Peter Zadek, now in his eighties, is among the most honoured and respected stage directors in Germany, a nation which during most of the past century has privileged stage directors above all other theatre artists. Zadek's central position is somewhat surprising in that he began his professional career in England and has in his repertoire, his public statements and his artistic approach sought to position himself outside the mainstream German tradition. This survey of his lengthy career seeks to illuminate this paradox, to show the nature and extent of Zadek's singularity and also to suggest what features in his approach have attracted such a devoted following within a culture he has never claimed as his own.

This article provides analysis of the short-lived London Grand Guignol (1920–2). During its brief existence, this institution became infamous – its presentation of acts of murder and violation provoked strong reactions from its audience, the press and the Lord Chamberlain's office. It has not attracted sustained scholarly analysis since, however, and this article draws upon archival material from the Lord Chamberlain's Plays and Correspondence Files, London's Theatre Museum and the Mander and Mitchenson collection in order to assess its audience's scopophilic – and often very physical – responses, as well as the ocularcentric preoccupations of the genre. The article illuminates censorious, critical and academic definitions of value, drawing upon Foucault's essay ‘A Preface to Transgression’ and the work of Georges Bataille.

This article asks how it is that performances of the work of the most important playwright in Israel – Hanoch Levin – fill auditoria, despite the fact that these plays are considered to be unpleasant, irritating and even repulsive. I investigate the position of Levin's theatre with regard to audience response, and demonstrate how he arouses both conscious intellectual and emotional responses in his audience. The article seeks thereby to identify the sources of pleasure in Levin's theatre. It is apparent that Levin has no wish to send his audience home cleansed and contented. Neither is he interested in providing intellectual affirmation of the world's rationality, regularity and order. Rather than balance, harmony and external affirmation, Levin's plays offer a kind of pleasure bordering on what Roland Barthes calls jouissance, resulting in a new kind of catharsis in his audience.

A large proportion of Thai films and of traditional and modern dramas are based on significant figures whose lives helped shape the trajectory of Thai history, but who are in the end overwhelmed by events. Some works are produced with obvious propaganda intent, reflecting the efforts of cultural reconstruction and historical reinterpretation. This paper suggests that the plays under discussion follow an epic and episodic form, depicting the full scope of the protagonist's life rather than focusing on a single dramatic event or examining a tragic destiny. This structure resembles the paradigmatic epic underwriting Thai royalty, the Ramakien, even while the role and nature of the king is being newly exemplified in annual spectacles.

Written by Lee Yun-taek, arguably the most prolific and influential of contemporary Korean dramatists, The Dummy Bride (1993) is of considerable significance to the Korean political theatre's search for a new dramatic idiom in the increasingly apathetic post-ideological era. Although the issue of modernization of tradition has been a constant preoccupation with a number of other Korean playwrights in the 1990s, Lee's exploration of the relationship between tradition and contemporary social reality strikes a much more political note under the influence of Brecht and Artaud. His incorporation of the utopian realm of imagination into everyday life does not offer a stable sense of resolution to the audience. Swerving away from the ‘decontextualization and museumization’ of tradition and cautiously guiding against the excessive optimism of madang theatre, a dominant form of political theatre in the 1980s, his unique theatrical aesthetic stands as a vigilant rehearsal for how to dream without disregarding or succumbing to a frustrating reality.

When scholars of any nation become so proud of their mastery of alien concepts that they forget or suppress their own cultural identity, they willingly succumb to ‘theoretical imperialism’. The flip side is the arrogant and wholesale imposition by Western scholars of theories created in the crucible of one culture on other cultures, subcultures or historical eras with divergent philosophical foundations. This article introduces several key Japanese critical theories that modify or fuse Japanese and Western psychoanalytic and aesthetic concepts, arguing that they can be fruitfully applied by theatre and performance scholars to works originating either in Japan or elsewhere. The article proposes a ‘both/and’ perspective that respects cultural differences without exoticizing the Other.