In the summer of 1671, after the court had left London and after his performance as Ladislaus in John Crowne's Juliana – a play thwarted, as the preface declared, by the fact that ‘the Dog-Star was near his Reign’ – Thomas Betterton made his way with Joseph Haines to Paris. What they, and particularly what Betterton, saw there helped to determine the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre which was then under construction, and which would open in November that year. When we compare what was happening on the French stage during and immediately after Betterton's visit with what we know of the Dorset Garden Theatre, however, it becomes clear that Betterton's experience was to have an effect on the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre not immediately, but in the years that followed its opening, and that the single most influential work was not one that Betterton saw on his visit to France in 1671, but one which was first performed two years later.

George Bernard Shaw reviewed three of Augustin Daly's Shakespeare productions in the course of his stint as theatre critic of The Saturday Review, and wrote briefly on another when he was the music critic of The World. At the beginning of the last of these notices, describing As You Like It in 1897 and Ada Rehan's performance in it, Shaw wrote: ‘I never see Miss Ada Rehan act without burning to present Mr Augustin Daly with a delightful villa in Saint Helena.’ Listing some of the production's errors produced a more sombre threat:

To think that Mr Daly will die in his bed, whilst innocent presidents of republics, who never harmed an immortal bard, are falling on all sides under the knives of well-intentioned reformers whose only crime is that they assassinate the wrong people! And yet let me be magnanimous. I confess I would not like to see Mr Daly assassinated. Saint Helena would satisfy me. (ShSh, 44) Readers of Shaw's reviews, especially those who encounter them only through Edwin Wilson's selection in Shaw on Shakespeare, will only know Augustin Daly's productions as seen by Shaw. But these critiques were part of a campaign on behalf of Shaw's aims for the theatre, and, specifically, a ‘wooing’ of Ada Rehan for the Shavian drama.

This article asks how it is that performances of the work of the most important playwright in Israel – Hanoch Levin – fill auditoria, despite the fact that these plays are considered to be unpleasant, irritating and even repulsive. I investigate the position of Levin's theatre with regard to audience response, and demonstrate how he arouses both conscious intellectual and emotional responses in his audience. The article seeks thereby to identify the sources of pleasure in Levin's theatre. It is apparent that Levin has no wish to send his audience home cleansed and contented. Neither is he interested in providing intellectual affirmation of the world's rationality, regularity and order. Rather than balance, harmony and external affirmation, Levin's plays offer a kind of pleasure bordering on what Roland Barthes calls jouissance, resulting in a new kind of catharsis in his audience.

Burmese-Australian choreographer/performer Rakini Devi is informed by her diverse skills in the areas of classical Indian dance, visual arts and contemporary performance practice. She uses these skills as well as her satirical wit and storytelling abilities to create an intricate portrait of the lived experiences of a contemporary diasporic subject. This is a portrait that is not only aesthetically stimulating but also politically inflected and provocative at the same time. Through her work Devi encourages us to remember that diaspora is more than a theoretical trope, that it is a complex and often contradictory experience which results in joy as well as pain as it is played out on live bodies.

Since it was restored to the English theatre during the 1930s, Volpone has enjoyed a unique currency amongst Ben Jonson's works; it has had a more consistent and successful performance history than any other of his plays. Although its beast fable scheme has apparently rendered it more immediately accessible (and allegedly more universal) than the author's humours comedies, it has also provoked responses of ambivalence and unease, in that its coupling of the animal and the human actively unsettles the ethical relations between nature, culture, economics and morality that the allegory ostensibly intends to clarify. In performance, the play has given rise to a critical discourse of vituperation, deviance and excess which reflects the tensions and contradictions endemic to the cultural vocabulary of anthropomorphism. Theatre practice has dealt with the play's problems and provocations by incorporating the image of the animal into an inclusive, consensual and predominantly realist mode of characterization and mise en scène. A notable exception was in 1968, when Tyrone Guthrie directed a production for the National Theatre at the Old Vic which literalized animal identities to the point of excess. The result was a radically contradictory rethinking of the play, and of the performance vocabularies which have been, and can be, deployed to animate it.

This article explores the relation between body and voice in the performance of a contemporary opera, Ficarra and Whittington's The Empress's Feet, based on a Chinese tale relating the origin of the practice of foot binding. The tale relates the ancient practice to cure a queen from bouts of sleepwalking that afflicted her. I initially explore the opera's complex formal structure, its central themes and the way it transforms the original tale. I will then develop some of the significant aspects, imaginary as well as factual, of both the practice of foot binding and the phenomenon of sleepwalking. I suggest that the opera not only relates itself thematically to the tale and through it to the practice of foot binding, but also suggests a further parallel between foot binding and a form of bodily mutilation that is associated with the development of the medium of opera in the West, namely the phenomenon of the castrato. The threefold consideration of foot binding, sleepwalking and the voice of the castrato will serve to reveal a moment of liberation, at the heart of the opera – call it the agency or voice given to the feet ‘unbound’. I will conclude with an account of a production of The Empress's Feet which I directed in 2014, based on the interpretation suggested in this article.

During the 1920s and 30s, several left-wing theatre movements developed in Britain, committed to creating a political discourse in venues and forms unknown within the existing cultural mainstream. Such organizations as The Workers′ Theatre Movement, Unity Theatre and Theatre of Action were all–to a greater or lesser extent–resolutely oppositional to the Establishment and outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship. In the early 40s the situation changed, as individuals and theatrical forms previously associated with the Left were adopted by the Establishment, most notably through ENSA and the BBC.

The MS of Oscar Wilde's A Wife's Tragedy belonging to the Clark Library comprises 28 unbound foolscape sheets, including one partial sheet, all of which are feint ruled except for one (20 A) which is plain. There is an additional small quarto sheet of plain correspondence paper with the watermark ‘Silver Linen’. Wilde provides no continuous pagination (and litte pagination of any kind), so I have numbered the sheets according to what I consider their most likely and satisfactory continuity, denoting the two sides of each sheet by A and B. The single quarto sheet, bearing merely an incomplete title, ‘Wife's Tragedy’, is not included in this sequence of pagination.

This essay sets out to ask in what ways it might be critically productive to come back to the maternal as a subject for feminism. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's desire to ‘loosen’ the antiessentialist drive to get ‘beyond’ gender, and her consideration in this respect of a non-dualistic idea of ‘beside’, I locate my analysis in three performances, examined ‘beside’ each other. Each of these performances is a solo show: Anna Yen's Chinese Take Away (1997), SuAndi's The Story of M (1994) and Kazuko Hohki's Toothless (1998). Moreover, each solo is located in different inter-national, maternal geographies: Asian/Australian (Yen), black British (SuAndi) and Japanese/British (Hohki), and each performs the loss of the mother by the daughter. Working also with Judith Butler's proposal that grief and loss afford a political, transformative means of ‘becoming undone’, I ‘read’ these three international geographies of the maternal side by side as different from each other, but all connected to the critical project of rethinking the maternal.

The archaeological digs at the sites of the Rose and Globe theatres have given us a fund of new information about the theatres, and not least about the composition of their central, open yards. Those of us who took part in the campaign to protect the Rose from the great caterpillar-tracked machines that loomed over it in May 1989 will remember the surprisingly pristine look of its mortar yard, smashed through to be sure by the concrete piles of the 1950s office block that had by then been removed, and damaged around its perimeters by Elizabethan erosion of one sort or another. Yet much of it still looked clean and smooth after its four centuries of watery slumber. One day it was thrown open to an invited audience of celebrities, and bystanders could watch as Dustin Hofman—then playing The Merchant of Venice at the Phoenix—trod where the groundlings had stood long ago, or as Judi Dench—not yet a Dame—picked her way across the yard, her narrow heels apparently doing no damage at all.

Although more has been written on the commedia dell'arte than on any other type of theatre, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, and opinions concerning its origins, early history, and definition are surprisingly divergent. It is evident that the term ‘commedia dell'arte’ would become virtually meaningless if it were stretched to include, without qualification, all manifestations of theatrical entertainment which feature characters representing, or deriving from, its stock types; or the full range of theatrical practises offered by the very versatile early comici d'arte, although all are of concern to commedia studies. The commedia dell'arte itself may be broadly defined as a type of professional dramatic performance associated with distinctive stock characters, that arose in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, whose evolving cultural derivatives have spread throughout Europe. Its stock types drew on a wide variety of sources, including mystery and mummers’ plays, carnival masks, street theatre and court entertainment; popular farces and erudite comedy; and have transcended the theatre to play key roles in music, dance, art and literature. The extreme complexity of its continuing interchanges with other cultural phenomena makes precise definition of the commedia dell'arte elusive, and the term itself also resists easy definition because it was coined only in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, two centuries after the type of theatre with which it is associated first came into being.

Alfonso Reyes's Ifigenia cruel has long been recognized as a personal hymn of liberation, which adapts Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris to the convulsed Mexican shore of the early twentieth century. The dramatic poem Ifigenia cruel by Alfonso Reyes was first performed in Mexico in 1934. The next documented performance, by the company Teatro de Ensayo Escena and directed by Aitor Goiricelaya, took place at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica in April 1958 − during Franco's regime. The purpose of this article is to put the 1958 production on the map of performances of Reyes's dramatic poem, and thus to fulfil a research niche regarding the scholarly work on this poem, which has traditionally focused on its historical context and literary legacy. Drawing on the Spanish political history of the period, the article reveals a performance history of Ifigenia cruel, which is essential for its reception.

11 May 2003. As I was preparing to write the Editorial for this, my last issue as Senior Editor, three seemingly unrelated incidents of transnational significance impinged on my consciousness. First, a Nigerian woman asylum-seker in Ireland was granted a stay of deportation, a direct challenge to a ministerial change in the Irish constitution which now decrees that foreign-national mothers of Irish-born children no longer have any residency rights. Her choice is stark, like that of Grusha in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle: she can either take her child back to Nigeria with her, or (since the child is an Irish citizen) leave him behind in an orphanage. No sooner had I read of this woman's plight than I discovered the case of four Kosovan Albanian asylum-seekers in the UK who had fled as much for reason of persecution of their homosexuality as an escape from ethnic fighting, but who ended up, because of their statelessness and immigrational illegitimacy, being forced to prostitute that same sexuality in order to pay off their unscrupulous traffickers. And then at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport's railway station I watched in despair as a Romanian woman risked her life to retrieve a €1 coin from the tracks, dropped inadvertently by an American tourist moments earlier.

On 29 August 1636, King Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, paid a royal visit to the University of Oxford at the invitation of Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University. They lodged in Christ Church, a royal foundation and the largest of the Oxford colleges, which was to become the seat of their court during the Civil War. During the two days they spent in Oxford on this occasion, the King and Queen and their entourage were entertained with three plays: William Strode's The Floating Island, in Christ Church hall on the night of 29 August; George Wilde's Love's Hospital, in St. John's College hall on the afternoon of 30 August; and William Cartwright's The Royal Slave, again in Christ Church hall on the night of 30 August.

Playacting in public has been considered suspect since the day Solon stepped backstage to ask whether Thespis felt ashamed to tell so many lies to such a great number of people. From the very beginning, there were recognizable dangers not only for the audience but also for the actors themselves. And every possible attempt was made to point out those dangers and to obviate them. In the Republic, Plato warned against imitating anything except pure virtue. Especially dangerous, in his opinion, was the imitation of a woman, ‘old or young, railing against her husband, or boasting of a happiness which she imagines can rival the gods', or overwhelmed with grief and misfortune; much less a woman in love, or sick, or in labour.’ Plato, and a long line of writers who followed, condemned such imitation, contending that the imitator could all too easily become what he imitated. In the Ion, Plato discussed the divine frenzy that overcame the actor and made him momentarily insane or unable to distinguish truth from illusion.

For about 130 years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spectators sat on the stage in Paris public theatres. In Molière's theatre only 32 spectators were permitted on stage. However, by the mideighteenth century, before the practice was discontinued, there were often more than 200 persons behind the curtain of the Comedie Française, sitting on benches or standing around at the back of the stage. This contingent of spectators was exclusively male – a collection of foppish petty nobility who found the stage an excellent vantage point from which to ogle and be ogled.

John Kani's Nothing But the Truth (2002) dramatizes South Africa's collective confrontation with its traumatic past – played out on the public stage most visibly in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings – through the personal situation of Sipho Makhaya and his family. This essay analyses the obstacles Sipho and his daughter face in their attempts to negotiate new identities within the shifting social and physical geographies of post-apartheid South Africa. Identities in the apartheid era were rooted in specific places and socio-spatial configurations that are now being radically and rapidly transformed; Kani's play implies that this transitional moment in the country's history provides the opportunity to rewrite the codes that determine the ways that space is produced and used, and in the process to alter the ways that people form identities and memories in relation to both social space and other people.

This essay examines the theoretical and practical implications of performance as a utopian gesture, particularly with regard to postcolonial drama. Analyzing Manjula Padmanabhan's futuristic play, Harvest, as a case study, I argue that ‘utopia’ is a crucial critical concept for postcolonial dramatic practice because it stands for the collision and convergence of aesthetic and political interests, using the body itself as a site for representation and resistance. The play explores the extreme outcome of the international trade in human organs as a metaphor for neocolonialism and the constraints of postcolonial societies rent apart by economic inequalities. In this, it presents a moment of personal moral reckoning as a paradigmatic marker for an entire culture's confrontation with its utopian desires and their consequences. Harvest reflects the utopian impulse of modern drama masked by dystopic expression: it demands a differently imagined and shaped future, even as it chronicles the collapse of utopian visions in absolutist excess.

This article examines an early example of martial arts performance in Australia occasioned by the tour of – purportedly – the first team of sumo wrestlers to leave Japan. By examining the performances and reception of the Japanese sumo wrestlers against the backdrop of international political relations, which included the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, this study contributes to our understanding of the transnational circulation of the martial arts on popular stages, and to our understanding of the circus as a politically dynamic site that nurtured performative transnational encounters. The case of the sumo wrestlers reveals, furthermore, ways in which the popular stage of the circus worked to undermine negative racial stereotypes prevalent in Australia's homeland culture.