Current productions written, directed, and/or performed by First Nations Canadians are often characterized by a complex layering of myth and iconography operating simultaneously in more than one cultural system. The effect is richly visual and auditory theatre, but, more important, such performances highlight the essentially indexical and iconographic nature of theatre itself by writing text at the intersection of discourses with quite different political and historical markers and, in the process, bringing those discourses together to form a new typology of signs. What is problematic is the effect of such signs.

I begin with two images of African actors. The first, from Asinamali by the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Africa (1935; Plate 24), portrays the ‘smelling-out of a fraudulent umthakathi’ (which can be translated as diviner or trickster), which were followed, on this occasion, by other scenes portraying the civilizing influence of European settlers. While the first offers an image of African agency and modernity in the face of oppression, the second, with its apparently un-mediated reconstruction of pre-colonial ritual and, in its teleological juxtaposition of ‘tribal’ and ‘civilized’ custom, seems to respond to the quite different terms set by a long history of displays, along the lines of the Savage South Africa Show (1900), in which the authenticity of the Africans on stage was derived not from their agency but by their incorporation into the representation of colonial authority.

Since the 1980s the Taiwanese theatre troupe Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) has been devoted to transforming jingju by way of adapting world classics. Through an analysis of its adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (2005), this article considers how CLT pushes the boundaries of jingju acting, which is made up of singing, speaking, dance-acting and combat. To meet Beckett's challenge of performing comic failure, CLT integrates jingju restraint and Western slapstick. In so doing, CLT liberates the actors’ bodies from jingju conventions to produce a new aesthetic, which also gives the original play a new metaphysical interpretation.

The work of Robert Lepage is examined in the context of the avant-garde, from Robert Wilson and Peter Brook, through the French Surrealists, back to Edward Gordon Craig. As well as being an icon of post-modernism, analysis of productions such as Needles and Opium, Elsinore and Zulu Time show the degree to which Lepage has realized Craig's ideals of the Übermarionette, and his screens, as well as ‘Scene’, his concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space. What this demonstrates is the unity of the modernist movement throughout the twentieth century.

The Singapore play, Talaq, was denied a public entertainment licence in October 2000 despite having been staged twice before, and its producer was arrested for trespassing when she refused to vacate the theatre in her bid to document the rehearsal process. The controversy, staged as a meta-drama by the print and broadcast media, reveals much about the cultural dynamics of Singapore's arts scene in respect of state subvention and artistic freedom, and the play itself raises questions about the performance of gender and ethnicity, as well as the political anatomy of the performing body.

This article traces the transnational career of the celebrated Beijing opera female impersonator Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) through photographic documentation of the performer. A wide spectrum of Mei's photos is analysed, which captures him both onstage and offstage. The timeline of these photos ranges from those produced during the Republican period (1911–49) to those produced in the People's Republic of China (PRC) (1949–) and includes media coverage from the US (1920s) and the USSR (1930s). This article raises questions about how nationalism, transnationalism and female impersonator's gender identity are represented in ever-transforming modes.

James Joyce's one extant play, Exiles, has never been held in great critical esteem. But rather than viewing it as an aberration in the Joyce canon, a fairer reading of the play takes into consideration the play's own theatrical context: what contemporary dramatists were doing both in print and on stage, what evidence there is of Joyce's own theatrical interests and what models he may have used in his own playwriting. The conclusion is that Joyce, surprisingly, wrote neither a ‘bad’ Edwardian play nor a slavishly Ibsenist one, but a pastiche of Victorian and Symbolist drama that roots the play firmly in the theatrical currents of the 1890s. In addition, Harold Pinter's landmark productions of the play in 1970 and 1971 revealed affinities with postmodernist drama, so that the play looks forward as well as back – it is simply not of its own time. If Exiles seems out of step with the developments of modernism, that is largely because it takes its inspiration from the European experimental theatre of the fin de siécle – not from the theatrical world of the Dadaists, Joyce's contemporaries. While this realization may not rehabilitate Exiles into the modernist canon or indeed the theatrical one, looking at the play's context and history raises key questions about the role of theatre and performance in the historiography of modernism.

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the theatre of the sixties and seventies has been the proliferation of small, generally independent, theatre groups. This phenomenon has not been limited to France but has spread throughout Europe and North America. For the most part, the groups have sought to reform, if not reject, conventional theatre practices, be it the method of productions, the dramatic language or the nature of the dramatic experience itself. Their alternative approaches have focussed attention on the process of dramatic creation. As a result, terms such as ‘collective creation’ and ‘audience participation’ have become critical clichés. But, whereas the practice of the former has been discussed widely both in the context of specific groups and of the general development of contemporary drama, the concept of audience participation has remained vague. Thus, much has been written on the transfer of creative responsibility from author to acting company and on the accompanying change in status of the actor, but the position of the spectator as a creative force has received little detailed treatment.

For various reasons, there is a tension between drama therapy and the concept of performance. Whereas many notions of performance are deeply rooted in the here-and-now, theatrical types of therapy often include practices concerning the future and constructing future images of self, subjectivity and conflict. This paper argues that therapeutic theatre's high affinity with iconic structures and with the creation of ‘images’ can be explained by its specific problems with the contingency and risk inherent in performance.

Performance is ideology! This is particularly true of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, one of his two comedies concerning the behaviour of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony—the other being The Comedy of Errors. Here he makes use of what may well be the longest-running English female stock character, the recalcitrant wife, who goes back to Mrs Noah, the disobedient woman of the mediaeval religious cycle plays. But at the same time he adapts the technique of classical farce to observation of human behaviour, by taking an impossible premise (that a wife can be tamed) and extending it logically to the utmost limits of absurdity. He also combines the Mrs Noah figure with the Judy puppet and the clever woman of the Interludes who outwits her husband, but with one distinctive omission: the physical violence commonly assumed essential to shrew-taming. I believe that here Shakespeare has forged a new dramatic mode by humanizing the intellectuality of rhetorically based classical farce and psychologizing the knockabout physicality of its Plautine offshoot.

The Sistren Theatre Collective came together in 1977 as the result of an initiative of the ruling People's National Party in Jamaica. As part of an extensive special employment programme in the 1970s, the Jamaican Government had created opportunities for women to receive basic job training. One group of women who had been involved in a training programme as Basic School aides decided to put on a play for Workers' Week. Through the good offices of the recently established Women's Bureau, the group was able to work on this project with Honor Ford-Smith who was a tutor at the Jamaica National School of Drama at the time. Their collaborative effort resulted in the creation of a sketch, Downpression Get a Blow (1977), based on the women's domestic and political experiences. In the months and years that followed, the group went from strength to strength, creating plays from their shared experiences; working with other groups to use dramatic scenarios as a way of problem-solving and ultimately establishing a permanent company with its own research unit, community workshops and silkscreen printing activities. At the time of writing in 1989, ten of the original thirteen members are still with the group and two new members have been added. Another ten to twelve women and men are employed by the collective as resource and support staff.

My dear Mackenzie, the fact is—my plays are too liberal for the aristocratic illiberals of Ireland.… My plays breathe the noble sentiments of the influential classes of Ireland.… But I am going to a place where the feelings and the reality of liberty exist in their most glowing form—and not the form alone, but the embodied spirit. I am going to America.

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.

The Scottish National Players were the most interesting and important group in Scottish theatre in the 1920s, and the ‘national drama’ which they produced defined Scottish theatre for almost two decades. The SNP, as they were known, became the focus for the aspirations of young people wanting to progress to a professional career within theatre and were responsible for training a whole generation of Scottish actors. Later theatre groups, such as the Curtain and the Gateway, were greatly influenced by the Scottish National Players, who also made a major contribution to the early years of broadcasting in Scotland. Though mainly an amateur group, the SNP recognized the necessity for a national theatre company to tour as widely as possible, and in doing so helped to fire the enthusiasm for amateur drama which swept Scotland in the thirties. Many of the problems and debates which confronted them in their attempt to provide Scotland with a national theatre, such as the vexed question of whether production should be restricted to Scottish plays, irrespective of quality in the hope of better things to come, are still relevant issues.

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and forms of productivity in twenty-first-century capitalism. I argue that Holstein's overidentification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft results in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice.

The aim of this article is to establish a classification for the various written documents produced by assistant directors (before and during the rehearsals, during the run-throughs, from the first performance onwards and so on). It also underlines theatrical work as an autonomous subject of interest. These written documents are useful, and even indispensable according to certain directors. The notes may differ in nature at different times in the production process. In their finality they preserve a record of what is to be redone, a record of the work whose existence the audience does not suspect. Contrary to what one might believe, it is not always the actors who retain the truest memory of their work. The following is based partly on my own experience as assistant director, or intern, to Yves Beaunesne, Denis Marleau, Matthias Langhoff and Robert Wilson.

Reacting to the concerns expressed by Sue-Ellen Case and others that Greek tragedies were written by men and for men in a patriarchal society, and that the plays are misogynistic and should be ignored by feminists, this article considers how female directors and writers have continued to exploit characters such as Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra and Electra to make a powerful statement about contemporary society.

In sharp contrast to the Americans' involvement in Vietnam, which has been endlessly dramatized in different forms, the realities of the Algerian war, which lasted from 1954 until 1962 and cost 100,000 dead or wounded, have been dealt with by very few French playwrights or film-makers. In fact Genet is the only one to have written a substantial work based on this subject matter while the war was taking place. The one other dramatist with whom he can be compared in this respect is the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, whose trilogy Le Cercle des représailles offers some intriguing similarities with Genet's three great plays written during the course of the war: Le Balcon, Les Nègres and Les Paravents.