One of the pleasures of editing Theatre Research International is the opportunity to engage with scholars from different parts of the world about their research. In the past year or so, I have visited several universities in South East Asia, finding out about the practices and ideas people are investigating, and how they are doing it. In the process, I have been struck by the alacrity with which ambitious universities in the fast-developing economies of the region – and, I suspect, elsewhere in the world – are embracing the metrics and other criteria required for success in global university rankings exercises. The legitimation, prestige and increased attractiveness to talented staff and students that a good showing in such exercises can bring is presumably an important reason why governments and university administrations see participation as an efficient use of limited resources. However, as anyone with direct experience of rankings-motivated institutional change will be aware, the practical results can be highly disruptive, and their cost can fall disproportionately upon arts and humanities researchers, so much of whose activity remains resistant to easy quantification.

Documentation is often descriptive, yet Brecht's approach to the task was to unpack as much of the process as possible in order to share his method and to make it available to other theatre-makers. This article initially examines how such documentation functioned and goes on to consider how and why it gradually declined over time. By the mid-1960s, the Berliner Ensemble had entered a period of crisis, yet the development of post-Brechtian practices in the early 1970s did not lead to a resurgence of documentation. However, at certain points, interest in manufacturing the carefully taken Notate resurfaced. The article thus investigates the relationship between documenting and transmitting Brechtian practices. Documentation becomes a yardstick by which to measure the fêted company's self-understanding as Brecht's theatre.

In South Korea, workers’ theatre is often considered outdated and unsuited for the postmodern era of hybridity and diversity because of its crude, ideology-oriented slogans. Thus the success of Hamlet for Only Nine Days (2013), featuring workers laid off from the CortCortec factory in South Korea as actors, is highly exceptional. This article presents an analysis of the characteristics of Hamlet for Only Nine Days as documentary theatre where various experiences and representations of reality mix with fiction, and reviews its political significance.

Since the Sunflower Movement of 2014, when thousands of Taiwanese students protested against a trade deal the Nationalist government had made with China, the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty has again been brought to the political fore. Home to twenty-three million people, not only is Taiwan beset by threats from China and isolated by international organizations, but in its rapid push to industrialize it also has incurred severe environmental degradation. Two contemporary theatre troupes incorporated the Sunflower demonstration's ‘pro-Taiwanese homeland’ agenda into their works about the environment. Addressing both the pollution of the countryside and the demise of rural communities, they idealized pastoral life and emphasized Taiwan's roots in agrarian culture. Sun Son's Mulian Rescues Mother Earth imagined a perfectly organized small agricultural community trying to sustain its success, and San Que Yi's Earth Project portrayed two examples of rural communities engaged in David-and-Goliath struggles against industrial pollution.

This article is about audiences’ reactions to plays at the 2013–14 Roverman Festival of Plays at the Ghana National Theatre. Using a modified version of Willmar Sauter's ‘Theatre Talks’, questionnaires and participant observation, I sought to ascertain what audiences at this festival made of two of the plays presented to them: What's My Name? and The Day Dad Came. Audiences identified and discussed endemic corruption and domestic violence in ways that showed their keen engagement with and interpretation of the plays and their eagerness to take what was presented to them and make it their own. The discussion also reveals the audiences’ interest in the aesthetic qualities of the plays, which they shared in surprising detail. I argue that the personality of the director–playwright, Ebo Whyte, frames the audiences’ appreciation of the plays.

From mid-October to mid-November 2013, Australian performance artist Casey Jenkins sat for twenty-eight days in a gallery in Darwin, far North Australia, knitting a scarf from a ball of wool lodged in her vagina. Parts of the performance of Casting Off My Womb were filmed by the public broadcasting service SBS2, and aired in late November 2013 as a two-minute-and-forty-eight-second video clip re-titled Vaginal Knitting. The clip went viral on YouTube, with over seven million views as of March 2016, and received extensive media attention. Casting Off My Womb attracted global public interest because Jenkins continued to knit throughout the days of her period, weaving her menstrual blood into the artwork. The performance elicited strong responses from its global viewing public. While some people praised the work, many online spectators wrote vicious, derisive and personal attacks on Jenkins for displaying her menstrual blood in a public place. This article uses Matthew Goulish's methodology of ‘slow thinking’ as a counterresponse to the impulsive reactions of the online spectators and as a means to register the powerful and incremental energy and effects of Jenkins's feminist performance.