The first performance of Sarah Kane's Blasted in 1995 is already widely regarded as a landmark in the history of contemporary theatre in England, singled out for the same reason that Edward Bond's 1965 Saved and Howard Brenton's 1980 The Romans in Britain achieved notoriety. Blasted belongs in this genealogy of English plays in that all drew attention to themselves with instances of raw violence represented onstage and contextualized within situations of scathing social criticism. Saved contains an infamous scene in which the apathy of a group of dispossessed urban youths leads them to the casual stoning to death of a baby in its pram, and in The Romans in Britain a young Celtic seer is raped onstage by a Roman centurion. In both cases, these instances of visual shock became decontextualized and held up to the public eye, a disassembling of the part from the whole, which constituted an act of interpretive violence perpetuated against the dramas themselves. The violence in Blasted was similarly decontextualized and sensationalized in the British press. Yet in contrast to Bond and Brenton, Kane's brief body of work quickly received sober reevaluations on the part of previously hostile theatre critics, largely as a result of her suicide in February 1999 at the age of twenty-eight. While Kane had always had supporters among theatre workers, including Edward Bond, who had appreciated the strength of her work from the outset, Blasted is now also praised as a major work of theatre by critics who were previously happy to mock the play and vilify its author.

When John Hodgkinson made his American debut at Philadelphia's Southwark Theatre on 26 September 1792, he was hailed as “superior to any other actor” who had yet appeared in the United States. For some ten years thereafter, Hodgkinson remained the unrivalled leading performer of the Old American Company in all the principal theatrical centers in America. In New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, the actor and his wife, Frances Brett Hodgkinson, dominated the bills of the troupe managed initially by Lewis Hallam and John Henry. They eventually became, in 1800, the highest paid performers in American stage history up to that time. (Hodgkinson received $70 weekly, his wife, $50. In comparison, Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, whose combined salary was second highest, received $50.)

In this paper we will focus on the Hallams, major originators and sustainers of the eighteenth-century American theatre. We have not attempted to write their biographies, only to present new information that can provide answers to long-standing questions and suggest alternatives to earlier assumptions. Among other things, we present the case for George Hallam, not Thomas, being the father of the line of actors; we have established the probable paternity for Nancy Hallam; we have discovered the wills of both William Hallam and Lewis Hallam II; we have more fully identified Lewis II's first wife, Sarah Perry; and we have found new information concerning his second wife, Eliza Tuke.

John Joseph Holland, one of the most prominent scene painters of the early American theatre, was born in England about 1776 and apprenticed at the age of nine to Gaetano Marinari, chief artist at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. “For upwards of forty years,” George Raymond recalled, Marinari “was accounted one of the first scene painters in Europe.” He trained Holland in scene painting and architecture, and the young artist taught himself landscape painting in watercolors. Soon after his apprenticeship was over, Holland went to Convent Garden, where he was employed from August, 1794, to February, 1795, but he later returned to the King's Theatre, where Thomas Wignell found him in 1796 and engaged him for the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.

During the late Middle Ages and until after the middle of the sixteenth century, outdoor production of the British drama took place, in general, in three different kinds of temporary theatre. These are the theatre of a circular platea or Place surrounded by “scaffolds”; the theatre of pageant-wagons each performing part of a scriptural cycle at successive “stops” throughout a town or city; and the theatre of a booth stage set up in a marketplace or on a village green. In recent years much new information has accumulated about each of these three kinds of theatre; new problems have been defined; and it is now possible to advance some new evidence and some new interpretations of old evidence. This article is therefore an attempt to sum up the state of our present knowledge about the three major kinds of outdoor theatre in Britain before the age of Shakespeare. Since that knowledge is in some respects still imperfect and tentative, I shall deal chiefly with questions of physical form, since here, thanks to a fortuitous abundance of pictorial evidence, our information is fuller and more precise than in the case of origins or of use.

In the third week of December 1908, a group of 300–400 prominent actors, actresses, and dramatists gathered at the Criterion Theatre in London to celebrate the formation of the Actresses' Franchise League. The inaugurating resolution, passed with one dissent, read: “That this meeting of actresses calls upon the Government immediately to extend the franchise to women, that women claim the franchise as a necessary protection for the workers under modern industrial conditions, and maintain that by their labour they have earned the right to this defence” (Votes for Women 24 Dec. 1908, p. 211). The resolution's emphasis upon labour as the enabling criterion qualifying women for the franchise reflects the roots of the British suffrage movement in the working class industrial north, where, as David Rosen notes, the Independent Labour Party had supported early suffragists (57).

Recent surveys of theatre theory and historiography have given only very limited attention to a critical episode in the organization, development and legitimation of modern theatre scholarship, the Theaterwissenschaft writings of German-language theorists of theatre study in the first half of the twentieth century. I propose to survey briefly the major moments in this group's emergence, characterize the theoretical approaches associated with some principal figures in the group, outline something of their influence (or reception), and make a few suggestions about their importance for further study. Their work has been undergoing a steady re-appraisal in the contemporary German theatre academy, and some members of the group, like Hans Knudsen and Artur Kutscher, were sufficiently self-conscious about the process of institution-building that their own history has itself been subject to historiographic comment. Consequently I will offer some German reconsiderations of the structure and significance of the field where they seem appropriate. Though there is some sense in the current American construction of this group as “positivist,” the label does not quite acknowledge the variety of theatre theories in which their relatively adequate theory of empirical evidence can be applied, nor does it do justice to the group's interest in theatre as a social phenomenon. The work of the group is so varied in relation to its empirical basis, and so involved in the emerging discourses of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, that it gives us reason to doubt any narrow construction of the theatre-historical tradition as theoretically naive or one-dimensional.

In his Paradoxe sur le comédien, written around 1770 but not published until the nineteenth century, the French philosophe Denis Diderot argued that the great actors of his day suppressed their individuality onstage; rather than personally experiencing the emotions called for by the playwright, they denied their own private subjectivity in order to create a more seamless public illusion. By an act of self-effacement, therefore, they paradoxically rendered themselves capable of impersonating anyone. In his essay, Diderot repeatedly turned to the example of his contemporary, the Comédie-Française actress Mlle Clairon, to illustrate this phenomenon. Off the stage, the philosopher claimed, Clairon was physically unimposing, and displays of her true feelings in the privacy of her home seemed artificial and unconvincing. In the theatre, however, she swelled in size and emotional presence until she dominated an audience and deepened the sentiments invoked by the playwright. According to Diderot, in the moment of public performance she was double: both the “little Clairon” and the “great Agrippina”, the socially inconsequential actress and a mythic heroine of the French stage.

After storming the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Joseph Arné had little time to take in the significance of his actions. Earlier that day, the twenty-something soldier from Franche-Comté had led a daring assault, neutralized several Swiss Guards with his bare hands, and supposedly disabled a cannon that was pointed at his charging comrades. As the sun set, Arné was greeted by throngs of cheering Parisians, who joined the young grenadier in patriotic songs, chants, and dancing. What Arné perhaps did not understand when he finally went to sleep that night was that he was about to become a theatrical star and a public figure. The next morning, Arné was back in the streets, this time “drawn through Paris in a triumphal chariot.” Several weeks later, he was portrayed as the protagonist in La Fête du grenadier, the first play dedicated to the July events, which premiered at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu on 3 September. That evening, the real-life Arné, and not the actor who was playing him, was “enthusiastically celebrated by the spectators and at the end of the piece went onstage to standing ovations.”

Until recently, postwar British theatre history was shaped and bounded by a very stable periodization that located its origin in the premiere of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956. As the story goes, the new kind of theatre ushered in by the Revolution of 1956 at the Royal Court grew more politicized with a second revolution, the birth of the alternative, or Fringe, theatre in 1968. Ultimately that revolutionary fervor was crushed by the conservative cultural and economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, who was elected prime minister in 1979. Contained within this history are many elements not directly related to the 1956|1968|1979 period markers; however this revolution model and its tripartite division of the era affected the conceptualization and positioning of all events within postwar theatre history.

Over the past generation, literary critics and theatre scholars in the United States have not been overly interested in Ibsen, widely considered a fuddy-duddy old realist who never truly became modern. The fact that his plays are still performed all over the world has had little effect on scholarly opinion. This is a deplorable state of affairs, for Ibsen is a major writer of modernity on a par with Baudelaire, and Flaubert. He is also unique among nineteenth-century writers for his clear-eyed and profound analysis of the relationships between women and men in modernity.

As an adjunct to my note in the May 1984 edition of Theatre Survey on the publishing of Robert Hunter's Androboros, I offer the following information concerning the identification of one of the play's characters, “Flip.” Although an apparently subtle reference, it provides clear justification for the numerous scatological references within the script and clarifies one of the more controversial scenes in the play. Moreover, it may indicate an additional impetus for the play's creation.

Near the end of his long career at the fairs, Alain-René Lesage wrote a play entitled L'Histoire de l'Opéra-Comique ou les Métamorphoses de la Foire which was presented at the St.-Laurent Fair, the theatre of Pontau, on the 27th of June, 1736. It had indeed been a metamorphosis that Lesage had seen in his twenty–four years with the forains, and in this, almost his last production, he wished “to give an idea of the different changes that the Opéra-Comiquc had suffered since its establishment up to the present time, and to demonstrate with what relentlessness the theatre had been persecuted by its rivals.” On the threshold of his retirement he recalled the various forms used by the actors to circumvent the restrictions and attacks of the Comédie Française and the Académie Royale de Musique.

In the midst of the currently fashionable lament over the death of the drama, or of the theatre, or of the idea of a theatre, it is strange that the Workers' Theatre, deliberately created to meet a specific cultural ideal and productive of its own particular theory, literature, and style of production, could exist for nearly twenty years, flourish in popularity for half that time, and yet remain unknown. Stranger still that the only study which is even partially comprehensive should choose to view this theatre as an organ of the Communist Party, to be given the same condescending treatment as that political movement itself. Such are the dangers of treating theatre as a weapon rather than as an art.

Ever since the project of supplying objective knowledge was challenged by the debates about colonialism, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, academics from different fields have begun to share a conception of knowledge as representational, differing primarily in the accounts of how their, “representations” are related to objects that are represented. Understandably, Plato's and Aristotle's definitions of mimesis have acquired new currency. According to Plato, whenever “you see one, you conceive of the other.” According to Aristotle, the relationship between techne and phusis is contained in the formulation that, on the one hand, art imitates nature; on the other hand, art carries to its end what nature is incapable of effecting. Both Plato and Aristotle perceive mimesis as the process of either epistemological or ontological repetition or doubling in which “one” (thought or subject) becomes “two” (thought or subject doubles as idea or object), in theatre studies, for example, the prevailing tradition defines representation in terms of a promise of a performative act. Such an act signifies that the “I” or “we” making the promise understands or knows the problem, the object, or the text and will be able to transfer it from nature, that is, from the real space, to the theatrical, “imaginary” space where the declaration of its existence and the formulation of its speech will be staged in a tight spotlight. This process is authorized by an institutional structure that safeguards the promise, its execution, and its use.

From October 20, 1774, when the Continental Congress passed a resolution outlawing theatrical activities in America, until the formation of the Lindsay-Wall troupe that began performing illegally in Maryland in 1781 and, under the management of Dennis Ryan, shifted its base of operations to New York in 1783, the theatre in America was in a near-dormant state. The only significant exceptions to this condition were the productions of the occupying British military in various American localities, and a few productions by American military officers given in response.

In “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss writes about Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge because, as she notes, these artists have decided not to follow the international fashion of installation and intermedia work in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. Neither have they retreated into the etiolated forms of traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. Rather, their recent works have embraced the idea of differential specificity, in which a medium itself is reinvented and rearticulated.

In 1943, Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for over three years. The USSR had become a rather unlikely British ally in 1941, and after two years of brutal conflict had begun to gain an advantage against German troops, who were demoralized by the fierce Russian winter and a lack of supplies. With this as a backdrop, on 21 February 1943, more than two thousand participants performed a large-scale pageant called Salute to the Red Army at the Royal Albert Hall in London to commemorate Red Army Day and celebrate the Soviet–British alliance against Nazi aggression. British cities such as Cardiff, Manchester, and Bristol also honored Britain's Russian allies with marches, rallies, and other celebrations. The pageant was London's contribution to these nationwide festivities. Although the audience at the Royal Albert Hall event comprised selected and invited guests, enormous crowds attended other regional events, as did prominent military dignitaries, members of local councils, local members of Parliament, and Russian military guests. This multicity event is one demonstration of how the extremes of war produce unlikely bedfellows.