This is my first issue as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International. Picking up the ‘baton’ from Freddie Rokem is no easy task; I feel the weight of this responsibility and am conscious of a steep learning curve, despite the excellent insight, wisdom and knowledge Freddie has passed on to me during his term of office, for which I am deeply grateful. Joining me as Associate Editor is Charlotte Canning from the University of Texas, Austin, who, behind the scenes, is already proving to be an invaluable journal colleague.

Based largely on transcripts and documentary footage of the trial, the play Aalst recounts the brutal killing of two children by their parents in the Belgian town of Aalst in 1999. This article explores the ways in which this performance engages spectators as witnesses in a play of seduction and estrangement during which the concepts of ethical responsibility and judgment are destabilized and radically challenged. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Arne Johan Vetlesen and Emmanuel Levinas a case is made for the importance of ambivalence as a productive mode of reading and responding to Aalst.

This article considers the performance of non-violent relationality. Focusing on a production of Big Love, it explores how performance might enlighten an ethic of non-violent being with others, and non-violent being in the world. While many theoretical models of identity emphasize the unavoidable aggressivity of intersubjective relations, this article focuses on scenes in which the subject is let go from violence and retribution. ‘Letting go’ is the strategically utilitarian term deployed here to think about a performative act that loosens the point of attachment between the subject and symbolic law, while paving the way for relatively non-aggressive conditions of being to emerge.

This article examines catharsis in recent one-to-one performances I shared with UK-based artist Kira O'Reilly. Focusing on my inter-experience of My Mother (2003) and Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow (2005), I argue that both performances can be read as troubling and elucidating ideas about the presence, nature and affect of catharsis. I raise questions and reveal my responses to felt states such as risk, intimacy and confession, and draw on hysteria and Kristeva's concept of le vréel to articulate the embodied knowledge of my close encounters with O'Reilly's visceral body artworks. Ultimately I propose that O'Reilly's performance practice adopts cathartic strategies that activate aesthetic, formal and material kinds of feminist political responsibility in her performance ‘other’.

A remembered piece of student theatre returns the writer to an examination of what was staged: a play centring on survival of the Shoah; the actor himself, a survivor; or an old man's self-discovery in the theatre. A shocking gestus in this production broke the boundaries of theatre and (while the fourth wall remained intact) transformed the audience into witnesses, and theatre into testimony. The article theorizes traumatic memory and its manifestations in the body, trauma's staging and the shape of narrative, and the difference between history, its performance and its mark.

Ho-Jin Yoon's production The Last Empress (1995) was the first Korean-brand, Broadway-style musical to travel to Western venues. This article explores how the play was influenced by its producer's commitment to South Korea's cultural development in light of the country's intensive globalization during the mid-1990s. My analysis concludes that the production's development and the musical itself comprise a set of interactions between the global and the national; in turn, these interactions indicate a mode of alienation in which the concept of ‘global’ becomes meaningless, a fetish, or an empty signifier used in the service of national glory. My analysis also shows how elements of The Last Empress magnify the national and how its esoteric, exclusivist idea of Korean-ness is visualized via gendered nationalism.

This article offers an overview of theatre research and publication in India. It comes in two parts. The first examines theatre research post-independence (1947) up until the 1990s – a period of new economic thinking and a liberalization of sociocultural values. The second focuses on theatre research and publications from 2000 onwards, identifying ways in which more recent scholarship has been concerned with the concept of modernity in theory and practice; has begun to address questions of form, style, space and performativity; and has explored urgent social issues. What emerges in this overview is a feel for how complex the field of theatre research is in India given its multiculturalism. In concluding it draws attention to current and future challenges for theatre and theatre scholarship posed by issues such as globalization, communalism, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.