Peter Brook begins the second chapter of The Empty Space, “The Holy Theatre,” with a lament for the loss of sacred approaches to theatre; approaches that satisfy a community's need to make visible its identity, its hope, and its history. In describing the vacuum within the modern theatre once occupied by ceremony—what he defines as the importance of a noble aim for theatre—Brook critiques hollow and backward attempts to fill new and grand spaces with old and meaningless ritual. In postwar Europe, he saw a need for new spaces that “crie[d] out for a new ceremony, but of course it is the new ceremony that should have come first—it is the ceremony in all its meanings that should have dictated the shape of the place.” Brook's assessment of postwar European bourgeois theatre and its search for new and meaningful agendas is framed by conceptions of space as antecedent to action, requiring only performer and audience in order for theatre to occur, and for a space to be called a theatre. Indeed, theatrical space is always a product of well-established cultural performance conventions—a phenomenon common throughout history. Brook's critique focuses on the conventions of theatrical space that developed from the romantic dramas and spectacle-driven performances of the late nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century. Echoing Bertolt Brecht, Brook rejected theatres that predetermined the limits of drama and performance, arguing that it was necessary to strip them of conventional expectations in order to lay bare their potential. Essentially, he asks: When and how does a space become a theatre?

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

As the conventions of theatre design would have it, a clock onstage is a distraction for the audience. This has not always been true. Late nineteenth-century popular plays were alive with the sights and sounds of working clocks, their pointing hands, swinging pendulums, and striking bells announcing the time of significant events and actions in the fictional stage world. Visible on the mantelpiece, or audible in the town square, stage clocks in this era lent verisimilitude while heightening suspense, mirroring the broader aesthetic conventions of popular fin-de-siècle productions, in which highly realistic and detailed settings coexisted with the suspenseful plots and broad character types familiar from older melodramas.

When Horace wrote in Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself” (“Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi”), he expressed the ancient world's view that, in order to emotionally affect his audience, an orator needed to feel the emotion himself. This idea was widely subscribed to in the eighteenth century. In the modern era Konstantin Stanislavsky engaged in a sustained investigation of emotion and acting, stressing that the actor needed to experience “real feeling” in order for the audience to experience authentic emotions also. As a theory of emotional transmission, it seems like common sense. Yet, when Denis Diderot witnessed in Baron d'Holbach's salon David Garrick's parlor trick of sticking his head out between two screens, and cycling through a range of passions with his face, the great philosophe wondered whether the actor felt anything at all even though his audience, including Baron Grimm, evidently did. “Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face?” Diderot asked, and then answered, “I don't believe it; nor do you.” By deciding in the negative, that Garrick could not have felt anything, Diderot reveals a common fallacy of the audience: the belief that what an audience feels reflects, and is a result of, what an actor feels. The problem for Diderot, which he addressed in the Paradox of Acting (1773), was how an actor such as Garrick managed to evoke emotions in his audience when he apparently felt nothing himself.

For US actor, playwright, and theatre manager Harry Watkins (1825–94), the 1852–3 season was a whirlwind of ups and downs, elation and despair, triumph and tragedy. His engagement as an actor in C. R. Thorne's stock company at the New York Theatre ended abruptly in mid-September, leaving him without work at a point when few theatres were hiring. He mourned the loss of a beloved cousin, Jane Mott, who passed away one rainy day in October after a drawn-out illness. He endured many a headache while spearheading a fund-raising effort among his fellow actors to contribute a memorial stone to the Washington Monument. He was elected to the board of the American Dramatic Fund Association, but infighting among the directors left him feeling insulted and underappreciated, ultimately leading him to cease his involvement. By far, his biggest frustration was his inability to obtain reliable employment. He wrote many letters to many managers, to no avail. More than once, he considered giving up the theatre altogether.

Edwin Forrest, then a not-yet-famous actor, spent the summer of 1825 living in the greater New Orleans area among the Choctaw. It has been alleged that he spent these months with his friend Choctaw chief Pushmataha. From this relationship, Forrest learned how to play “Indian,” acquiring knowledge that informed his later interpretation of the title character in John August Stone's 1829 play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. Accounts of Forrest's time with Pushmataha appear in biographies of the actor and critical assessments of his acting. In none of these texts is the fact of their relationship disputed.

In the summer of 2013, Shakespeare's Globe, the company based at the Globe reconstruction in London, mounted productions of the three parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI at Wars of the Roses battlefield sites. The battlefield as performance space, with its rolling hills and buried corpses, mediated the temporal overlap of past and present, as contemporary bodies engaged with the construction of a historical narrative in the fictional play and the actual historical moments of the Wars of the Roses. The associations entrenched in the soil of these sites, the physical remains and histories of the past, encode a connective experience for the contemporary participants interacting with it. The battlefield site, then, is not just a site of historical significance—it is also a site of historical reenactment, where present bodies meet absent ones in the Globe's attempt to converge separated temporalities. The Globe framed the battlefield performances as a way of enlivening history by grounding well-worn Shakespearean texts in the places they represent. But the Globe, in collaboration with The Space, an online arts collective, also filmed the ten-hour marathon event at the Barnet battlefield, live-streamed, and then saved the performance to a digital archive. So the Globe displaced the site of their site-specific experience. Virtual spectatorship, a result of the Globe's efforts to increase access to their battlefield performances by making them available online, adds another layer of absence to the battlefield. The virtual spectator as absent spectator challenges the privileging of a physical viewing experience that the Globe's “open-air” project promotes. The displacement of site disrupts the relationships grounded in the material performance space and its geographical connections, and expands the understanding of site-specific by demonstrating how a specific relationship to place might be produced and maintained without physical access to a geographical location. Together with their placement at the historical sites and transmission into virtual spaces, the battlefield Henry VIs generate a multiplicity of shared viewing experiences. These shared experiences mediate the continuation of a (re)constructed historical and collective memory and highlight the role of spectatorship, both physical and virtual, in the formation of communal and national identity.

It is 7 November 1904, 7:55 p.m. New York City theatregoers anxiously await the opening of George M. Cohan's newest production, Little Johnny Jones. The house is just about filled, but the well-dressed ushers hustle a few stragglers to their seats. Some of the theatre's usual patrons have been held up late at work, while others are too consumed by Clifford Berryman's political cartoons in the Washington Star to attend the performance. This particular Monday evening marks an important moment for America: polls for the thirtieth presidential election will be opening in fewer than twelve hours. Theodore Roosevelt represents the Republican Party, and Alton B. Parker heads the Democratic ticket. Although results will not be known for sure until the close of the 8 November election, Roosevelt's recent success in office upon the assassination of William McKinley gives him a political boost. New York City's predominantly Republican values leave little doubt about which name a majority of tonight's audience will be checking off on the ballot come morning; Roosevelt has carried every region but the South in his campaigning efforts thus far. Nonetheless, Broadway occasionally attracts a few guests from the slightly less liberal states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and this evening's house is no different; the Liberty Theatre is filled with men of opposing political views. A nervous excitement fills the room; a combination of political gossip, predictions about how Cohan's first Broadway musical will compare to his earlier comedic works and vaudeville skits, and occasional gasps and awestruck sighs from spectators who are seeing the inside of the Liberty Theatre for the first time since its very recent grand opening at 234 West 42nd Street. The twenty-thousand-square-foot theatre, with its dramatic stage, extensive balconies, and striking cathedrallike ceilings is the perfect home for the unfolding of Broadway, a theatrical form and style that America will come to call its own. As the house lights dim and the violins hum a piercing A note, other members of the orchestra slowly begin tuning their individual instruments. As the oboists finish adjusting their pitch, the conductor taps his music stand: musicians tilt their gaze to the front of the pit, audience members sink into the velvet of their plush seats and begin to quiet their chatter. Blackout.

The two white male cosponsors, a Democrat and a Republican, dressed as King George and Hamilton, respectively, as they rapped the resolution in the state senate. In Hamilton, chief creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stakes out space for an immigrant from the Caribbean who was in the room where the United States of America was founded. Based on Ron Chernow's biography, Hamilton follows the struggles and successes of Alexander Hamilton in a story largely told by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2015 and subsequently moved to Broadway. With its Founders Chic historical approach, hip-hop aesthetic, and multiracial cast, this Broadway blockbuster has earned substantial commercial and critical acclaim from across the political spectrum. Former President Barack Obama joked, “Hamilton, I'm pretty sure, is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

No discussion of antitheatrical polemics can escape mention of Stephen Gosson. His characterization of theatre as the “doctrine of the devil” is found in his last of a succession of pamphlets attacking the theatre. His polemics comprise one of the most theologically nuanced arguments against the Elizabethan stage—euphuistic though they may be. Indeed, others were far more concise. The preacher William Holbrooke, for instance, made his case with efficiency when he branded stage players “scumme of the world.”

“Theatre is not political action. Political action happens in the streets.” This is how the German director Thomas Ostermeier addressed the audience in a recent conversation with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts. All theatre can do is make us realize the “lies we tell ourselves.” Thomas Ostermeier made a name for himself staging the socially conscious dramas of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. After becoming the artistic director of Berlin's Schaubühne, Ostermeier turned to Henrik Ibsen because he thought that Ibsen's bourgeois world would appeal to the patrons of the Schaubühne: “Characters in Ibsen constantly worry about money.” Perhaps, this is also the reason behind Ostermeier's desire to bring his production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, adapted into English by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, to the patrons of Broadway in the fall of 2018. It's a Trojan Horse. Get the haves into the theatre and make them see their own complicity in perpetuating the injustices of capitalism. Ostermeier's version of An Enemy of the People breaks the fourth wall during the play's town hall meeting and invites the audience to share their thoughts about capitalism and democracy. Ultimately, this audience participation reveals the anxiety that theatre might simply be a distraction.

In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag includes Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1875–6) in a list that illustrates “random examples” from “the canon of Camp.” Though the ballet has become an integral part of the classical repertory for professional companies from Moscow to New York to Sydney as well as the inspiration for numerous figure skaters (most notoriously in Johnny Weir's outré and rhinestone-bedecked interpretation in 2006), it has, as suggested by Sontag, been creative afflatus for gay underground performers for more than a century. But what are the origins of the swan gone queer? As this article demonstrates, I suggest that one way to trace both the swan's queer genealogy and its continuity lies in the dramatic history and lived performance of the ill-fated Ludwig II (hereafter “Ludwig”) of Bavaria (1845–86)—the Swan King (Fig. 1). Tchaikovsky, after all, had been inspired by the dramatic story of the effete young king (and perhaps titillated by a shared closeted gay desire), who would become a prototype for the ballet's tragic hero, Prince Siegfried. In fact, dance scholar Peter Stoneley suggests that “Swan Lake confirms the virtual impossibility, in Tchaikovsky's [and Ludwig's] era, of accommodating homosexuality within wider society.” Ludwig's desire was expressed through a lens of his same-sex fantasies and their inspired artistic interpretations, most notably taking form in the construction of his neo-Romanesque, fairy-tale castle Neue Burg Hohenschwangau (more commonly known as Neuschwanstein or New Swan on the Rock Castle, though it was not renamed until after Ludwig's death). Ludwig's queer positionality also arises from the theatrical way that he performed a highly aesthetic (though hardly effective) approach to monarchy with his swan-bedecked castle and its environs as a sort of metastage set. In this context, the swan may be read as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “a companion species,” or a personal animal symbol (real or mythical) that represents a variety of feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in the hegemonic context of a given time and place (like homosexuality in Roman Catholic Bavaria in the nineteenth century). Ludwig chose the swan (drawn from family heraldry but primarily envisioned in his own life through storybook-driven fantasy) as a means of alternative expression to that normally available to a man in his position and with his responsibilities, and also as a way to enact his forbidden desires.

On 30 March 2018, protesters in the Gaza Strip engaged in a peaceful demonstration for “Land Day,” a Palestinian commemoration of the expropriation of lands for Israeli settlements in 1976. During the march, Palestinians approached the border with Israel where the Israeli army opened fire with live ammunition and tank shells, killing at least fifteen demonstrators. Dozens of others were wounded. In the weeks and months that followed, Palestinian protesters continued to protest at the Gaza border. As this issue goes to print, the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that at least 116 Palestinians have been killed in protests framed as the “Great March of Return” since 30 March 2018, and as many as thirteen thousand have been injured. This spring's events, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, offer yet another reminder of the violence and dispossession that for decades have characterized Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

Peru approached the twenty-first century a polarized country. In the year 2000, with increased authoritarian control over the legislative and judicial branches along with constitutional reforms paving the way for his re-reelection, President Alberto Fujimori campaigned for a third term in office. His main electoral opponent, Alejandro Toledo, along with opposition leaders, spearheaded massive demonstrations in Lima accusing the government of repression, corruption, drug trafficking, and electoral fraud. Opposition figures were joined by grassroots social movements, unions, students, and human rights activists who opposed the regime's repressive and corrupt practices, which included by now reports of torture and extrajudicial killings. When Fujimori first became president a decade earlier he had inherited a country ravaged by widespread poverty, hyperinflation, nearly depleted foreign reserves, a growing narcotics trade, and two armed terrorist groups: the MRTA (Tupac Amarú Revolutionary Movement) and the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). Both were on the offensive across the country, the Shining Path most prominently, planting car bombs in the capital, kidnapping and killing civilians, and besieging towns and villages across the country. Looking for a way out of economic and terrorist violence, Peruvians were faced with two options in 1990: Alberto Fujimori, an ex-university president and agricultural engineer of Japanese descent, and Mario Vargas Llosa, a white, upper-middle-class novelist and liberal intellectual. Though Fujimori was less well-known, many Peruvians saw Vargas Llosa's center-right coalition as a repackaged version of the same traditional political groups that had lead the country into crisis. Fujimori would appear much like Hugo Chávez later in Venezuela, a populist outsider ready to challenge the traditional party system. Many saw Fujimori's succinct rhetoric as refreshing when contrasted with Vargas Llosa's elaborate speeches, especially since the former president, Alan García, who fled the country in 1992 on corruption charges, was also well-known for his loquacious disposition.

There is so much to say about the persistent critiques of and mobilizations against Chris Dercon's vision (or lack thereof) of the newly named Volksbühne Berlin. My task here, however, is a different one: to begin to understand why there has also been such persistent mobilization on behalf of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In what follows, I provide some critical context for reflection upon the unique role the Volksbühne played in post-Wall Berlin. I suggest that in his twenty-five-year tenure at the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf worked to refunction the theatre apparatus itself, to transform the theatre as state institution, as interrelated set of supporting structures that extend beyond and behind the proscenium arch. Further, Castorf's work as both director and artistic director helps us to understand the complex relations between a theatre aesthetic, which exposes and critiques the structures of its (state) support, and a theatrical institution with similarly ambitious goals. As an aesthetic and as an infrastructural project, Castorf's Volksbühne enacted a new kind of public theatre in Berlin—and it is this project of institutional dis/avowal that we must remember (and dare to reenact) as so much more than reactionary or provincial nostalgia.

When Tim Renner, then secretary of state for cultural affairs in Berlin, announced in March 2015 that Frank Castorf's term as artistic director of the Volksbühne would end in 2017, his reasoning was clear. After twenty-five years, it was time to “develop the Volksbühne further,” to “rethink” where this storied theatre would go next. As the agent of change, Renner had identified Chris Dercon, then still director of London's Tate Modern—a highly regarded museum director with decades of experience as a curator, and none as a theatre maker.