This article demonstrates the existence of a strong aesthetic kinship between the mise en scène of Robert Lepage and the representational mode of the classical Japanese rock garden. In order to elicit the creative participation of an active spectator, both use such Zen techniques as a radical reduction of scale, or shukukei (miniature landscape); minimalistic material metaphors, or mitate (metaphoric representation); and an asymmetrical, fragmented style, or fusuma-e (fragmented scene). Drawing on the theory and practice of Japanese rock gardening, this article introduces a new critical vocabulary for describing the representational logic, and enlightening effects, of Lepage's approach to ‘setting up stones’ on the stage in Seven Streams of the River Ota and other works.

The aims and ambitions of this article are initially fairly limited. I want to examine a series of events which occurred at the Comédie-Française in April and May of 1765, leading to a complete disruption of normal performances at the theatre, to the imprisonment of most of the company's leading actors, and to the temporary withdrawal from performance of what might otherwise have been eighteenth-century France's biggest ‘box-office hit’, Le Siège de Calais, a patriotic tragedy by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy. In themselves these events, sometimes known as l'affaire Dubois after the actor most directly involved in them, are little more than a bizarre and sporadically scurrilous footnote to the theatrical history of France in the eighteenth century. But the more one examines them, the more they illuminate certain rather murky areas of literary and social history, two areas in particular: firstly, the social relations of the acting profession at a time when it was, despite considerable pressure from numerous sources, still barred en bloc from the sacraments of the Catholic church; and secondly, the degree of autonomy which could be said to have existed for a company which was, legally, a kind of workers' co-operative but which, at any rate at that stage, operated within a rather ill-defined administrative limbo (it was simultaneously autonomous and totally subject to noble whim). The strike which brought about the cancellation of performances of Le siège de Calais in April 1765 is, then, a specific and in no way typical event, but one which draws together a number of historical strands – literary, theatrical, economic, moral and political – in a particularly interesting way. I want, in the course of this article, to deal with two questions – questions to which I do not really feel able to give definitive answers but which may, when examined, cast doubt upon one or two familiar preconceptions about the nature of the eighteenth-century theatre as a profession, and at the same time open up certain areas of enquiry with regard to the theatre as a material reality rather than a predominantly literary or artistic form. The questions are in themselves quite simple: why did the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française refuse, on Monday, 15th April 1765, to perform a play which, given its enormous success earlier in the year, it was very much in their economic interests to present? And why did the resulting situation become so irreducible that, far from the usual discreet pressures being brought to bear on the relevant authorities to resolve the dispute, it led to the imprisonment of three of the most popular ‘stars’ of the century, and to an effective lockout lasting for almost a month?

This article compares the two major figures of Chilean and South African theatre, in particular two intimate realist dramas onstage and onscreen in the 1970s and 1980s, when both countries were ruled by tyrannies tolerated by governments in the so-called free world. In Boesman and Lena and Hechos consumados the depiction of solidarity against the dispossession caused by ‘capitalist revolution’ in Pinochet's Chile or Afrikaner capitalism in apartheid South Africa still resonates today when the rhetoric of struggle appears compromised by the culture of consumption and when post-apartheid and post-dictatorship governments retreat from ‘suspended revolution’ in a world shaped not only in the global South but also in the affluent North by neo-liberal axioms of shrunken government and free markets for the rich against austerity for the poor.

In October 1997 the City of Buenos Aires hosted its first International Festival of theatre, music, dance, and the visual arts with performances by groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Latin American theorists, among them Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama, who have long considered such a transcultural event not as culturally transcendent but, rather, as culturally transformative, provide a frame for reading the Buenos Aires Festival as a site of transnational and transcultural operations. Particular focus is placed on the Festival's geopolitico-cultural project, constructed out of the complex relations of local, national, regional, and international politics and performance.

Performance studies and queer studies are two of the most significant paradigmatic shifts to energize the analysis of Irish theatre and performance in very recent times. The development of these critical approaches can be seen to respond to the growth of more experimental, performance-centred methods of making and interpreting practice, and the emergence of a wide range of identities within theatre and performance sites, and the Irish social and cultural landscape more generally.

This article examines catharsis in recent one-to-one performances I shared with UK-based artist Kira O'Reilly. Focusing on my inter-experience of My Mother (2003) and Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow (2005), I argue that both performances can be read as troubling and elucidating ideas about the presence, nature and affect of catharsis. I raise questions and reveal my responses to felt states such as risk, intimacy and confession, and draw on hysteria and Kristeva's concept of le vréel to articulate the embodied knowledge of my close encounters with O'Reilly's visceral body artworks. Ultimately I propose that O'Reilly's performance practice adopts cathartic strategies that activate aesthetic, formal and material kinds of feminist political responsibility in her performance ‘other’.

The Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress met in New York City over 4–10 June 1967 at the same time as the Arab–Israeli War was taking place. This context very much framed the delegates’ debates over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with the concept. The participants focused on three key questions: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. This article focuses first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.

This study explores the theme of carnivalesque homoeroticism in medieval decadent Cairo as portrayed by oculist and littérateur Ibn Dāniyāl in his third shadow play The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion. The playwright's satirical response to Sultan Baybars's campaign against vice in Egypt in the thirteenth century falls within the irreverent burlesque tradition. The article analyses the playwright's carnivalesque and satirical shadow play in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He related the carnivalesque – a burlesque dramatic genre aiming to secretively challenge and sabotage the social and political hierarchy of an autocratic regime through satirical obscenity and rhetoric – to the medieval carnivals and feasts of fools throughout Europe. Bawdy burlesque comedies were intended to provoke hilarious laughter by mockingly satirizing the despotic government's absurd subjugation of its citizens. The study shows how carnivalesque dialogic, long thought to be limited to medieval literature in Europe, found fertile soil in medieval Cairo. Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy Ṭayf al-Khayāl, which consists of The Shadow Spirit, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, and The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion, can unquestionably be studied in the context of Bakhtin's plebeian popular culture of laughter and the carnivalesque tradition.

In the Shakespearean theatre, the removal of dead bodies from the stage was a theatrical necessity, owing to the absence of a curtain between the stage and the auditorium. Despite the many non-realistic conventions accepted in the theatre, the disposal of corpses had to be carried out in such a way as not to disrupt the reality of the fictional world. An analysis of certain kinds of intriguing situations, such as suicide scenes, reveals how efficiently Shakespeare and his contemporaries utilized the stage hangings, the upper gallery, and the stage trap so as to avoid the necessity of bringing on bearers for the corpses at the ends of the scenes. Only at the end of the play, when the logic of the fictional world stops functioning, could the spectacle of a corpse getting up and leaving the stage have been accepted by the audience.

The work of Palestinian playwright Fateh Samih Azzam arises from his experience growing up as a refugee and from his strong commitment to human rights. His latest play, Baggage, is set in a crowded airport where a lone Traveler re-enacts the Catastrophe of 1948 and its consequences. This article begins by positioning Azzam's work in relation to post-1948 Palestinian theatre. It then looks in detail at how Baggage, written as a monodrama, incorporates a number of devices including airport announcements and other voiceovers to imbue monologue with dialogue. The question of the relationship between monologue and dialogue is examined in the context of the emergence of the ‘political’ in performance and especially in relation to Jon Erickson's recent contention that dialogues facilitate the representation of conflicting world views whereas monologues tend to be ‘vehicles for the overarching world view of the playwright’. Next, it discusses a recent staging of Baggage in Famagusta, North Cyprus, focusing in particular on the way in which the production was able to embellish and extend devices contained in the written text of the play to facilitate a movement from monologue to dialogue. In its conclusion, the article returns to the prevalence of monologue in Palestinian drama and to Erickson's idea that monologue involves partiality to one side of a dispute. The article contends that productions of Baggage, which, like the one in Famagusta, accentuate the dialogical, will make it clear that the play is not just a memory play for Palestinians, but that it also cries out for all those forced out of their homes and into what Edward Saïd has called ‘the trauma of exile’. Furthermore, it argues that the Traveler's monologues need to be heard and should initiate dialogues, which in some parts of the world have not yet even begun. Finally, it suggests that the universal appeal of this and other Palestinian plays could be even more striking were the heavy use of politically oriented symbolism counterbalanced by a more minimalist Beckett-like aestheticism.

A shibboleth has grown up around the work of Edward Bond. The tag ‘controversial dramatist’ has continued to dog both the man and his work. This article will hope to explore some of the contradictory, and sometimes frustrating manifestations that such ‘celebrity’ has produced. Since the reception of The War Plays [1985] by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theatre Bond has largely withdrawn his work from mainstream British theatre. Since the late 1990s he has looked to a new home – La Colline Theatre – in France, to premiere new work and run retrospective seasons of older plays. Here, Bond's celebrity is of a different kind, and has allowed him to enhance and develop his work as a playwright, director and writer about theatre. While this article draws on secondary sources it also uses material based on personal correspondence with Edward Bond.

Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place (February 2011) by Muhammad ‘Azīz (1955–) documents how Egyptian youth played a leading role in coordinating and organizing the 25 January 2011 revolution through social media networking and how the battle fought at Tahrir Square exemplifies genuine human networking. ‘Azīz's play constructs its social and historical grounding as a fabulous mix between the real, the fictional and the virtual. It reimagines the possibilities of political theatre in the context of postmodern virtuality. This study explores how realism can incorporate other worlds as a way of rethinking theatre and politics in a richly multicultural, post-revolutionary Egypt. It illuminates Egyptians’ complexities, where individualities are reinforced against an oppressive regime. This analysis focuses on the dynamics of space and resistance, as multiple selves move from individualistic, alienated spaces towards connection through the space of resistance and shared political activity.

It was as a branch of ‘genetic criticism’ that a genetics of the theatre first established itself in France as a scientific field of study. Applied to literature alone in the first place, it has since then gradually widened its scope of investigation. Taking Marguerite Duras's first play, Le Square (1956) as an example, this essay aims to demonstrate the main effects of such a disciplinary gestation on the ‘French’ approach to the creative processes as regards the theatre. On the one hand, the existence of well-tried methodological procedures for the study of manuscripts permits both a dynamic re-examination of dramatic works and a criticism of the myths which often surround them. On the other, apprehending the different textual materials and the other kinds of genetic documents produced around the stage according to a methodologically coherent manner reveals the constant interdependence of techniques and arts, and the need to improve models constructed for altogether different studies.