Few people deny the intimate inter-relationship in new China of culture on the one hand, and the stage of the revolution on the other. Yet I do not think it has always been made clear why it is theatre that has been the main art for expressing that relationship.

Performance analysis and performance theory have to deal in one way or another with the relationships between the written dramatic text and the stage performance of that text. The point of departure for most discussions of this issue is that the drama text through its staging is ‘translated’ or ‘transformed’ into a performance text but since the ontological status of the written and performed texts are fundamentally different it is virtually impossible to set up a clearly delineated hermeneutic procedure through which the new, ‘translated’ work of art, the performance text, can be analysed on the basis of the dramatic source text alone. It is quite evident, moreover, that the staging of a certain text is both a completely independent work of art, presented by live actors for an audience in the total context created especially for that performance and an ‘interpretation’ of another independent work of art, the dramatic text. The performance itself thus creates a special form of intertextuality where the words assigned to the characters on the printed page of the written text are spoken by the actors on the stage. The behaviour of a certain character on the stage is a specific realization of a potential range of meanings which that character contains in the source-text on the printed page.

Since the two texts are so fundamentally different any attempt to judge the adequacy of the ‘new’ work of art, the performance text, mainly in relation to the dramatic text is doomed to run into insurmountable hermeneutic difficulties.

Proceeding from the observation that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy) soon abandons the analysis of actual performances in favour of a discussion of character, the article explores Lessing's problematic relationship with the performing body, situating it in the context of an increasingly textual culture. It shows the implications of this move in terms of gender prescriptions before discussing Lessing's ‘disgust’ with a particular performance of his Emilia Galotti. Reading this example with Lessing's treatise Laokoon and drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, it argues that Lessing's struggle with the performers reveals a profound crisis in subject formation in the sense that the disturbing corporality of the performing body is always threatening sympathetic identification. The article concludes that the Dramaturgie itself constitutes an ‘abjection’ of performance. A postscript opens up the view onto the contemporary relevance and refiguration of Lessing's Laokoon in the Laokoon Festival in Hamburg.

We Are All Treaty People is a Canadian play for young audiences (ages eight to twelve) that addresses difficult knowledge, Elders’ story sharing, and contemporary and historical Indigenous–settler relations. This article discusses the contemporary and historical political context of the play and its production, the creation process and its narrative anchors. It argues that through a respectful, Indigenous-led creation process, and structural techniques, the play has the potential to offer hope and healing, and encourage relationships based on knowledge.

The craze for amateur theatricals among the higher orders in late Georgian England is notorious. It was a passion that was given vent not only in Britain itself, but throughout the Empire, where military officers and civilian gentlefolk trod the boards in centres as far apart as Montreal and Cape Town, Jamaica and Calcutta. One colony that conspicuously lacked such genteel pleasures was convict settlement in New South Wales. The rigours of the posting, the minute numbers constituting the social elite, their geographic dispersal, and the bitter factionalism of their community effectively killed off any possibility of such theatre for the first twenty-five years or so of the outpost's existence. For the next fifteen years the positive influence of a growing population was negated by the continuance of the factionalism, by the deep suspicions of a succession of governors, and by the growing influence of the clergy, most of whom were bitterly hostile to theatre.

Hong Kong is a bi-lingual community, and drama in Hong Kong has, over the last few decades, developed along two lines: drama in the predominant dialect of Chinese for the vast majority of the local population, and drama in English for expatriot westerners and a small English speaking minority of Chinese theatre goers.

In a recent issue of New Theatre Quarterly an article on the visual documentation of performance notes that theatre has proved to be resistant to ‘mechanical reproduction’ and that theatre practitioners are unconvinced of its value. The author goes on, however, to argue for the ‘urgent need’ for full archives of video recordings of performances. She even quotes Eugenio Barba to the effect that what really matters in performance is not the immediate effect on the spectators, but a kind of afterglow and the impression to be made on future generations.

In both the play and the film of Marguerite Duras's India Song no verbal exchange is seen to take place on stage or in camera shot and all the dialogue emanates from disembodied voices which reverberate across the filmic or theatrical imagery. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sound of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals. These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. In this essay, I want to focus on the composition and the ‘enactment’ of the sound script of India Song and consider the way in which it functions as a stratum of eloquent signifying systems in the performance of this rich and poetic text. My concern will be with the ‘composite’ text of novel/play/ film and the way in which sound is evoked across the spectrum of reader, spectator and auditor, though my intention is not to suggest that the written text, the film and the play performance are interchangeable. I shall refer to the published text, Duras's own 1974 film version, and Theatr Clwyd's performance directed by Annie Castledine and Anabel Arden in 1993.

Samuel Beckett's monodrama, Krapp's Last Tape, presents great challenges to the actor. A short piece, it is complex, many-layered and laconic. As always, Beckett never uses even one word, where silence will do. I rehearsed and performed the play some years ago and have continued to reflect on the play and the role of Krapp.

In the autumn of 1997 the World Bank issued ‘China 2020’, a seven-volume report on the key issues and challenges that ‘China must face over the next two decades’. The opening passage reads:

China is in the throes of two transitions: from a command economy to a market-based one and from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. So far, both transitions have been spectacultarly successful. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, with per capita incomes more than quadrupling sine 1978, achieving in two generations what took other countries centuries.

When a company of Japanese actors under the leadership of Manzaburo UMEWAKA* presented some noh plays at the Aldwych Theatre in 1967 as part of the World Theatre Season, a good many British critics confessed themselves to be more than a little baffled. Opinions ranged from one reviewer's: ‘Noh is stylised to the point of static incomprehensibility’ to Philip Hope-Wallace's guarded appreciation: ‘The sound which prevails is curious; wailing and hooting noises like owls with indigestion. But the combination of strange noises and slow, potent, intense movement adds up to some very exotic and memorable poetry; to those (so to speak) in the know, it must be a lifetime's experience.’ To Irving Wardle the cultural barrier was impenetrable. ‘I found the performance totally alien: a blank cheque with no doubt centuries of artistic credit behind it, but which might equally almost have been staged as a hoax on the cultural community… I doubt whether any such vision can be transmitted without a shared language…’ Even critics anxious to enter into the spirit of this, to them, wholly new experience admitted that they found it hard going. W. A. Darlington wrote, ‘The plays were performed by a company trained from childhood to a stylised form of art of which one cannot hope, without study, to appreciate the finer points.’