Twenty-first-century Russian theatre artists have increasingly taken to using material from real-life events to explore the intricacies of injustice in the civic sphere and its connection to the country's past. In a fifteen-year time span documentary forms have come to the forefront of Russia's theatrical avant-garde. In this article Molly Flynn offers a close reading of one of the most politically charged productions to have emerged from Moscow's booming documentary theatre – One Hour Eighteen: the Trial that Wasn't but Should Have Been (2010). The play uses verbatim texts from the prison and medical staff directly involved in the final days before the murder of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitskii in 2009. Setting the piece in a theatrical courtroom, the creators of One Hour Eighteen place their work in the context of Russia's judicial history in the previous century, during which the resemblance of trials to theatre has often been uncomfortably close. Molly Flynn is a doctoral candidate in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the history and significance of documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia.

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.

Stanislavsky's ‘life of the human spirit’ is at the heart of his understanding of how the actor could become an organic actor rather than a player of borrowed actions and lines. In this article Maria Shevtsova explores the links between Stanislavsky's aspirations for the actor and Grotowski's ‘holy’ actor, the latter providing the impetus for a theatre of presence rather than one of presentation – one that is concerned with the embodiment of fictional bodies and souls. The notion of actor ‘training’ is re-examined in the light of Stanislavsky's practice concerning the actor's mindful and probing work on himself/herself. Grotowski's work on presence-in-action, the basis first of the performer and then of of the doer, has been a catalyst for the singer-movers of Teatr ZAR and this group's goal of spiritual journeying, shared also by its spectators. Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book is the The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (co-authored, 2013). She is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In contrast to most studies of cultural nationalism, which tend to focus on literary style, narrative devices, or the static visual arts, in this article Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes the ways that Japanese actors deploy physical and vocal techniques in portraying gender and ethnic ambiguity. Expanding on her recent work on actor-dancer Itō Michio (1893–1961), she uses the concept of J-centrism (Japancentrism) to demonstrate how modern Japanese performing bodies (in both traditional and contemporary genres) imply political meaning – her title being a riff on Susan Sontag's famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. While not suggesting that the artists under consideration promulgate fascism, Sorgenfrei maintains that the Japanese aesthetic preference for gender and ethnic ambiguity fuels the politics of Japanese cultural nationalism, even when the performers or directors adamantly disavow rightist, nationalistic ideologies. Through a focus on analysis of selected performances by Bando Tamasaburō and theoretical writings by Suzuki Tadashi, Sorgenfrei suggests that the performance of ambiguity by a single actor implies the ‘universality’ and cultural superiority of the Japanese body. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin, where she researched the work of Japanese dancer Itō Michio. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition 2015).

In this article, Linda Mackenney explores the four epic plays John McGrath wrote between 1989 and 1996 in the aftermath of his forced resignation from 7:84 Scotland in 1988. These were produced in association with David MacLennan of Wildcat Stage Productions and televised by McGrath's Freeway Films for Channel Four in the 1990s. McGrath died of leukaemia in 2002, and MacLennan died earlier this year after a battle with motor neurone disease; but the work they did together in the 1990s forms a significant part of their legacy. Linda Mackenney was introduced to McGrath's work as a student, when she attended the lectures at the University of Cambridge which were later published as his seminal critical work, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form. She carried out the research for 7:84 Scotland's Clydebuilt Season in 1982, was the creator of the Scottish Theatre Archive at Glasgow University Library, and is the author of The Activities of Popular Dramatists and Drama Groups in Scotland, 1900–1952 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). She was a member of the 7:84 Scotland Board of Directors between 1983 and 1988 and is currently completing a study of John McGrath's theatre writings.

In this article Kris Darby examines the significance of walking on the theatre stage, responding to the growth of pedestrian performance as an area of research. He seeks to provide a point of expansion for a field that is still largely concerned with site-specific works where audiences walk during the performance. Beginning with a discussion of the possible reasons for the neglect of walking on stage, the author addresses the prominence of walking and the journey as a rehearsal tool employed by a wealth of practitioners. As further justification for the inclusion of the stage in pedestrian performance research, a series of historical case studies is presented which spans over a century of theatrical history, and includes an examination of the audience's pilgrimage to Richard Wagner's Parsifal (1882) and the ‘epic flow“ of Erwin Piscator's treadmill in Good Soldier Schwejk (1927). The significance of walking in Samuel Beckett's life is also explored through the ‘inward walking’ of Footfalls (1976), and the proscenium staging of Matthew Earnest's Wanderlust (2010) is made significant through its critique of supermodernity. The author concludes by arguing that an immobile audience can kinaesthetically empathize with the performers, embarking on their own internalized journey within the theatre. Kris Darby is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Drama at Liverpool Hope, whose research interests concern the relationship between walking and performance.

In this article Dmitry Trubotchkin focuses on Homer's Iliad as directed by Stathis Livathinos and premiered in Athens on 4 July 2013 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Summer Festival – as far as is known, the first production of the complete Iliad in world theatre. It was performed by fifteen actors, each of whom played several roles and also acted the role of the ancient rhapsode, or narrator of epics. Livathinos's Iliad restored the original understanding of ‘epic theatre’, which differs from what is usually meant by this term in the light of Brechtian theory and practice with its didactic and distancing emphases. In the Greek performance, the transformation of an actor from one role to another and from acting to narration is constant, and the voice of Homer as a ‘collective author’ can be heard through all these transformations. Livathinos's Iliad may well be a landmark, indicating a new way of presenting epics on the stage. Dmitry Trubotchkin is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Russian University of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Moscow State University. He heads the Department of Ancient and Medieval Art at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow. His publications include ‘All is Well, the Old Man is Still Dancing’: Roman Palliata in Action (2005), Ancient Literature and Dramaturgy (2010), and Rimas Tuminas: the Moscow Productions (forthcoming).