For those who may have been a little dismayed by my previous questioning of such sacred absolutes of the Greek theatre as (1) the circular shape of the original orchestra, (2) the central placement of the altar, (3) the panoramic siting of Greek theatres, and (4) the dawn beginning of performance, please accept this assurance: the three-actor rule for tragedies is alive and well—and not presently refutable. I shall apply the three-actor rule to the extant tragedies in order to see what effect it had upon acting and production practices during the Classic period.

The ‘Generation of 1870’ produced some of Portugal's best writers. In the theatre, two plays effectively broke the mould of playwriting and ended an era of overly moralistic and simplistic drama. The two plays could not have been more different: Os Lazaristas was a virulent attack on the Church while Viagem à roda da Parvónia was a satire on the middle class.

Our players are not as the players beyond the sea, a sort of squirting baudie Comedians, that have Whores and common Curtizans to playe womens partes, and forbeare no immodest speech, or unchast action that may procure laughter, but our Sceane is more stately furnisht than ever it was in the time of Roscius, our representations honourable and full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun, a Whore and a Zanie, but of Emperours, Kings and Princes, whose true tragedies they do vaunt.

At the Theatre Historiography Symposium, held during the 1993 Helsinki IFTR/FIRT Conference, a specific term came into circulation which infiltrated and permeated the discussion to such an extent that it appeared to adopt the position and function of a key term in theatre historiography: ‘theatricality’. This was no great surprise, however. For the symposium set out to consider two basic issues: first, to examine the application of analytic strategies from other disciplines to theatre history and, secondly, to identify the distinctive features of theatre history as a single discipline. Both concerns are closely related to the concept of theatricality.

Strife, arguably John Galsworthy's best play, can most fruitfully be studied from four different perspectives: theatre history, textual history, dramatic analysis, and critical reception.

Given the omnipresence of performers of all political stripes speaking for a variety of causes and candidates, it is difficult to remember a time when artist-activists were not an integral part of America's theatrical landscape. Indeed, under David Douglass's leadership, the American Company (formerly the Hallam Company) assuaged Puritan fears about the presence of ‘theatricals’ in staid eighteenth-century New England by performing benefits for local causes, thereby injecting its work with a social purpose. Throughout its history the American theatre has used performance as a propaganda weapon for such causes as abolition (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), temperance (Ten Nights in a Bar Room, 1858), civil rights (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), and currently the AIDS crisis (Angels in America, 1993). Political activism in the American theatre flourished in the 1930s, largely through the work and ideology of such enterprises as the Group Theatre, the Theatre Union, even the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and similar left-wing movements that sought to produce plays that deal boldly with deep-going social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of people. The mission was realized mostly through traditional theatre means, i.e. plays or agit-prop dramas à la Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers. These have been chronicled in a number of useful surveys, most notably Gerald Rabkin's Drama and Commitment (1964), Sam Smiley's The Drama of Attack (1972), and especially Malcolm Goldstein's detailed look at the 1930s radical theatre, The Political Stage (1974).

The general opinion, voiced on instinct rather than conclusive evidence, has been that the Punch and Judy show came from Italy. The name Punch is clearly derived, via Punchinello (1667), Polichinello (1666), and Policinella (1664), from Pulcinella, the commedia dell'arte character who originated in Naples about 1600. Prints in abundance show a puppet performance, resembling Punch and Judy, in Naples, Rome and Venice in the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century. And one of the earliest, and perhaps the earliest Punch performer on the streets of London was an Italian, Piccini by name, whose show was immortalized by George Cruikshank's drawings and, to a lesser extent, by Payne Collier's edited text in 1828.

We are living at a time when we are particularly conscious of historical change and of the impermeability of institutions, political, social, intellectual, and educational. The old disciplinary structures that organized our Western educational system for so long seem to have accelerated from the slow and comfortable evolution which gave rise to, for example, the various social sciences and, indeed, our own discipline of theatre studies into a dizzying whirl of new inter and cross relationships that the stunning proliferation of centres, institutes, and special programmes reflects but by no means adequately represents. The world of intellectual discourse, within which theatre studies, historical studies, and for that matter the cognate fields toward which and from which analytical ideas of theatre and performance circulate, has become in the last quarter of a century extremely complex, and seems to offer an almost infinite variety of methodologies vying for critical attention. There are a number of concerns and assumptions that run consistently through a great deal of this varied discourse, however, and one of the most important of these has obviously also contributed significantly our sense of a conceptual world in flux. This is the wide circulation in modernist thought of historical and cultural relativism, the rejection of traditional essentialist beliefs in favour of an attitude that regards most human institutions as culturally generated and thus always changing or changeable through the continuing negotiations of cultural activity.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the dominance of language, so typical of Western culture since the Renaissance, was increasingly challenged. As early as 1876, Nietzsche wrote on Richard Wagner in Thoughts Out of Season:

He was the first to recognize an evil which is as widespread as civilization itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province— the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity—and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say, thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive confusion of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilization, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man can no longer make this misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go.

The disease of language which Nietzsche here diagnoses, can be described as a degeneration of language from the state of being a polyfunctional, ambiguous, flexible semiotic system that allows people to express their feelings, constitute their selves and communicate with each other, into a restrictive technical language.

It is my contention that Shakespeare intended his plays to be performed using only two doors for entrances and exits. In the rapid repertory system of the Globe, stage-management was essential, but there is evidence that it was not based on the arbitrary, mechanical rule-of-thumb previously suggested. Analysis of the entrance and exit patterns in Macbeth shows that there was an organizing system in force, but that it depended on, and in turn reinforced, the spatial logic of the play.

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)

A play, a film; one author, one dénouement: the die is cast, there is nothing more to be done. Huis clos (No Exit) ends with Garcin's disillusioned surrender: ‘Eh bien, continuons.’ In Les Jeux sont faits (The Chips are down) ‘lentement [les bras des deux protagonistes] retombent, ils se détournent et ils s'en vont, chacun de son côté’. Against all odds, Garcin, Inès, Estelle — in the play —, Pierre and Ève — in the film — fight in vain for a new life, only to capitulate when their failure becomes evident.

All artistic conventions of each theatrical era have two intertwining aspects: the aesthetic goals, and the technical crafts for achieving them. In some cases, a particular combination or development of skills results in a refinement of the art or the discovery of a newly desirable aesthetic; in others, the demand for new artistic effects leads to the invention of appropriate techniques. Thus, when painterly standards and drafting methods of central perspective spread rapidly over Northern Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, illusionistic spectacle became an indispensable element of theatrical performance. It was eagerly supplied by architects in whom the printing of Vitruvius's De Architectura (1486) awakened both the responsibility for and the challenge embodied in designing theatrical scenery. Conversely, as Elizabethan playwrights conceived of plots dependent on avoidance of meetings between certain exiting and entering characters, second and third entrances were provided—either by cutting into the tiring house wall, or by hanging a curtain with several slits in front of it, to accommodate stage traffic.

Theatre historians often turn to art history, not only for information about source images that can help with the speculative reconstruction of lost performances, but also for lessons in historiographic method. Historians from both disciplines have long shared the difficulties of ‘ekphrasis’, i.e. the translation of nondiscursive images into descriptions, and vice versa, as well as other vexing problems of general history like periodization, documentation of events, and so on. Unlike theatre history, art history has a recognized pantheon of interpreters, which has been subjected to overview studies like Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art as well as specific treatments of major critics and their influence, like Michael Ann Holly's work on Panofsky. Theoretical concerns about historiography, sometimes assumed by literary critics of ‘master narratives’ to be synonymous with postmodernism, developed somewhat earlier in art historical writing, which would appear to be an advantage.

Ma Pei is the protagonist in Blood-Stained Hands (Xie shou ji), adapted from Macbeth by the Shanghai Kunju Troupe (Shanghai Kunju Tuan). This production was first presented at China's first Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986, and came to Britain for the 1987 Edinburgh Festival and subsequently went on tour, to great acclaim, to Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and London. Its significance is marked not only by a fusion of Shakespearian characterization into stock Kunju character types, but also by its forcing changes on the Kunju stage.

Textual and performance innovation in twentieth-century Peking Opera is not new and the experiments by practitioners in Taiwan today demonstrate approaches that both reflect past attempts and contemporary variation. There has been resistance to change in the art form, however, because it was supposed to have reached perfection with Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), who, because of his artistic pre-eminence and international status, was able to introduce several daring innovations that revolutionized the medium without upsetting its parameters. Mei not only experimented by acting in contemporary non-traditional plays, but also within the Peking Opera tradition and was responsible for shifting the limelight away from that of the old man role (laosheng) to that of the young woman (dan), his own role. He and his playwright collaborator, Qi Rushan, wrote new style Peking Opera scripts that made best use of Mei's unique performing talents. Instead of the stylized costume evolved from Ming and Qing, dress, Mei would occasionally use historically accurate costumes from earlier dynasties. He introduced the use of classical dances and encouraged the inclusion of the eihu, the second, lower pitched fiddle into the accompanying orchestra.

In 1529 Agrippa von Nettesheim criticized the ‘futility and uncertainty’ of science. Indeed, the triumphant rise of European culture and science has always been accompanied by shadows of dissent. While, on the one hand, the rhapsodic shattering of reason was heavily criticized, on the other hand, equally sharp criticism was raised against the hermetic spirit of universal systems. The accepted authority of scientific knowledge was continually served a Lenten repast, and mighty edifices built on theory have bowed to the weight of doubt, crumbling into ruins of truths. The path which we call ‘progress’ is overlaid with traces of our own actions in the image of Sisyphus in Hades, who is condemned to push a huge boulder uphill. He is forever forced back to the beginning of his task, because of the perfidious nature of the stone.

The world in which the International Federation for Theatre Research first accepted the invitation from our Russian colleagues to hold its Twelfth World Congress in Moscow was a startlingly different one from that in which the Congress eventually took place: and Moscow itself had borne witness most dramatically to this transformation. Since its Eleventh World Congress, held in Stockholm in 1989, the IFTR has been coming to terms with a world in which much, including the boundaries and contents of its own discipline, has become subject to radical change. In a formal way, the adoption of a revised Constitution for the Federation is a recognition of the new world in which we are living: now the responsibility for furthering the aims of the Federation lies firmly in the democratic hands of subscribing Institutions and individual Members. More substantially, the process initiated in Stockholm of dividing Congress Sessions into Working Groups held together by a common interest, reflects the diversity of approaches which are now embraced under the title of Theatre Research, and the role which the Federation plays in bringing together scholars from a diversity of backgrounds, not only to meet colleagues from other countries working in the same field, but to obtain through keynote speeches and informal contacts in a crowded schedule of theatregoing, receptions and private encounters, a wider view of developments outside their immediate sphere of interest.