The first issue of the journal in 2004, and the first under my editorship, is devoted to a special focus on ‘Postdramatic Theatre’. While this term may not be familiar to many readers, the phenomenon it embraces most certainly is. Coined by the German theatre studies scholar, Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatisches Theater,1 the concept refers to tendencies and experiments defining theatre outside the paradigm of the dramatic text. Also known, somewhat imprecisely, as postmodern theatre, it questions fundamentally the very tenets of the dramatic theatre. Postdramatic performances usually eschew clear coordinates of narrative and character and require therefore considerable effort on the part of the spectator. For this reason, it has been termed, in the words of New York theatre critic Elinor Fuchs, ‘spectator's response theatre: we write our own script out of the “pieces of culture” offered’.2 Like Lehmann, Fuchs tries to find an over-arching frame within which to make sense of the manifold experiments in theatre and performance that were taking place in the 1980s. Whereas Lehmann sees postdramatic theatre primarily as a question of form and history which affect the configuration of time, space and mediality of theatre, Fuchs regards the same developments as a response to the massive critique of Western models of subjectivity that we associate with terms such as poststructuralism and deconstruction.

This article examines the work of the Situationists and their leading member, Guy Debord, as it relates to theatre history and the history of the manifesto. The Situationists privileged the writing of manifestos over the production of art works in order to avoid the fate of the historical avant-garde, whose provocative art had been co-opted by the cultural establishment. Despite this pro-manifesto and anti-art stance, the Situationists drew on the theatre, envisioning the construction of theatrical ‘situations’ influenced by the emerging New York happening as well as modern theatre artists such as Brecht and Artaud. This theatrical inheritance prompted a recent theatrical representation of their activities based on Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. What this theatrical rendering demonstrated, however, is that the theatricality of the ‘situation’ is different from that produced on a stage, reminding us that the strategies of the neo-avant-garde cannot be easily transferred to a traditional theatrical form.

The article begins with a short description of the current situation in Polish theatre where the traditional understanding of a dramatic text has made the reception of formally innovative European playwriting difficult. On the basis of recent German plays by Rainald Goetz, Dea Loher and Roland Schimmelpfennig, which have been translated into Polish and published but have not yet received significant productions, the article tries to answer two important questions. Firstly, how the postdramatic texts written for avant-garde, feminist and postcolonial theatre during last three decades have influenced plays written for and put on the mainstream stages in the 1990s. Secondly, in what ways the new texts, which in many respects go far beyond the borders of traditional drama, have changed the existing definitions of theatrical mimesis and theories of drama

In his Postdramatisches Theater Lehmann compares the effect of the dramatic theatre to that of perspective in painting. Both are structured according to an aesthetic logic that can be characterized as teleological. On the contemporary post-dramatic stage, this logic is deconstructed or rejected. In my text, I take a closer look at this comparison of drama and perspective in Lehmann's text. I confront Lehmann's account of the postdramatic theatre with the work of Dutch theatre director Gerardjan Rijnders. Rijndesr's work draws attention to the inevitably of the subjectivity involved in every vision of the world, even when this world seems to be shown ‘as it is’ in itself. As I will argue, it is precisely the relationship between what is seen and the subjective point of view from where it is seen that is obscured in Lehmann's account of the similarities between drama and perspective.

Much contemporary experimental theatre and many performance practitioners in Germany and Austria share an interest in what one might call the material conditions or the medium of their performances. The article discusses different examples where the sharing of space, language and time in performance and thereby the ‘communicability’ (W. Benjamin) of communication is explored. Directors and writers discussed include H.J. Kapp, W. Golonka, L. Chetouane, R. Pollesch, C. Bosse, J. Szeiler. It is argued that in these cases theatre is done in a political way, because it allows the experience of alterity and opens up a space of potentiality.

In this article Nicholas Ridout argues that the work of the animal in theatrical performance generates an affective response which has both cognitive and potential value. Using examples of the appearance of animals on stage in recent work by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Jan Fabre, it suggests that when animals are coerced into the making of meaning in theatre, the unease which their appearance provokes is not so much the result of an encounter with the irreducibly ‘other’ as a recognition of familiarity, proximity and a history of exploitation. That animals can readily be seen to be exploited on stage allows the possibility of the exploitation of humans being seen as part of the same economy and this same history.

Eva Diamantstein's play and production of Nachtmahl (Supper) premiered during the Spielart Theatre Festival in Munich, Germany, in November 2001, and subsequently toured to Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Vienna in 2002. Both a research project and a theatrical enterprise, Nachtmahl is based on the biographies of four women who actively participated in various Nazi projects. Seated at a long table and having a four-course dinner together with the female characters, the spectators gradually discover their histories while the theatre becomes a dynamic space of coexistences, in which the continuities between past and present acquire a material and experiential quality. By situating Nachtmahl within the historiographical strategies crystallizing around women and National Socialism, the author discusses the production's use of social rituals, strategies of domination and intimidation and mechanisms of collective communication. The production explores how culturally conditioned strategies of exoneration function as devices for separating oneself from a seemingly distanced past.