One of the surest ways of registering disapproval of a play or a performance is to dismiss it as ‘melodramatic’, thus invoking a whole network of mistaken dramatic values and improper practice. In arts reviews, classrooms and text books, ‘melodrama’ recurs as the ‘other’ of ‘proper’ realist drama. In English Drama: A Cultural History, we describe the critical history of melodrama as ‘The Unacceptable Face of Theatre's importance and seriousness. One of the most influential interventions came from Peter Brooks, whose Melodramatic Imagination propounds two arguments in favour of melodrama'scultural centrality: first, Brooks shows how Diderot and Rousseau anticipated the French form of melodrama, then he makes connections between melodramatic gesture or sign and the work of Saussure or Barthes. My aim here is to develop the case further by suggesting that, in the case of English melodrama, the practice of the form as it emerged was very far from being non-intellectual, out of control or stupid. Indeed the dramatists themselves were well conscious of what they were doing formally: not only intelligence but also self-reflection were there from the start.

It is my intention to derive the concept of ‘theatrical irony’ from the general theory of theatrical communication.

The basic meaning of the term ‘irony’, from the Greek word ‘ειρωνεια’, was ‘dissimulation’. Over the centuries, this term has been extended to additional semantic fields and consequently acquired new meanings as in ‘Socratic irony’, ‘philosophical irony’, ‘romantic irony’, ‘dramatic irony’, ‘tragic irony’, and so on. At the same time, a number of more colloquial expressions were introduced as well, as in ‘ironic smile’, ‘irony of events’, ‘irony of fate’, and so on. I am of the opinion, however, that despite the diversity of such phrases and regardless of their partial overlap, it is still possible to unveil a common semantic core. Furthermore, it is my belief that our understanding of theatrical irony benefits from all these additional usages.

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carter's A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of women's lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.

The importance of scene painters to English theatre increased markedly toward the end of the eighteenth century—in part a response to the contributions of Philip James De Loutherbourg at Drury Lane in the 1770s. Advertisements began routinely to record the name of what we would now call the scene designer. Gaetano Marinari was identified as principal painter and machinist at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket between 1785 and 1789, when the old opera house burned. Thomas Greenwood held the equivalent position at Drury Lane, John Inigo Richards at Covent Garden, and Michael Angelo Rooker at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. For particular productions the names of assistant painters might also be advertised. On 20 December 1785, for example, Covent Garden listed Richards, Carver, Hodgins, Catton Jun., and Turner as the crew that executed scenery for the travelogue Omai, which turned out to be De Loutherbourg's last designs for the London theatre.

Drawing on an idea of the theatrical event, this article sets out to analyse the interactions between the housed (audiences) and the homeless (performers), in order to understand the theatrical conventions, performance contexts and sociocultural conditions that make it possible to narrow the gap between the housed and homeless. Focusing on three performances of zAmya Theater Project's Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), I analyse theatre's capacity and its limits to build community and examine why different interpretive communities respond differently to the same staged moments.

Using rarely seen minutes, manuscripts and photographs preserved in the Shanghai Jingju Theatre archive, an analysis of Interrogating the Chair, a revolutionary Chinese opera embodying Mao's instruction ‘We should never forget the class struggle’, reveals how the ideological demands of the mid-1960s interfered with Chinese theatre. Further, the many revisions of the opera show how the traditional jingju repertoire was transformed into model opera. Interviews with those involved at the time are used to present a direct account of how practitioners dealt with the dilemma of presenting a revolutionary and contemporary theme while keeping faith with their indigenous theatrical form.

Jingju (‘Beijing opera’) is China's most iconic traditional theatre, marketed as a global signifier of Chinese theatre and national identity. Although troupes from mainland China regularly tour Europe, audiences in the UK have also had access to Jingju via two indigenous organizations: the UK Beijing Opera Society (now defunct) and the London Jing Kun Opera Association (now in its ninth year). These organizations consist of Chinese, overseas Chinese and Western performers performing both Jingju and Kunju (‘Kun opera’). Where there is a mix of ethnicity, can ‘traditional Chinese theatre’ still be conceived of as ‘traditional’? How is Jingju mapped onto non-Chinese bodies? Can Jingju performances by ethnically white performers reflect diasporic identities? Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, this article argues that by highlighting the performativity of identity, the performance of Jingju by non-Chinese performers challenges the notion of Jingju as a global signifier of ‘authentic traditional Chinese theatre’.

In a fashion that harks back to the birth of naturalistic drama, but also reflects contemporary anxieties about the etiolation of the real, the forensic capabilities of theatre have become, in the last two decades, the primary focus of theatrical attention. Reconsidering landmark works and rhetorical frames that helped to establish verbatim, virtual and in-yer-face theatre, this article explores the ways in which these key works and genres deploy, and attempt to jam, theatre's diagnostic machinery. The article contextualizes that machinery in relation to the medical underpinnings of naturalism, the growth of theatrical reflexivity from Pirandello to Beckett to Blast Theory, and the televisual phenomena of crime-scene investigation and fly-on-the-wall ‘reality shows’. In the final section I move to address two works which are explicitly about diagnosis, but which, in signal and purposeful ways, evade diagnosis: Must, by American performance artist Peggy Shaw and British company Clod Ensemble; and If That's All There Is, by UK-based company Inspector Sands.

The Australian career of the young American actor Minnie Tittell Brune exemplifies the complex cultural and economic forces operating on the institution of live theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Brune focalizes the contemporary processes which reconstituted the international institution of mass entertainment out of the traditional cultural practices of theatre. The theatrical star is seen as both engaging with and resisting the commodification of her labour power, image and talent resulting from her ambiguous industrial role as magnetic ‘star’ and as managerial commodity. However, the iconic and affective power of the actor evokes strong attachment from significant sections of the newly heterosocial popular audience, in particular from the gallery girls, the young female audience who idolized Brune as a performative personality enacting social self-realization and glamorous transformation. Through reading Brune's repertoire, her social persona as ‘star’ and her ‘emotional’ performative style, it is demonstrated how artistic retro-glamour, religious evangelicalism and discourses of sexuality and femininity serve to manage theatre's move into the mass-entertainment age.

The Western tours of the Mei Lanfang and Tsutsui troupes in 1930 illustrated how to (re)construct the theatrical nationality of China and Japan through the manifestation and manipulation of the performance of Peking opera and kabuki. Through the ‘purification’ of Peking opera's stage presentation system, the Mei Lanfang troupe forged a ‘pure’ theatrical Chineseness that boosted the Americans’ fascination with the ‘(a)historicality’ of Chinese theatrical tradition. By presenting Westerners with a ‘hybridized’ kabuki, which embodied a ‘historically authentic’ theatrical Japaneseness, the Tsutsui troupe deconstructed Westerners’ psychological expectations of a culturally imagined ‘pure’ and ‘classical’ Japanese theatre. As two sides of the same coin, the two troupes’ (re)construction of theatrical Chineseness and Japaneseness together challenged the West's essentialist views of cultural ‘Others’, which forcibly endowed Eastern theatre with a pure and unchanged ‘otherness’.

In 1939 the Chicago and New York City dance units of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project premiered two works inspired by the events of the Spanish Civil War. This paper offers an examination of the conflicts that arose in presenting dances about a war in which the US government adopted a position of neutrality, but about which many artists took a profoundly partisan stance. Further, this research unveils how internal censorship at the Federal Theatre Project affected the creation and presentation of these dances as well as ways in which the choreographers (Ruth Page/Bentley Stone and Helen Tamiris) subverted requests for alterations to their scenarios and choreography.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too by Andrea Dunbar and A State Affair, by Robin Soans. Co-production Out of Joint, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, and Soho Theatre Company. Double bill first performed at Liverpool Everyman on 19 October 2000 and Soho Theatre, London on 5 December 2000.

A play, a film; one author, one dénouement: the die is cast, there is nothing more to be done. Huis clos (No Exit) ends with Garcin's disillusioned surrender: ‘Eh bien, continuons.’ In Les Jeux sont faits (The Chips are down) ‘lentement [les bras des deux protagonistes] retombent, ils se détournent et ils s'en vont, chacun de son côté’. Against all odds, Garcin, Inès, Estelle — in the play —, Pierre and Ève — in the film — fight in vain for a new life, only to capitulate when their failure becomes evident.

This article proposes to address the tension between digital co-presence and embodied spectatorship inaugurated by the pivot to online and hybrid forms of (post-)pandemic performance through the lens of the postdigital. The term is developed as a way of accounting for the complex mediatized co-presence between performer and audience in a representative example of this genre, Dead Centre's To Be a Machine (Version 1.0). As its theoretical framework, the article brings together the concept of ‘postdigital performance’ (Causey) with co-presence as a central element of liveness and spectatorship. It puts forth the hypothesis that To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) constructs a postdigital sense of co-presence that is characterized by a blurring of the lines between embodied and virtual spectatorship, temporal co-presence and real-time interaction with the remote audience, and an increased sense of emotional alignment with the remote audience in lieu of physical proximity.

This article focuses on an incident of censorship and police intervention at the Königstädtische Theater in Berlin in 1828, occasioned by a performance of Gotthilf August von Maltitz's The Old Student (Der alte Student). Identifying how the playwright and his actors sought to represent political topics onstage allows me to explore how theatre functioned as a potential player in an incipient public sphere. In turn this reveals how the desire to represent political topics onstage and to become a performative player in the public sphere was already under way in the 1820s, well before the revolutionary turbulence of 1848.

When Homi Bhabha discusses the problematics of signification and coding in intercultural interpretation, he questions the relationship between practices and the experience of culture. By questioning the power of codes and signifiers to fix cultural identity, Bhabha allows that the stable object of culture might be caught ‘in the disturbed artifice of its signification’, that is, ‘at the edge of experience’. This suggests to theatre and performance studies that the culturally inscribed body need not be viewed as a stable repository of displaced and deferred codes. The body may be intercepted in situations, or at moments, when signification dissolves and is reconfigured.

The Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones’) memorial project commemorates victims of Nazi violence and the Holocaust through an individual marker installed outside the last willing residence before deportation and execution. The Stolpersteine project has spread throughout Europe, providing an urban topography of sites where traumatic events occurred. Because Stolpersteine are placed in public streets, they create performance possibilities, inviting passing pedestrians to engage in past history and trauma. As the project grows throughout Europe, however, the universality of the stones abuts with the specificity of local history and memory. This article considers the Stolpersteine installed in the Catalan city of Manresa. These stones, representing twenty-eight Spanish Republicans who were interned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, are framed by a Catalan-language audio guide that directly points to the collaboration of the Francisco Franco dictatorship with Nazi Germany. In so doing, the stones in Spain also stand for violence meted out during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

When in 1932 M. C. Bradbrook put forward the view that the Elizabethan style of acting was probably formalistic, she initiated a debate that has not yet ended, between those who accept her view and those who, like Marvin Rosenberg, believe that Elizabethan acting style was probably realistic, akin to modern style. She wrote: ‘There would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalised. Conventional movement and heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off dramatic illusion.’ There is no real conclusion to be drawn, and those who take a middle way, arguing for a more complex fusion of the formalistic and the naturalistic, are probably close to the truth. The reason why the argument cannot be resolved is that there is virtually no contemporary evidence about acting styles in general or about particular performances, so that discussion rests less on scholarship than on conjecture based upon the few hints that can be gleaned from the plays and elsewhere. In this paper I want to consider the ways in which female roles might have been acted by boys and young men, taking my perspective from the performance of the onnagata, or female impersonator, in the Japanese Kabuki theatre.

The ‘notice préliminaire’ to L.-H. Lecomte's unfinished Histoire des théâtres de Paris includes a list of eighteen major fires occurring between 1789 and 1900, each of which resulted in the total destruction of a theatre. The date of each disaster is given, as also the date at which the theatre was rebuilt, either on the same site or in a new location. But beyond these brief particulars, Lecomte gives little information on the circumstances and none at all on the probable causes of each catastrophe and the precautions taken subsequently to avert a recurrence. It is the purpose of this paper to flesh out the bare bones of Lecomte's statistics, and to extend the picture to embrace similar disasters befalling provincial playhouses in France over the same period. There had of course been spectacular fires before the Revolution at Paris theatres, notably that which destroyed the opera house located in the Palais-Royal on 6 April 1763 (incidentally severely damaging the palace itself), although, since it occurred during the Easter break, the theatre was fortunately empty at the time. The Opera was eventually rehoused on the same site, but on 8 June 1781 the building once more went up in flames and was reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble. Again there were no victims among the spectators, since it was only when they had left after the evening's performance that the fire broke out; but many of the dancers were still changing into their outdoor clothes at the time and two of them failed to follow the example of the others and make their escape across the roof and down to the street. A total of a dozen or fifteen people perished as a result of this fire, including one elderly woman living in the Cour des Fontaines who died of shock at witnessing the fearsome spectacle.