What does the #MeToo movement reveal about how acting is understood at the present time, both in practice and by the public at large? The claim of one convicted abuser, New Zealand acting coach Rene Naufahu, was that his sexual offending in the classroom was simply preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’. Drawing from Elin Diamond's argument that dramatic realism does not simply reflect the real but in fact produces it, I examine how figures like Naufahu promulgate certain notions of acting in order to produce a reality that legitimates abusive behaviour. Furthermore, I suggest that this behaviour is often a performance of acting itself whereby the actor, director or coach, in a selectively self-reflexive manner, exploits their professional ‘role’ in order to exert power over their victim. I argue that one way of contesting real-world practices that rely on hegemonic assumptions of what acting is or should be is to redeploy the critical terminology of acting to analyse and expose such abuses for the acts that they are.

German American theatre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City became a model for both a national American theatre and other diasporic theatres in the US. This theatre aspired to an autonomous, class-free, universal culture, which was seen as the legacy of a German Enlightenment tradition epitomized by Schiller's national(izing) theatre. German Americans were thus exceptionally positioned to claim the ideology of a universal culture as a national characteristic. At the same time, however, the theatre was structured by market demands and the need to appeal to a diverse German American constituency. This oscillation between idealistic and commercial culture made the German American theatre attractive. In the end, the theatre not only helped legitimize New York City's cultural periphery, but became a model when a new American ‘national’ culture, the national theatre, was being imagined, which ultimately illustrates the importance of the concept of legitimacy for hybrid public cultures.

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.

Bangkok, Singapore, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg – some thirty performers of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatrical Troupe toured the world in 1900. Daily newspapers enthusiastically reported on the unprecedented shows of the performers ‘from the land of the white elephant’. After they disappeared from the map of theatre history, in 2010 Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun ‘revives’ the troupe in his performance Nijinsky Siam. He follows their October 1900 St Petersburg show – the very performance attended by choreographer Mikhail Fokine and costume designer Léon Bakst, who later worked closely with Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1910, Nijinsky's La danse siamoise/Siamese Dance premiered at the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. This article follows the routes of the Boosra Mahin Troupe on the basis of selected primary sources and from a global-historical perspective. In tracing the Boosra Mahin Troupe and their tours, the article not only maps their manifold routings and reroutings, but also advocates for the need for a global theatre historiography that puts past cultural entanglements and connected performance histories centre stage.

The recent performance work, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, directed by Romeo Castellucci for his company, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, explores the ‘crisis of creation’, brought on by the scientific revolutions of genetics and nuclear physics and the cultural atrocity of the Holocaust. Genesi is analysed against Eduardo Kac's art installation, Genesis, which combines advanced media for telepresent interactivity and genetic engineering. Genesi and Genesis relate not only in the cultural concerns of science and technology studies, but in their interdisciplinary strategies, which include combining aspects of theatre, visual art, sculpture, and technology. Castellucci and Kac engage the risks inherent in the destruction possible through creation (both aesthetic and scientific) and isolate manners in which contemporary constructions of the human are challenged. The works signal an awareness of the constantly shifting boundaries and borders of aesthetic genres and the developing convergence of the disciplines of science and art.

The challenge and the excitement of expanding both the focus of our research and the field of our praxis beyond Theatre (or Film, Pop or Video) to Performance is to identify phenomena which transcend one medium and may enable us to know something about acting as such, spectating as such and thus ‘being’ as such: performance, not as a second-hand version of some more primary reality, but as a ‘realm’ in its own right.

Skylight Theatre's productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Earl Bales Park in Toronto (1987 and 1989) situated Prospero on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, set the action during the late eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook—the period of the area's colonization—and cast Ariel and Caliban as Haida Indians, Canadian Aboriginal people.

It is an hysterical and unpleasant affair and would have no chance of being produced here it if had been written by an Englishman. To some soi-disant ‘intellectuals’ anything foreign is good. (Lord Chamberlain's Report on Toller's Mass Man, 1924)

Early modern mountebanks, also known as charlatans or quacksalvers, were commercial travelling showmen associated with the sale of quack medicines and other products. They achieved wide recognition as a significant influence on the rise of professional acting, through their employment of performers to attract customers for their wares, and are frequently discussed in the context of early professional popular entertainment. Many depictions of mountebanks include commedia dell'aite costumes, but it has remained an open question whether some of their shows (as well as some of their costumes) fall within the sphere of the commedia dell'arte. Inconclusive evidence is presented by the relatively few studies which incline towards accepting a significant overlap between mountebank activity and the commedia dell'arte and clear-cut distinctions are routinely made between the repertoire of street performers, and that of the comici d'arte. Richards and Richards concede that ‘mountebank stages … may well have been the breeding grounds of many of the first regular actors’, but repeatedly emphasize the distinction ‘between performers of the trestle and those of the stage’, and are careful to dismiss mountebank stage routines as at the most ‘short playlets’. If the presently perceived lack of detailed documentation concerning mountebank entertainment is justified, then so is the cautious approach typified by Richards and Richards. On the evidence presented to date, it would appear that mountebank performances are at most distantly related to the commedia dell'arte.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov (1879–1953) has never been accorded his due credit as one of the most original thinkers and practitioners of modern European theatre. The absence of a rigorous and extensive appraisal of Evreinov's vast creative output has undoubtedly blinded otherwise well-informed critics to the seminal importance of his ideas on the essence of theatre. While names like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Strindberg, Piscator, Brecht, Artaud, Craig, Appia, Reinhardt, Pirandello and even the lesser known Russians, Vakhtangov and Tairov have all become by-words in the history of experimental and innovative theatre, Evreinov has remained a shadowy figure.

A consideration of identity formation in contemporary Australian multicultural theatre is offered through a re-assessment of the unsettled (and unsettling) constructions of Australia as ‘home’ in the work of three playwrights. William Yang's Sadness disrupts a localized perception of home, space, and cultural communities to amalgamate two disparate communities (the queer/homosexual community in Sydney and the Asian-Australian, or ‘Austasian’ community) into a reconfigured Australian identity. Janis Balodis's The Ghosts Trilogy uses many actors who play across the unsettled lines of history, amid numerous voices, homes, and homelands that indicate the enormity of what ‘Australia’ comes to signify. Noëlle Janaczewska's The History of Water constructs a way of locating the self by means of a metaphoric home as each character establishes herself on a psychic plane rather than choosing the strictly physical locations to which she has access. In their interrogations of home and homeland, these plays challenge assumptions regarding identity, disrupt notions of the ultimate ownership of land/culture by anyone, and problematize the idea of settlement as it is currently articulated in Australia.

This essay creates a theoretical frame interweaving Jill Dolan's concept of ‘finding hope at the theatre’ with Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ to argue that spectators’ affective responses to performed violence in live theatre include hope and imagining social change. I draw upon my own active witnessing of theatrical performances of two works – Ruined by Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American Lynn Nottage, and Encounter by the Indian-American Navarasa Dance Theater Company. Along with Dolan and Foucault, I draw upon affect scholarship by James Thompson and Patricia T. Clough, and upon theorist Saidiya V. Hartman's discussion of slavery that makes the human into an abject ‘non-human’. Continuing forms of female enslavement and resistances to domination are evident in the representations of sexual slavery in the two works.

Omri Nitzan's direction of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters at the Israeli National Theatre Habimah in 1993 was one of the most ingenious and locally-bound contemporizations of a classical play that I have ever seen, as well as one of the most dependent on a correlatively attuned recipient. Nitzan sets out from the viewpoint that Goldoni's comedy of errors, derived from the commedia dell'arte and negating it, is not a stylized refined and exclusively theatrical pastime, set in the never-never locus of a glamorous stage Venice, as implied by Strehler's famous precedent, but is rather a kind of socially critical and realistically inclined play, ‘dealing with crime, class-distinctions and the capitalist structure of society’. ‘As I repeatedly read the play’–maintains Nitzan–‘I felt myself attracted to its human tale. I have seen suffering, miserable characters, relentlessly striving for unattainable happiness. There are three suicide attempts in the play […], which sometimes seems like a nightmare.’ Nitzan's production is set in a derelict square, a cross between a contemporary shabby Italian piazza and the backyard of a ramshackle, old Bauhaus building in a Tel Aviv suburban slum. The set of enclosing walls, lit by harsh Mediterranean lighting, and its multiple doors including a revolving one, vaguely alludes to the traditional setting of a farce. However, this impression is contradicted by the very theatrical and yet lifelike signs of depravity, instability and aggression: the thin paper walls, which are punctured and vandalized throughout the performance, are smeared with hostile graffiti expressing the pent-up feelings of its emotionally mute inhabitants. Heaps of trash lie scattered. The performance does not start with Clarice's engagement to Silvio, but with an invented mimed scene of Federigo Rasponi's murder by his sister Beatrice's lover, Florindo Artusi, performed to flickering disco lighting and accompanied by the shrill music of a Gothic horror melodrama. The actors speak a brilliantly processed vulgar slang; their body language is erratic and violent, including in the love scenes; these are lovers who swiftly resort to blows or pull out knives with long blades resembling shabarias, the weapon of Palestinian terrorists in 1993. Truffaldino wears the stained blue overall of a delivery boy, with an empty money pouch, typical of many such lads seen driving third-hand scooters in the streets of Tel Aviv. He is no smart comedy servant, but a hungry, humiliated and bitter unemployed youngster, although some remnants of the traditionally stooped posture are still vaguely in evidence. The archetypal attributes of the commedia masks are also belied by the performance of other characters such as Pantalone, who appears here as a small-time Levantine merchant, clad in a cheap suit, an unlit cigarette butt between his lips, bragging with his car keys in the typical macho gesture of working-class Israeli males.

This article examines the flash mob dance Glow by the Afro-Norwegian duo Madcon, which was performed at the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo, Norway, in 2010. The dance was modelled on the format of popular Wii dance games, and coordinated black and white dancers, families, mass publics and prerecorded and live footage in order to choreograph European ‘unity in diversity’. The use of black dancers as avatars urging dancing crowds towards greater kinaesthetic sensitivity raises the questions of how race is figured in neo-liberal visions of cosmopolitan Europe, and what role gaming technology plays in facilitating cross-racial empathy and ethical responsiveness at a time when solidarity is fraying as a consequence of fiscal crises and austerity measures. Finally, the article considers Afro-European academic, activist and artistic practices as alternatives to neo-liberal regimes of race.

Mexico's popular theatre is a multi-faceted ancient art whose roots extend deep into pre-Hispanic cultures, as well as into the popular dramatic tradition of Spain. Today, nearly five centuries after the arrival of the Spaniards, popular theatre continues to be a phenomenon both of urban and rural Mexico, reflecting the rich gamut of cultural and historical characteristics found throughout this vast geographic and ethnic patchwork. While a wide range of distinctive qualities exist across the broad spectrum of popular theatre, formal differences give way – through careful observation and analysis – to the perception of an underlying unity of purpose which supports all popular theatre: addressing the spiritual and material needs of the common people.

A small, anonymous grisaille(Figure 1)from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is among the more familiar images of seventeenth-century French theatre history. It depicts Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII, and other members of the royal family at the theatre. The setting for the scene is the Grande Salle of Richelieu's Parisian home, the Palais Cardinal. Designed by the palace architect Jacques Lemercier and completed in 1641, this theatre was among the first purpose-built proscenium theatres in France. In the 1660s it became the site of the public performances of Molière's most successful plays; after the playwright's death, it housed the Paris Opéra until a fire destroyed it in 1763.

If by successful is meant widely performed, the most successful playwright in the English theatre between T. W. Robertson in the 1860s and A. W. Pinero in the 1890s was a Frenchman, Victorien Sardou. This apparent paradox can be elucidated not only by the list of English adaptations of Sardou which concludes this survey, but by noting some of the leading English actors who appeared in Sardou. They include Irving (Madame Sons-Gêne, Robespierre, Dante); the Bancrofts (Nos Intimes, Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy, Odette, Fédora); the Kendals (Les Pattes de Mouche, Nos Intimes, Dora, Maison Neuve); Wyndham (Rabagas, La Papillonne); Hare (Les Pattes de Mouche, Dora, La Tosca); Tree (Fédora); Forbes-Robertson (Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy); Hawtrey (Divorçons!); Bourchier (Divorçons!); Du Maurier (Dora). The admission to the list of such leading ladies as Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Modjeska, Elizabeth Robins, and Gladys Cooper would extend it further.

When scholars of any nation become so proud of their mastery of alien concepts that they forget or suppress their own cultural identity, they willingly succumb to ‘theoretical imperialism’. The flip side is the arrogant and wholesale imposition by Western scholars of theories created in the crucible of one culture on other cultures, subcultures or historical eras with divergent philosophical foundations. This article introduces several key Japanese critical theories that modify or fuse Japanese and Western psychoanalytic and aesthetic concepts, arguing that they can be fruitfully applied by theatre and performance scholars to works originating either in Japan or elsewhere. The article proposes a ‘both/and’ perspective that respects cultural differences without exoticizing the Other.

This essay examines the US tours (2007–13) of Black Watch, a docudrama about the eponymous military unit, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). I argue that the production manifests a ‘banal theatrical nationalism’ when theatrical national signifiers meet quotidian acts of soldiering and the mundane labour required to remount the production at each tour venue. I focus attention on the regimental history recounted through ‘Fashion’, the play's central military uniform dressing sequence, and introduce into my analysis a New York City fashion show, Dressed to Kilt, to interrogate the stakes of fashion, cultural production and visibility. Black Watch materializes what I am calling a ‘Scottish operative’ that acts on behalf of the NTS in securing international attention and potential investment. In order to query the sociopolitical stakes of this production's US success, I identify political, cultural and military links between the US and Scotland.

This article offers a dramaturg's perspective on the day-to-day rehearsal activities of the director Peter Sellars as he prepared his highly controversial production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 1994. Because Sellars had conceptualized his production well before his arrival in Chicago, and because he was inaccessible prior to the first rehearsal, the usual pre-production collaboration could not take place. On one level the article is about the dramaturg being thrust into the thick of an unusual process and finding his role(s) along the way: as enquiring interlocutor asking questions to clarify the proceedings for self and for the audience, another as documenter. Sellars readily agreed that any other person's perceptions of his process are different from his own. My purpose here is to offer a dramaturg's-eye view of the working methods of one of contemporary theatre's most iconoclastic and innovative directors, along with some critical reflections on the process.