prague Conservatory and subsequently completed master's study in composition in Prague under the Czech composer J. B. Foerster. Burian eventually composed seven operas, numerous ballets and chamber works, and most of the music for his theatre productions.

If the roots of Burian's general creativity may be found in music, the roots of his philosophy may be found in Marxism: while still a student, in 1923, Burian became a member of the Czech Communist party.

For the last two years the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop has concentrated on the workshop process rather than on public performance. This change of emphasis is closely connected to Anna Halprin's concern with therapy (a means and an end in itself) as the focal point of artistic activity rather than with the esthetic or formal elements of dance or theatre.

In a broad sense, the theatre experience—through empathy, for example—can be considered in terms of therapy. In the same way, therapy, especially group therapy, has “theatrical elements,” such as role-playing, acting-out emotions, self-revealing monologs, etc. But usually theatre and therapy, in their conventional contexts, remain two separate areas with only minimal overlapping.

Anna Halprin bridges the gap between therapy and theatre first by being a performer (a dancer with a long history of innovative approach to dance) and a dance therapist; and secondly by devising workshops in which the function of theatre and therapy are identical.

Until a hundred years ago, the Tamil theatre of South India was devoted exclusively to the presentation of stories derived from Indian epics and other religious sources. The first plays focusing on contemporary social problems were written in the 1870s. Although the bulk of Tamil drama continued to be primarily religious in content, this newly articulated concern with social problems introduced a separate line of development which was to become a major factor in the political evolution of Madras in the second quarter of this century.

Starting in the twenties, the Indian independence movement began to draw the Tamil theatre into direct involvement with social and political reform. The theatre was used to propagandize the activities of the Congress party, which led the struggle against British rule. Plays were written to urge the people to unite and fight colonial oppression.

With the intransigence of an innovator who feels himself inspired, Antonin Artaud, by an imperious gesture of the pen, by an imperious gesture of the mind, wrote off about two thousand three hundred years of theatre.

Of Western theatre.

We are in the early thirties. This was the period when Louis Jouvet successfully produced the masterpieces of Jean Giraudoux: the period of Electra and her half-god, half-prophet Beggar, just before the Trojan War would not take place, and a little longer before Ondine would glisten in the first rays of another world. This was the period when Charles Dullin created the terrifying protagonist of Richard III, the saraband of ‘Tis a Pity She's a Whore, tragedies as frenzied as tragedies can be, in which howling, cursing, death-bed laments alternate with love songs and sweet tenderness. This was the period when George Pitoëff preserved from mere fashionable success Chekhov's Sea Gull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, Ostrovsky's Storm, and an extraordinary Hamlet like Romeo.

Today, all over the United States, American young people are being spoken to by revolutionists in words they understand, in a style that makes those words acceptable, and through an invisible medium that old professional politicos have not yet picked up on.

This medium is the phonograph record, purveyor of bubble gum music and symbol of Elvis Presley's “Houn’ Dog” and the celebrated “Get off of my Blue Suede Shoes” (which John Lennon once called a protest song). One of the leading manufacturers, Columbia Records, runs a series of advertisements in the underground press the theme of which is “The man can't bust our music” and “Know your friends.” The implication aligns “us” against “them,” and the context of the advertising design and illustration is interracial, hippie, pot-smoking youth.

Is Columbia for legalization of marijuana? No. Columbia is for making money. Thus the investment in music aimed at long-haired youth.

By this time many of us have heard of the controversial doctrines of Epic Theatre. Some of us have been intrigued by Epic theory; others have lost no time expressing their annoyance. In his lifetime Bertolt Brecht, Epic's chief architect, encountered a full measure of both reactions. He accepted enthusiasms calmly and took rejections in the same spirit. In spite of all box-office accountants he insisted that the validity of a theatrical credo was not to be determined by a counting of heads. “Einstein's theory was understood at first by half a dozen people,” he once told me. “Whether I am accepted by six people or six million is beside the point. The point is whether I am justified.“

It must be admitted that the meaning of Epic Theatre is not quickly grasped.

Engaged as I am, at the moment of writing this article, in preparing to stage Edward II for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, my thoughts are more immediately concerned with the problems that the texts of Marlowe's plays present to the actor than with those that they pose for the historian or the critic.

An actor wants to know from where and how he makes his entrance; where and how he is to make his exit. Confronted with the stage direction “Exeunt to the cave” or “Enter from the cave, Aeneas and Dido,” what the actor and actress want to know is where this cave is located on the stage, what sort of a cave it is, how wide the opening and how much head-room, whether it is equipped with a door or sliding panel, and so on.

Since his death eighteen years ago, Artaud's fame has steadily increased. Everyone claims him as predecessor; literary magazines and theatre programs propagate his name; he is quoted as having said things which he never said and he is used as a front for the worst eccentricities. After the Rimbaud myth we have the Artaud myth; to expose the hoax we need a new Etiemble.

In the meantime, Gallimard's careful publication of Artaud's complete works puts into our hands an objective tool to evaluate texts which have been distorted by faddism. The six volumes published so far have already set straight a number of wrong judgments. Volume III revealed Artaud's creativity in cinema; until then, film historians knew Artaud only as an actor. They barely mentioned the one film he had directly inspired, The Shell and the Clergyman [see p. 173], and dismissed it as unimportant.

To the modern temperament and to its artists, in a manner that will undoubtedly remain modern in generations to come, the main stream of theatre art in this century is clearly associated with developments in the visual and plastic arts. The sequence is apparent; from Gordon Craig (and Neo-Romanticism) through the Futurists, Dada, the work of the Russian formalists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, the Bauhaus, and so on, to the work of the present day that draws in various ways upon this background. We perceive ever more clearly in this work an underlying intention: the creation of an abstract theatre. Its symbol, and that which clearly represents its function and aesthetics, is the mask—or the masked actor whom Craig called the Übermarionette.